United Nations of Beer

Vermont Brewers Festival

by Ashley Cotter-Cairns and Mattias Dahlstrom
(UNOB HQ and Beer Delegate, VT, USA)

Vermont Brewers Festival 2007

Yes, it's true. With a little help from a couple who departed, palming off a handful of unused tokens to us just as we were about to leave, plus two session entries on our press passes, freshly-appointed Vermont Beer Delegate Mattias Dahlstrom and I sipped and stammered our way through 44 beer types in a little under nine hours. (And we didn't spend a cent!)

As you might imagine, things got a tad messy towards the end of the second session of the Vermont Brewers Festival. Indeed, Matti and myself were in no fit state to make further value judgments, despite the 3oz sample sizes.

Truth is, a beer festival is about more than stamina and alcohol tolerance. The real problem is taste bud fatigue. After seven or eight different IPAs in five hours, it gets hard to become enthusiastic about trying just one more.

Even those unfortunate enough not to be on the guest list would not have felt hard done by, as the entry fee included ten tasting tickets. Thumbs up to the Vermont Brewers Festival for additional tickets costing only 50c each AND all samples costing just a single ticket (Mondiale de la Biere in Montreal had samples costing as much as four tickets a shot!).

The Vermont Brewers Festival was split into three four-hour sessions. Friday night suffered a heavy downpour, but our big day dawned bright and clear. Mattias and I got ourselves in the mood with a bike ride and hike, followed by a bacon and egg roll. Bring on the beer!

I had no concrete plans, apart from meeting up with a few brewers, trying their brews and having a good time. All boxes were thoroughly checked.

I was happy to see a level playing field for the brewers at the Vermont Brewers Festival. Nobody had outshone their neighbors by erecting a massively overblown stand, as you sometimes find at 'competitive' events. More or less at random (there was no map in the program), we meandered around the field and began running through our tasting tickets.

Lately I've been particularly keen to try organic beers. Matti is a bit of an organic food freak, too. So we were delighted to find Orlio Organic, showing off its Common Ale and IPA brands. Both were very good, but the IPA in particular impressed us, although like most of the beers at the Vermont Brewers Festival, it was served a few degrees too cold.

Orlio's were the best organic beers we tried, though Peak Organic and one or two others did show up with certified organic beer. Click for reviews of Peak Organic Nut Brown ale and Peak Organic Pale ale.

Some Vermont staples were present, along with a few lesser-known brewers and some out of state labels. Magic Hat, Otter Creek, Rock Art, Trout River, Long Trail... the list went on and on. With more than 130 beers to choose from, it was clear that Matti and I had our work cut out for us.

Local to Mattias is a restauant called American Flatbread, which features an in-house brewery called Zero Gravity. We found these a bit hit and miss, with the Zero Gravity IPA being disappointing, but the Zero Gravity Belgian Dubbel Saison was delightful. We couldn't have had a better day to be drinking it, either.

Harpoon had a tremendous lineup of beers, but we'd previously decided to limit ourselves to two brews per stand. The limited release Harpoon Brewery Kellerbier and Harpoon Brewery Peche Peach Lambic seemed the perfect choices.

Shed Brewery from Stowe, VT tempted us with its Shed Mountain Ale and Shed Imperial Stout. We weren't too impressed with the Stout, but the Mountain Ale is a brown ale which has a strong local following and with good reason.

Magic Hat is a very famous brewery, not least due to its use of creative artwork on the labels. Being a bit of a Burt Ward as Batman fan in my youth, I immediately gravitated towards the Magic Hat Wonder beer, which had a big Riddler-style question mark on the front.

Riddle me this: when is a beet beer not a beet beer? When it tastes like a lager with food colouring added. I am assured fresh beets and Belgian beet sugar went into its manufacture, but I challenge anybody to detect either product under blind taste test conditions!

Lake Placid's IPA was probably the best of the show behind Orlio's and well worth looking up if you like the style.

Friends from other states included Tuckerman Ale, Brooklyn Brewery, Woodstock Inn and Brewery and Smuttynose. We've reviewed some of the beers they brought with them on the appropriate pages of the site.

I am ashamed to admit that those final free tokens from the couple were a bridge too far. We bravely attempted to go for 50 samples in a day, but fell a bit short and gave the last few away to a bunch of happy souls whose need was far greater than ours.

In my mind, the Vermont Brewers Festival 2007 was a huge success. Judging by the crowds in the final session, the ambitious target of 10,000 visitors was probably flirted with (and without seeking to incriminate anybody, some of those visitors were probably flirted with, too). Recommended if you're in the Burlington area during next year's event!