The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Napa Valley of Beer?
Want to try some of the state’s best? Prepare to wait in line.
Want to try some of the best beer in Vermont? Be prepared to wait in line,
My brother Tyler and I have driven over 400 miles to Vermont to stand in line for beer. Despite our best efforts we are now standing numbers 18 and 19 in the queue of people shivering outside the Alchemist Brewery in Stowe on a cold November morning. Behind us we can see at least 40 more people, including a few we’d met touring breweries in Burlington the day before. In front of us is a bearded guy wearing a furry trapper hat who had sprinted from his car carrying a cooler.
We’d arrived at the Alchemist at 9:45 a.m., but the parking lot was closed with a sign that read “Parking Lot Opens at 10 am … Please Do Not Arrive Early.” An employee politely but firmly suggested we go get some coffee and come back in 15 minutes. When we returned at 10:02, we were the 10th car in line. “Do you think you should jump out and get in line?” I said.
“Are you kidding me?” Tyler replied. “The brewery doesn’t even open until 11!”
Now as we wait, Tyler, who refuses to wear a winter hat, has made his displeasure known by muttering a string of obscenities.
The bearded guy in front of us unfastens his earflaps and says, chuckling, “Haven’t you guys ever stood in line for beer before?” “No,” Tyler says. “Never.” “They said there was a line around the parking lot the other day,” says the earflap guy. He tells us he has driven up from the south shore of Massachusetts, about four hours away. This isn’t his first time in line at the Alchemist. “So are you guys maxing out your purchases?” “What do you mean?” I ask. “You’re only allowed to buy 10 four-packs of Heady and the others.”
By Heady, he means Heady Topper, the almost-mythic double India pale ale that the Alchemist brews. Heady Topper has scored a perfect 100 from BeerAdvocate, where readers have in years past rated it the top beer in the world (it’s always in the top 10). Heady Topper is sold mostly in Vermont in limited production, delivered on specific days to be released at specific times in specific stores, where it sells out in minutes.
My brother and I are beer geeks, but we both share a deep ambivalence toward a certain kind of connoisseurship that apes wine snobbery with its tasting notes and buzzwords, the wine-ification of everything. I mean, I love wine — I just wrote a book about it, in fact — but I’m skeptical of bringing the whole wine-snob thing to topics like cheese, coffee, chocolate, whiskey, water. And, of course, beer.
I’d planned this beer tour because I’d figured — and hoped — that Vermont, with its chill and natural vibe, would be the last place that the wine-ification of beer and its subsequent snobbery had taken hold. But standing in line at the Alchemist, I worry that Vermont may be transforming into some kind of touristy, theme-park “Napa Valley of beer.”
“The line’s bigger today because of Petit Mutant,” says the earflap guy ahead of us in line. “They’re releasing that today.”
Finally, an employee steps outside and addresses the crowd. “Today, we’re offering PUH-teet Mooo-tahnt,” he says, pronouncing “petit” in American English but “mutant” in a very pretentious French-ish accent. He tells us that Petit Mutant is a wild ale fermented with Brettanomyces yeast, as well as “about a pound and a half of cherries per bottle,” and that “all the cherries are from Vermont.” He also tells us we will be able to buy only one bottle per person.
We’re given sample beers, and for about 18 minutes the line snakes along. These hazy, unfiltered IPAs are the prototypical Vermont- or New England-style IPA. My Focal Banger and Tyler’s Heady Topper are higher-alcohol beers (7 and 8 percent alcohol
by volume, respectively), which normally are not my style. But I really like Focal Banger, a total flavor bomb that’s fruity, piney and super hoppy. I can’t tell if Tyler likes the Heady Topper, but he finishes it. When we get to the cashier, he asks us what we’d like to buy. We order our two bottles of Petit Mutant and a few four-packs of the other beers. Tyler gets some IPA-scented lip balm. We fork over $90.
In the parking lot, grown men are literally running to their cars to deposit their purchases and then running to get back in line to buy more.
When we get into the car, I ask Tyler, “What did you think of the famous Heady Topper?”
“It’s a hazy, high-alcohol double IPA,” he says. “It’s fine, but I can’t understand what all this fuss is about.”
The day before, Tyler and I made an epic tour of a half-dozen craft breweries and cideries in Burlington. The city on chilly Lake Champlain, with a population of just over 42,000, is bucolic Vermont’s major metropolis. Burlington’s breweries are only the tip of Vermont’s craft-beer iceberg. The state has the highest number of breweries per capita, pumping out the most craft beer per capita in the United States, with annual sales of more than $100 million.
We began our beer crawl in the city’s gentrifying South End, where more than a half-dozen breweries have sprouted in the past few years. But first we took an Uber a little farther south to visit Magic Hat, one of the pioneering breweries of the early craft beer movement — its apricot
beer, No. 9, has become a bar staple. These days, though, most beer geeks cast aspersions on Magic Hat and insist the brewery isn’t considered “craft” anymore because it’s way too big. Yet Magic Hat still makes some tasty beers. I enjoyed the Vamplifier, a bitter red ale, and Wacko, with a tiny bit of beet juice, which made it pink. The bartender told us there were only four cases of Wacko: “People are going crazy over this, coming out of the woodwork.”
We moved on to Switchback Brewing, where the various beers we tasted were differentiated by the type of hops (Simcoe, Mosaic or Citra hops) and whether they were “wet” or “dry.” Around the bend at Queen City, the focus was on English styles, underscoring the city’s beer diversity. I really liked the dark, drinkable porter style that’s often neglected within the craft beer movement, a Yorkshire ESB (or extra special bitter) called Landlady.
From Queen City, we moseyed across the street to my favorite brewery in Vermont, Zero Gravity. We saw several others at the bar who were just at Queen City, Instagramming and keeping track of their beers or using an app called Untappd. At Zero Gravity I loved what beer people call its “session beers” — loweralcohol beers that are made for drinking, such as the Conehead IPA, the Touch of Drei saison and especially the Oyster Stout.
We moved on to Burlington’s waterfront, where, as the sun began to set and a frigid breeze whipped across the lake, we settled in at the cozy Foam Brewers and sampled a barrel-aged sour, which the bartender told us was fermented with a citrus fruit called Buddha’s hand.
The next morning, after leaving the Alchemist, we head a few miles north from Stowe to Morrisville and Lost Nation Brewing, which sits on Lake Lamoille. We sit at the bar and order burgers along with smoked tofu and buffalo cauliflower to pair with our tasting flight — a perfect Vermont brewery meal.
Lost Nation swims against the trend of big-alcohol, super-hoppy beers with 8 or 9 percent alcohol, or higher, becoming the norm. With its lower-alcohol “sessionable” approach, Lost Nation makes beers you might enjoy drinking with food. For instance, its gose, a sour Germanstyle brewed with sea salt and coriander, is a tart and refreshing pairing with wings or tofu. One of my favorite beers may be its Petit Ardennes, a spicy, fruity farmhouse ale that clocks in at around 4.2 percent abv, about what Bud Light is, but with about a hundred times more flavor.
After lunch, we head about 45 minutes northeast, into the Northeast Kingdom. Since I’m captaining our vehicle, I have been judicious with my sips of beer in order to stay safely under the legal limit. This is a good thing, since the road beyond Greensboro, which winds past the famed cheesemaker Jasper Hill Farm, turns narrow and clay and gravel on the way to Hill Farmstead Brewery. When we feel lost, suddenly the parking lot emerges, with a taco stand, portable toilets and music playing while people are hanging out in the sun drinking beer. It looks like a mix between a Grateful Dead show and a tailgate for an NFL game, with a surrounding scenery that’s absolutely gorgeous.
Hill Farmstead is another legendary brewery, voted the best brewery in the world by RateBeer, the rival of BeerAdvocate. It’s buzzing with people, many of them looking to fill growlers from the taps at the growler stations. There is a ticket dispenser where we a take a number: 370. We can see that they’re on 333.
It takes about 20 minutes to get to the front of the line. Hill Farmstead names its beers after ancestors of the founder, Shaun Hill. Edward is an American pale ale, Harlan is an American IPA, and Edith is a dark farmstead ale.
When we return to Burlington, we ditch the car and make one last visit — a place called Burlington Beer Company, which we find in a random industrial park in a suburb called Williston. Here, we enjoy ridiculously experimental beers: one called Peasant Bread, a brown ale made with wild rice; one called Destroyed by Hippie Powers, a blue-hued IPA made with blue pea flowers; an IPA brewed with a special hops called Barbe Rouge and strawberries, called Peak Nostalgia.
Peak nostalgia seems to be the theme inside the brewery, too. While you drink experimental beer, you can play old-time Nintendo video games like Donkey Kong and Tecmo Bowl, or board games like Jenga or Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots.
Tyler and I agree that Destroyed by Hippie Powers is one of the best beers we’ve drunk on our Vermont sojourn. It’s the perfect ending to our trip. I love Vermont because underneath the pretty scenery and the mellowness, it’s just weird enough. So every time we’ve found ourselves in danger of veering into the realm of the wine-ification of beer, we’ve encountered something just weird enough to keep that from happening.
The autumn sun has now set on this Saturday evening, and before our second game of Donkey Kong, a line spontaneously forms in this experimental brewery in a suburban industrial park and within minutes winds out the door. Tyler surveys it all with a mix of fascination and mild contempt. “What is it with people in Vermont?” he says.