Vermont Brewers Festival

Friday night was lovely weather, fresh brewer faces and reasonable lines if you avoided the Big Three. Green Mountain Mashers booth shut out first time in at least a decade. Pleasant overall, but a lot of regular locals missing.

 

Saturday night was a lot of fun. What a beautiful setting. Two of my favorites outside of the big three were Foley brothers fair maiden IPA and mystic brewings barrel aged quad. Really a lot of phenomenal brews from booths with little to no line. I found that to be the most pleasant part. Breweries making excellent stuff and happy to chat about it. That fair maiden IPA is legit, and I actually preferred it to some of the big three ipas. Bravo. Happy to see wormtown there as well

 

Friday night was unbelievable. Was able to get to the front of Lawson's to try Triple and then avoided Alchemist and HF and barely had to wait more than 5 minutes anywhere else. Had nice conversations with Mike from Otter Creek and Sean Lawson, overall I thought it ran very smoothly and was much less hectic than I had thought it would be. Cheers to Kingdom Brewing and Pro Pig for dropping the abv on a couple of their beers so they were only one ticket.

The three winners for me were: Triple Sunshine, Peche Mortel and Catapulte. Fair Maiden on tap was excellent and noticeably better than from the bottle, Bantam from Pro Pig was also a winner.

Great event, glad I could make it this year and am already looking forward to next years!

 

When did the start brewing Peche Mortel in Vermont?

 

Quebec really brought it for this fest. Cheers to Benelux, Dieu Du Ciel and Dunham (the ones I tried). Other invited breweries included: Flying Goose, Allagash, Portsmouth, Mystic, Jack's Abby, Sixpoint, Tuckerman, Smuttynose and Wormtown.

 

Don't forget Le Trou Du Diable simply awesome beers, the mellifora was a beautiful beer and was lucky enough to try la buteuse barrel aged at the mule which if possible was even better. a few beers in I even was up for embarrassing myself by thanking them in French.

 

Dieu Du Ciel!

 

Didn't get to stop by there, those 3 were just the only ones I got to try and was throughly impressed. Think a trip up to Quebec to drink some beer is in order. I was able to rattle off a bounjour and merci, that's about it!

 

Foley Brothers killed it with Fair Maiden. It stole the show.

 

How did Jack's Abby do?

 

Sucks that the Mashers got excluded from the event, especially now that the vast majority of new brewers are former Mashers. Something like 1/3 of the VT brewers there started out as part of the Mashers.

 

Agreed that Foley Brothers really showed big. I have had the Ginger Wheat and IPA in the past and found them to be ok, bt nothing special. The Fair Maiden IIPA was awesome. Really one of the great finds of the event.

The Quebec breweries again showed up impressively. While Dunham really impressed me last year. Benelux was a great surprise.

I was also impressed by Bantam from Prohibition Pig. I am not sure who they have as a brewer, but I tried about 4 of their offerings this past weekend both at the festival and the restaurant.

Again a great weekend in the Burlington area!

 

Fine, wish they had brought more Framinghammer's to try, other then that they had Hopstitution, Hoponius Union and Berliner Lager. Got familiar with it as a real quality brewery going to school in MA, I know they're from out of state but unfortunately they guys I tried to talk to at their tent had no idea where the brewery even was or were that informed on their selection.