http://rutlandherald.com/article/20140824/NEWS01/708249944/
Kurt Staudter, director of the Vermont Brewers Association, raises a glass at the Harpoon Brewery in Windsor. Staudter says the state is now producing more beer than some European countries.
Photo: Photo by Dirk Van Susteren
Published August 24, 2014 in the Rutland Herald
A toast to Vt.’s brewing industry
By DIRK VAN SUSTEREN
With a hearty demeanor and a fitting name, Kurt Staudter is someone you’d expect to meet at a Hamburg rathskeller or a Munich biergarten.
But, no, he’s at Harpoon Brewery’s Tap and Beer Garden in Windsor, with a frothy stein of Octoberfest, a seasonal German lager, holding forth on Vermont’s beers.
The thirst for them seems unquenchable. “Take Magic Hat, Harpoon, Otter Creek, Long Trail,” says Staudter, 56, citing those familiar Vermont brew names. “Together these companies make more beer than all the breweries (combined) in many European countries!”
And it all began in 1987. That’s when Catamount Brewing Co. opened Vermont’s first, modern-day craft-brew plant in White River Junction.
Like virtually all of the state’s original craft breweries, Catamount was conceived by a guy, Steve Mason, who was bored with the likes of Bud and Miller, who had tasted robust beers in Europe, who had managed to pool some money and who gave brewing a go in the land of maple syrup.
Flash forward, and Vermont now has some 40 commercial breweries, which is touted as the most per capita of any state. The brewing industry in Vermont employs some 2,200 people.
And all this is especially remarkable, says a book co-written by Staudter, because Vermont never had a big beer-drinking tradition in the first place. Its early immigrants were not, say, German or Belgian, nationalities historically associated with a beer culture.
In fact, if Vermont had any tradition at all vis-à-vis beer it was one of teetotalism: From 1853 until 1902, the state banned alcohol, and this was way before a certain congressman from Minnesota, Andrew Volstead, lent his name in 1919 to the act leading to national Prohibition.
Staudter is now sharing beer trivia — did you know that America’s craft brew movement started in California in 1979 with Sierra Nevada? — over a hefeweizen, a wheat beer, while a waitress delivers a plate of bratwurst and sauerkraut and then dashes off to serve other visitors in Harpoon’s spacious taproom.
On a blackboard fronting the long wooden bar, its stools mostly filled, is a list of today’s 19 beers on tap, from “Boston Irish Stout (4.3 percent alcohol) to “Imperial Pumpkin” (10.5 percent). For six bucks you can get four 6-ounce samples of any of Harpoon’s offerings.
Also written in chalk are suggested ways to appreciate beer. You’d think you were at a wine-tasting exam, with a checklist reminder for student sommelier. Here, beer drinkers are invited to consider: 1) appearance. 2) aroma 3) “mouthfeel” 4) taste and 5) finish. Each has subcategories too; for example, under “appearance” one might note color, clarity, carbonation and head retention.
Could beer be taken more seriously?
It’s a treat quaffing and conversing with Staudter, and for those who don’t have that opportunity, there’s that book he co-authored, “Vermont Beer: History of a Brewing Revolution” (History Press, 2014).
Staudter teamed up to write it with Adam Krakowski of Montpelier, an historian and fine-arts conservator. The two, who also co-write for the “Yankee Brew News,” a trade publication, became acquainted at a University of Vermont agriculture conference on the potential for hop farming in Vermont.
(Neither grows crops, though Staudter and his wife Patti have trellises of hops running up the porch of their home in Springfield.)
The authors divided the research, with Krakowski focusing on the period from early colonial days through the temperance years. Drawing from newspaper accounts, he tells of breweries flourishing and failing and occasionally burning to the ground.
Staudter interviewed brewers from across the state for his part, and the result is a snapshot of Vermont’s contemporary but fast-changing beer world.
“Because of the book project I have a greater insight and appreciation of the beer scene and how it (the industry) is moving forward,“ he says.
Actually, Staudter has been a central part of that scene. He is executive director of the Vermont Brewers Association, a position he took six years ago after a meeting at the Otter Creek Brewery in Middlebury.
“I arrived for a job interview at 10 in the morning, sat down, and was asked whether I wanted coffee or a beer,” he says with a laugh. “Everyone there chose beer, and so did I.”
The work, which he shares with Patti, largely involves staging and promoting events, the biggest association-sponsored shindig being the annual Brewers Festival on the Burlington Waterfront that attracts some 9,000 devotees.
The two oversee the “Brewers Passport Program,” which draws beer fans to breweries and brewpubs across the state to have their “passports” stamped and to become eligible for gifts from breweries.
So, why so hopped up about beer?
Staudter grew up in and around New York City, where imported brews were generally more available than in other parts of the country. His father, a corporate executive of German ancestry, often traveled to Europe on business and brought home samples of beers from Germany and other countries.
Staudter and his two brothers washed down, with German beer, pigs knuckles, sauerbraten and bratwurst prepared by his mother. On special occasions, the family dined at Luchow’s, the famous German Guilded-Age restaurant in New York, which gave him at an unusually young age an unusually sophisticated taste for beers.
And as a young man out with friends, Staudter recalls, he was known to dump a bottle of Guinness Extra Stout into a pitcher of domestic beer to give body and flavor.
Staudter in the early ’80s moved to Springfield where his father had bought the Hartness House Inn (later sold). Staudter worked there for a few years before moving on to other jobs and professions, among them being a political columnist, first for the Springfield Reporter, now for the Vermont Standard of Woodstock.
He’s brewed some altbiers over the years at home in the kitchen; but mostly when it comes to beer, he writes about it, and has celebrated it on public-access television programs, and that probably contributed to his being tapped as head of the brewers association.
How long will Vermont’s beer craze continue?” What does he think of those city-block-long lines of people waiting to buy Heady Topper (Vermont’s trendy beer du jour)?
Staudter remarks that Vermont’s beer industry has “matured” but will likely keep growing but, of course, experience “shakeouts” and other forms of change.
A sampling: Harpoon 14 years ago wound up purchasing Catamount after financial woes led to a bank foreclosure; and Otter Creek was bought by Wolavers 12 years ago, and then both were bought in 2009 by Long Trail — which Saturday celebrated its 25 birthday.
There’s room for newcomers, says Staudter. But it’s best to think small at first. He mentions Stone Corral in Huntington, a microbrewery on a horse farm, that now produces three barrels at a time, often with local ingredients.
“Vermonters, with the localvore movement and with its farmers markets always popular, has long shown support for things produced locally,” says Staudter. Beer is no different.
Vermont’s brewing business also has become inextricably tied to the tourism industry, benefitting both, he emphasizes.
At the Harpoon Brewery, you’d think for a second you were at Ben & Jerry’s with all the promotion aspects, including tours, aimed a building product loyalty.
As shoppers in the souvenir shop consider Harpoon hats, mugs and red hoodies ($39), Staudter declares, over his stein: “We are not just homebrewers now; we are a large part of the Vermont economy.”
Dirk Van Susteren is a Calais freelance writer and editor.
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