(Updated Tuesday 27 September. When I first published this on 24 September I thought my story of Vermont beer was over. But there was more to come)
This month the Biermeister goes international. This blog comes to you from the place that has been at the top of my bucket list for some time - the US state of Vermont. So when a business trip to Washington DC hove into view, I seized the opportunity and planned a brief holiday to fit in around it.
Why Vermont? Apart from the fact that it is a really beautiful place, it has a certain beer heritage.
Which is nothing to do with the fact that, in 1935, two Vermonters called Bill Wilson and Bob Smith started Alcoholics Anonymous.
The state first came to my attention when I was discovering the UK champion brewery that is Cloudwater. I saw that they had been placed in the top 10 breweries in the world by Ratebeer.com. That made me explore which brewery had been placed at no 1. I saw “Hill Farmstead Brewery, Greensboro Bend, Vermont”. I thought great, I’ll buy some of their stuff. I discovered that I could not. They did not sell outside the US. They barely sold outside Vermont. And so, that day, I vowed that if their beer would not come to me then one day I would go to them.
I based myself in the beautiful city of Burlington. A handy jumping off point for Vermont, but also a destination in its own right. Situated on the edge of Lake Champlain, surrounded by places with exotic names such as “Colchester” and “Essex”. Having recovered from my somewhat fraught journey up from New York, I sampled the glorious local breakfast offerings and decided to make myself feel good by taking a 20 mile cycle ride around the lake. Then it was time to hit the beers.
To place Burlington beer in context, let me first introduce you to Greg Noonan. Greg started out as a homebrewer. And he didn’t just do it, he wrote about it. Specifically, in 1986 he published “Brewing Lager Beer: the most comprehensive book for home and microbrewers”. Lager was held to be particularly difficult to home brew, and Greg had mastered the secrets.
It might be stretching it to say that this was a bestseller. It was not a light read. But I am reminded of the old saying about the Velvet Underground - only a thousand people bought their album, but every one of them formed a band. The way the story is told, pretty much everyone who read Greg’s magnum opus started a brewery.
But first Vermont law needed to make the brewpub possible. (See my previous blog on the struggle to open up US microbreweries - https://www.londonbiermeister.co.uk/blog/america-the-beer-tiful-part-1-january-2021) It was only after Greg had lobbied the Vermont legislature for three years that he was able, in 1988, to open the Vermont Pub and Brewery.
Greg diligently revised his books over time and added new ones. It was a labour of love. He also carried on experimenting with different beer styles. Working with his colleague John Kimmich, he invented the Black IPA - basically an IPA with dark malt, which looks like stout but isn’t.
Unfortunately, Greg’s life was cut short in 2009 by cancer. But the Vermont Pub and Brewery, or VPB, endures.
So the VPB was one of my first stopping points in Burlington, as I took a seat at the bar and began sampling. Greg’s Irish heritage shines through in the construction of the beer, and I duly started off with the Burly Irish Ale. I moved on to the Flemish-style red ale called Tulach Leis, which nods to his Cork family origins. The beer that struck me most, however, was the Bombay Grab IPA - an original Greg recipe, 5.5% and highly drinkable. I resolved to take some of it away. This was not straightforward. I ended up taking the only option available and ordering a Growler, which turned out to be a half gallon. It was at this point that I remembered that I would have to transport it around the US over the next few days, so in an act of heroic self-sacrifice I have been drinking it ever since to reduce the weight. The actual Growler glass container is a beautiful souvenir.
On the same day, my research took me up the lake road to Foam Brewers, for what turned out to be a highly rewarding interlude. I ordered a delicious local cheese and charcuterie plate and downed three stunningly good beers - a fruity 7.2% IPA called “The Fruit that Ate Itself”, their signature DIPA called “Experimental Jet Set” and, gloriously, a saison with organic black plums, lemon zest and lavender “with the final addition of a butterfly pea flower”.
At Foam, I was struck for the first time by the New England beer vibe. Leaving aside that everyone was exceptionally nice, young couples abounded with the women interrogating the bartenders knowledgeably about the construction of the beer. A little bit removed from my experiences of CAMRA events in the UK with wives and girlfriends stoically putting up with having beer explained to them.
“Fruit that Ate Itself” was a prime example of what I had hoped to taste in Vermont - the genre that has since become known as the Hazy IPA, or New England IPA (NEIPA). What’s one of those? Well, key features are
The story goes that the first NEIPA was “Heady Topper”, produced by John Kimmich in 2011 at “Alchemist”, the brewery that he founded for himself after working with Greg. I tried this with some anticipation at a gourmet restaurant in Burlington one evening. It came with the instruction that it should be drunk out of a can, which I obeyed. At first I thought “wow, powerful hop flavours”. As the can wore on, I started thinking that actually, this was a classic old-style very heavily hopped IPA, and too bitter for my palate. So this is a legend that frankly I don’t get.
I much preferred the “Madonna” Imperial IPA from the Zero Gravity brewery that I enjoyed the following evening in the hotel bar - 9% but it didn’t feel overwhelming. Then, on the final day of my stay in Burlington, I "accidentally" stumbled on Zero Gravity brewery when I decided to go for a long walk down to the South End of Burlington to burn off some calories. It was open at around 11 a.m. on a Sunday, with some people enjoying coffee and waffles but others already getting stuck into the beer. I decided at this point to switch down to beers of ABV that was at least lower than those I had enjoyed on previous days. I tried the "Oktoberfest" Marzen with the distinctive malty flavouring and a highly pleasant Pale called Lone Wolf.
Having maxed out on the breweries of Burlington, it was time to get a car and make the pilgrimage to Hill Farmstead, founded by Shaun HIll in 2010 and exhibiting a gloriously obsessive pursuit of quality and innovation every since.
After a pleasant meander from Burlington to Hardwick, it was a scramble over dirt roads until I reached the hallowed portals. It was a very unassuming building, but I joined a large group of people who had travelled far and wide to be there. It was a beautiful day so people were able to sit outside, and I joined a lovely couple from Massachusetts at an outdoor table. I sampled a number of the beers that they were offering on tap - the “Harlan” IPA, the “Soignee” farmhouse ale (brewed with blood orange and hibiscus, aged on top of a cherry and raspberry pomace) and the “Shirley Mae” vanilla nitro porter. I had been slightly concerned that, having travelled thousands of miles and dreamed of Hill Farmstead for so long, I would have ended up thinking “yeah, quite nice”. I need not have worried. The porter in particular was like nothing I had ever tasted.
There was still one Vermont brewery that captured my attention during my research. Let me give you a musical clue to their name. All together now…
“Helles and Weizen and Porter and Gosen
Abbeys and Tripels, and Kriek and Frambozen
Sharp Belgian Saisons that bring you to tears
These are a few of my favourite beers”
In fact there are a few songs that would work. “Pils, a beer, a lager beer”... “I’m on 16 beers, going on 17”. But to put you out of your misery (too late: Ed), the brewer is Johannes von Trapp.
Johannes is the son of Baron Georg von Trapp and his second wife, the former nun Maria. So he was not one of the kids supposedly (some liberties were taken - e.g. numbers of kids and names) portrayed on screen in “Sound of Music”. Johannes was born in the US in 1940 and was one of the later members of the Von Trapp Family Singers. He writes about his family “fleeing Austria” in 1938. I mean we know that, right? They crossed the Alps in a perilous journey on foot, while the nuns disabled the pursuing Gestapo cars (insincere apologies to anyone who has not seen the movie and for whom that was therefore a spoiler). Actually they all caught a train to Italy and travelled on from there. To be fair it was probably still quite scary.
The Von Trapps eventually settled in Stowe, Vermont, where they started a holiday lodge. Johannes took over the management after Maria’s death. He opened a brewery in 2010, seeking to fill a gap in the US market for crisp Austrian-style pilsners.
I drove through Stowe on the way to Hill Farmstead. It struck me as a twee picture postcard tourist town, and so I didn’t stop. Later, I asked the guy in a Burlington beer shop if the Von Trapp stuff was actually any good or just trading off their name. He thought for a bit before saying: “actually, yes, some of it is very good”. I didn’t buy any (due to some weird Vermont law about tax, I would have had to have bought a whole four pack), instead settling on an IPA from another Greg disciple, Sean Lawson of “Lawson's Finest Liquids”. Finally, at Burlington Airport on my way out, I spotted Von Trapp Helles on the bar list and tried one. Meh. Disappointing. In a sea of beer riches, this was a Ratner's trinket.
So, in summary, go to Vermont. Just go. I was worried beforehand that my pilgrimage might turn into an anti-climax, but the opposite was true. You won’t really be able to do justice to Vermont beer any other way, because it is so hard to buy outside Vermont. And the food, the scenery and the people are amazing.
But if you really can’t get there, drink some NEIPA from elsewhere and let your imagination run riot. There are plenty of them to choose from. It will not massively surprise you that I would recommend BrewDog Hazy Jane and Thornbridge Green Mountain as fine examples of the genre - both readily available in the UK.