It’s a little before 9 on a sunny Wednesday morning, and the air at Mike’s Maine Pickles already is heavy with the steamy aroma of garlic and hot vinegar.

In the kitchen of a former restaurant in the Aroostook County town of Easton, Trudy Fuller seals jar after jar of spicy pickled garlic before submerging them in a boiling cauldron of water for a 20-minute bath.

“I know there’s no vampires around, that’s for sure,” Fuller said, laughing.

For the past five years, proprietor Mike Henderson and his staff of five employees have pickled everything from the mild, such as fiddleheads, cukes and green beans, to the wild, such as whole garlic cloves and cayenne pepper, hot kielbasa, and jalapenos spiced with cayenne and horseradish.

“You open up that jar and flames come out of it,” Henderson said, grinning mischievously. “I like to make a product that when you put it in your mouth, you feel alive.”

Henderson has a passion for pickles – a passion that arose partially from a love of food and partially from necessity. Before he started Mike’s Maine Pickles, he worked as a farmer, a schoolteacher, an insurance adjuster, a guidance counselor and a contractor. When he turned 50, he found himself out of work and overqualified for most of the jobs he found. But he had a dream. And that dream involved pickles.

So he packed up a few cases of jars and hit the craft-fair circuit. This wasn’t such a good idea. Then he loaded up his

old Lincoln Town Car with pickled eggs and headed down Route 1. He returned a few days later with an empty car and a notebook full of requests for more pickles.

“Once we introduced the eggs to the consumer, they said, ‘OK, what else do you have?'” Henderson said.

He answered with dilly beans and sweet pepper jam, hot garlic, and traditional bread and butter pickles. The stores wanted more. He branched out to the other New England states, and things started to grow too big for the kitchen of his Presque Isle home, so he recently moved the business to Easton.

Now, he and his staff go through 200 pounds of cucumbers, 150 pounds of green beans, 80 gallons of vinegar and more than 4,000 eggs a week. Mike’s Maine Pickles can be found on the shelves of 280 retailers, from the region’s most exclusive specialty-food shops to gas stations and mom and pop stores.

“The whole concept we have is we’re actually bringing pickles to the people,” Henderson said. “We do have a high-end gourmet product, but it’s actually for the people, it’s not just for the tourists who are coming to Maine. I brought it to the people because it’s the consumer who ultimately decides what’s good.”

To keep in contact with the consumer, Henderson and his wife, Susan, hand-deliver 300 cases of pickled goods a week. You can’t buy Mike’s Maine Pickles online. You can’t order them by mail. You can either find them at your local grocery store, convenience store or gas station, or you can go without. Developing a relationship with the consumer is important to Henderson, which is why he travels more than 1,500 miles a week in the big, white van that took the place of the Town Car.

“I’m known as ‘the pickle man’ on the road,” Henderson said. “They say ‘Here comes the pickle man from Maine.'”

The fact that the pickles are from Maine is one of Henderson’s key selling points, especially in New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts.

“It sells just because it’s from Maine,” he said.

And the pickles fit that “Maine” image to a T: a homemade product made from high-quality ingredients in a simple, no-frills package.

“A lot of the recipes are the old-fashioned type,” Henderson said. “There’s no fancy stuff in there. It’s just what you’re purchasing.”

But just because they aren’t fancy doesn’t mean Henderson skimps on ingredients.

“One of the secrets to our success here is quality,” he said, holding up a jar of the latest addition to his line – pickled kielbasa. Then, he picks up a jar of a major competitor’s pickled sausage, which looks like little red hot dogs floating in tinted vinegar. “That’s going to propel us to another zone.”

Apparently, the market for pickled sausage is huge. I was a bit skeptical of this until my colleagues started walking by my desk and asking me when I was planning to open my jar of pickled kielbasa. It was, by all reports, delicious, which is good, because pickled kielbasa is one of the reasons why Henderson moved to the new facility in the first place. There, he has a USDA-approved meat room that he invested nearly $30,000 to build.

“You have to put on armor to get in there,” Fuller said as she took a break from pickling to check up on her mother, Chris McBreairty, who was labeling jars in the other room.

There is no space for inventory in the small, one-story building because the turnaround is so quick. Every week, the staff fills and boxes between 1,200 and 1,800 jars, which get packed into the van and hauled off to the stores. The demand is greater than that, Henderson said, but he prefers to keep it small so he can keep it local. And it’s still the only full-time pickle plant north of Boston.

“We have a facility here in Easton that’s bringing money back into the County,” he said, proudly. “The great strength that the company has is its employees. We’ve all come from potato pickers to pickle packers.”