Editor’s note: Walt Amses is a writer and former educator who lives in Calais.
“Honey, I’ll be late. I got caught in Heady Topper traffic at the co-op.”
Certainly strange but completely true. Vermonters — whose fetish-level reverence for designer brews rivals the NRA’s devotion to the AR-15 or real men to the Ford F-150 — are lining up in droves for beer. Farmstead is another brand whispered in hushed, venerable tones as though the perfect complement to sacrificial lamb off the small plate menu.
Full disclosure: I’m probably not the best judge of alcohol consumption. I haven’t had a drink for two months shy of 30 years and you might say I was a social drinker. You might also say a wolverine is a family-friendly pet but that wouldn’t make it so. It depends on who consider your social circle. Hells Angels? Then, yeah, I was a social drinker. So my effort at irony may be somewhat fueled by envy. But so what, right? We’re all friends here.
Vermont, I’ve learned, has the largest number of breweries per capita in the entire country, according to the Brewers Association, so conventional wisdom suggests beer lovers have ample opportunity to acquire whichever golden thirst quencher they desire. But as it turns out, microbrews flow from microbreweries whose size insures quality but limits capacity, infusing a reverence once reserved for fine French wines and a rationing system reminiscent of 1943, when commodities ranging from sugar to nylon stockings were in short supply.
But the beaming, starry-eyed consumers, heading toward the co-op registers, cradling cases as though a swaddled first born, seem every bit as happy as beer drinkers from my father’s generation, willing to overlook the price — which certainly puts the “Heady” in Heady Topper — and the fact that a six-pack curiously only contains four cans.
My introduction to beer happened in another galaxy: The old man on the couch, Schaefer out of a can and a half-empty pack of Salems on the coffee table, “Have Gun Will Travel” or “Bonanza” flickering gray across the living room. More social lubricant than aesthetic expression and decidedly blue collar, beer in my father’s day worked best when washing down a shot of rye whiskey in the Bayonne corner bar where drawn shades and clouds of cigarette smoke brought the solace of eternal midnight.
My father once — meandering home from the bar — joined a jostling crowd watching a bloody fist fight between another teenager and myself — maintaining spectator status until much later, and even then, limiting his concern to a tactical assessment: “Where’d you learn to throw a left?” I imagine his or any of his hard-drinking buddies response to having been offered a “fruity” beer would be about as enlightened as his parenting skills. Those guys considered beer drinking a right, maybe even a sacred rite, and couldn’t have fathomed it becoming a prescription-only, upper middle class privilege.
But the beaming, starry-eyed consumers, heading toward the co-op registers, cradling cases as though a swaddled first born, seem every bit as happy as beer drinkers from my father’s generation, willing to overlook the price — which certainly puts the “Heady” in Heady Topper — and the fact that a six-pack curiously only contains four cans. It should be no surprise that several Vermont beers are coveted, earning national reputations and winning a variety of prizes with different websites citing both Heady Topper and Farmstead as the best beers “in the world.” Lawson’s Finest Liquids in Warren is even smaller with brews every bit as sought after but even more challenging to find.
As I encase my comparatively humdrum kale, tofu and granola in old-growth forest because as usual I forgot the reusable bags, my musings take me back to early ’70s Central Park and the last beer queue I clearly remember. My friends and I would head to a warehouse on Staten Island and score 10 cases of Carling Black Label at less than $5 a case and resell it for a buck a can on those first couple of warm, sunny New York afternoons.
A plastic trash barrel secured to a hand truck with a bungee cord, a block or two of ice and for $50 we were in the beer business. Usually folks lined up and we sold out in a couple of hours, clearing about $100 apiece and managing to get by on that for a couple of weeks. That same C-note today will get you a case of Heady Topper and a large pizza … barely.
