In Vermont: Making Beer the Old-Fashioned Way

By John Skow

A little national-pride music, maestro. Thank you. Our very own United States of America (rooty-toot-toot) makes the best TV beer commercials (tantara) in the universe. Nobody else is close, unless it is some race of advertising geniuses in the Crab nebula, and that is not close, and anyway the Crabs do not have John Madden or Mickey Spillane, so forget them.

However -- some really gloomy national-shame music now, if you please -- it is also true that most of what the U.S. makes and labels as beer (gronk, honk, sound of oboists performing underwater) is fizzed up and flavorless, the worst brew in the universe. Why this should be so is puzzling. Other nations do not find it impossible to brew serious beer. The Germans and Austrians are masters, of course. Scandinavians, Dutch and French are experts. Italians see no point in beer, but what they make is drinkable. Mexicans produce good summer-weight cerveza. Canadian beer includes such hairy, out-of-the-swamp- and-still-dripping specialties as Moosehead, fondly known as Moosebreath by truck drivers in the Northeast. Japanese export beer tends to be thin and disappointing, which is to say it tends to taste far better than our mainstream belly wash. For that matter, Ladakhi Buddhists in remote Himalayan valleys make beer better than ours in open earthenware pots, in which dazed microorganisms swim for the shore. Furthermore . . .

But it is time to turn off Vermont's Interstate 91 into White River Junction. White River is an old railroad town and, as some old-timers brag, an old bootlegging town, an old red-light town. Those glories are long gone, and just now it is simply an old town, at the confluence of the White and Connecticut rivers. The surrounding country is some of the handsomest in New England, but there is a scuffling, head-down quality to South Main Street, out by the Legion hall. It is just the place for a brewery, though the last of the old breweries in Vermont went out in the 1890s, as far as anyone knows. There is one brewery in New Hampshire, the big, mass-market Anheuser-Busch operation in Merrimack. And only one very small outfit in Massachusetts, an enterprising Boston pub called the Commonwealth Brewing Co. Ltd., which turns out a variety of sturdy ales and porters for consumption on the premises. It is true that the somewhat misleadingly named Boston Beer Co. sells Samuel Adams, a good, chewy boutique lager that yuppies buy for nearly $7 a six-pack on payday, but the stuff is made in Pittsburgh. To the north, Maine Coast Brewing sells a tart, beer-flavored beer called Portland Lager at a stiff $5.35 a pack, but despite the sea gull, lighthouse and sailing ship on its label, Portland is made by a brewery in Eau Claire, Wis.

Nevertheless, here is the Catamount Brewing Co., a tiny and unlikely throwback to the days when a beer barrel did not roll far from where it was filled, and big horses like the ones in the Bud ads did the rolling. Catamount has only five employees, none of them Clydesdales, but they actually make beer. Big sacks of malted barley are hand-trucked into the milling room at the top of a three-story brick building that once housed a meat-packing plant. After about three weeks of boiling, fermenting, cold filtration and conditioning, Brewmaster Steve Mason gives his mustache a reflective tug. He starts the machine that fills and caps bottles with one of two workman-like ales, Catamount Amber or Catamount Gold, then jiggles them down the rolling track toward the labeler. Here the likeness of a catamount, a virtually extinct Eastern mountain lion, is glued to each. Mason's partner Alan Davis explains, if this is an explanation, that the beast suggested itself as a symbol because Green Mountain Boys Ethan and Ira Allen used to drink a lot of ale at a tavern called the Catamount in Bennington, Vt., some miles to the south. Catamount's catamount looks moody and preoccupied, as if it had invested money in a small brewery.

Mason, for one, has no doubts. It is clear that he would rather work the valves and switches of his own brewery than pilot a steamboat down the Mississippi. He began brewing beer as a basement hobbyist in 1975, when he was an anthropology student at the University of Michigan. Home brewers give up, as a rule, after a few bottles of the first batch explode and must be swabbed off the ceiling. Mason persisted and eventually learned to mill barley, make his own wort -- the sweet, not-yet-fermented, liquid product of the barley mash -- and add hops during the boil for bittering. "This was pretty advanced stuff," he admits.

He was then, but only in the real world, an admissions officer at Goddard College in Vermont. In yeasty fantasy he was a professional brewer, and in 1983 he began to ferment. He traveled to England and, with surprisingly little difficulty, apprenticed himself to a small brewery called Swannells, in Hertfordshire, a proud producer of real ale. Real here is a technical term, and it means that the ale is unpasteurized, unfiltered, conditioned in the cask and delivered to thirsty believers by gravity or hand pumps not powered by CO2.

Back in Vermont in 1984, Mason hooked up with Davis, who was running an artist-in-residence program there for the National Endowment for the Arts. In the mists of the future, they discovered, each could see Catamount looming small. They began to work out financing: stock sold to a few believers and a low-interest community-developme nt loan. Mason was aiming at something close to English real ale, though he knew there would have to be some touch-up carbonation to accommodate the colonials' taste for fizz. Beer drinkers in Vermont and New Hampshire, the intended markets, bought a lot of bottles and not much draft beer, so Catamount would be bottled without additives, and, most important, there would be no pasteurization, a process that gives beer shelf life but that, Mason and other purists feel, "heat shocks" the beer and ruins its flavor. (Control of bacteria is not a factor -- the alcohol does that -- but cold-filtered, unpasteurized beer should be stored at cool temperatures and should be drunk within three months. Like bread, beer is really good only when it is fresh. Virtually all imported beer must be pasteurized to survive the lengthy shipping process. In the U.S., most mass- market beer is pasteurized, except for Coors and a variety of draft beers.)

Most used equipment available was far too big for Catamount, whose production this month will begin with only about 2,500 cases for its market area of New Hampshire and Vermont. But a yeast tank from a dismantled Stroh brewery in Detroit became a brew kettle. A high-tech Italian wine filter turned out to be ideal. Stainless-steel conditioning tanks were built to order. By September the partners were ready to begin ten weeks of practice | brewing. Mason says there were few surprises. At one point, a daily check of the yeast culture by Consulting Biologist Mike Sinclair showed that wild yeast had corrupted the strain, and Mason had to order another batch from Chicago. The taste of Catamount's gold and amber ales was distinct -- amber more full- bodied and slightly higher in alcohol content -- but their color was too similar, and Mason made adjustments to darken the amber.

An observer hears all this with interest and growing thirst. Davis is about to pour glasses of Catamount to illustrate a point he is making when a local dairy farmer arrives to pay for a batch of used barley mash, which he feeds to his cattle. Conversation develops, and the beer remains unpoured. Are there not cows to be milked? Perhaps there is some manure to be shoveled? At last the observer gets his glass of Amber. It is red in cast, bread fresh, with the body of a weight lifter: serious beer. A glass of Gold is similarly muscular, though not so massive. Lighter, notes the visitor, "though of course" -- he spells out the word that self-respecting beer drinkers prefer not to pronounce -- "not L-i-t-e."

Davis remains composed, but his emotion is evident. "We do not deal in Lite," he says with pride.