8/28/2023 0 Comments Youtube alchemist beerIt was this early insistence on quality over quantity that set the standard for the “mile deep rather than a mile wide” distribution approach taken by nearly every budding craft brewery today. After the flood, John and Jen grew the operation as fast as they could, quickly scaling to 9,000 barrels of Heady Topper per year within the first year of production, the amount at which the Kimmich’s still cap the beer to this day. Maintaining control over the beer was priority number one, followed by creating jobs in their local community. The plan for the initial brewery (which Jen had to convince John was the right move) was always to keep it small. And it’s not an exaggeration to say that without the success of Heady Topper, Vitamin Sea Brewing - our top choice for 2019 - probably wouldn’t exist. But the fact of the matter is, Heady Topper isn’t on the list of Top 100 Beers In The Country. We try to focus on new breweries, rather than the classics. Sure, every year we make our “ Best of the Year” beer lists and we’ve never included Heady. Regardless - and John refutes all of this - it’s one of the best beers ever made in America. Depending on who you ask, it’s the IPA that launched a movement, that singularly converted the Big Beer masses to craft, or, perhaps, created the taste for an entirely new style all its own. No single American beer has been doted upon with as much unrelenting, unabashed praise as Heady Topper. We weren’t tied into anything, we could start doing some new thinking.”įor the vast majority of American craft drinkers, this, in a way, is the resurrection of John Kimmich. “It gave me the total creative freedom again to go in any direction we wanted. “One of the things we got away from, that gave us a clean break after losing the pub, is that all expectations were gone,” says John. The stormwater didn’t sink The Alchemist, it set its puppet master free. Now that production is humming in their larger production facility in Stowe, the man behind Heady Topper is reaching back into the archives, once again brewing those pub favorites lost to the flood. He’s really an artist, a genius with that… We probably had eighty to ninety different beers.” “Each time John brews a beer, he tweaks it. “John had eight years of brewing every style of beer you can imagine,” says his wife, The Alchemist Brewery co-founder Jen Kimmich. In the eight years before he ditched his waterlogged brewpub, Kimmich had been tinkering. But after that, beyond beer nerds, knowledge of the catalogue dropped precipitously.īut this is soon changing. Over the past decade, if anyone uttered the words “The Alchemist,” they were most likely followed by the words “Heady Topper.” Sure, a couple people could’ve probably named Focal Banger, the brewery’s second canned offering, which The Alchemist debuted in January 2013. The move took The Alchemist Brewery from a household name in Waterbury to one of the most famous breweries in the world. John first canned the now-famous double IPA immediately after the flood. When the pub went under, John’s obsession with Heady Topper - a name that would soon be mentioned with a sort of hushed wonderment as far as California - became relentless and all-consuming. The Death And Life Of The Alchemist Brewery That is, right up until a flood caused by Tropical Storm Irene put it under several feet of water, and subsequently out of business, in August 2011. The Alchemist Pub and Brewery in Waterbury, VT, was hugely successful relative to its scale, and understandably so - it was John’s test kitchen, his lab, and his playground. There were four or five rotating beers as well, including Heady Topper, the double IPA John first brewed two months after opening the pub with his wife, Jen. Regular visitors to the pub, on the other hand, were greeted by less eccentric options: a golden beer called Light Weight a red beer called Donovan’s Red Pappy’s Porter and Holy Cow IPA. Wellness Beer was brewed that one time and never again, a clandestine one-off from one of the world’s most gifted brewers. The ginseng… you’d drink this beer and feel it all around your mouth, like this tingly amazing kind of feeling. “Honestly, it was like nothing you’d ever had. “That was a beer before its time, that’s for sure,” says the beer’s mastermind, founder of The Alchemist Brewery John Kimmich. Alongside the food, they were served beer brewed specially by the pub’s owner, packed full of raspberries, pomegranate, cherries, ginseng and echinacea. In a Vermont pub in 2005, a group of cancer survivors sat down for a meal planned by a therapeutic chef at The Alchemist Pub and Brewery in Waterbury, Vermont.
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