Vermont Pub & Brewery’s Forbidden Fruit has been a gateway beer for several generations of young Burlington drinkers. Elise Pecor, like many others, drank her first glass of the sour brewed with 500 pounds of raspberries the day after she turned 21. She liked it so much that she kept coming back, became friends with the bartenders and got a part-time job as a host. Since December 2019, she’s owned the place.
In late October, Pecor, 43, and co-owner and brewmaster Scott Gawitt, 51, announced that Vermont Pub & Brewery would close on Saturday, November 14, citing a drop in business in 2020 from which it never recovered. This week’s 38th anniversary party, on Wednesday, November 11, will be the last for the brewpub, founded in 1988 by Greg and Nancy Noonan.
The Noonans made history when they opened their doors: VPB was the first brewpub in the state and one of only 11 in the country. They’d been illegal in Vermont since Prohibition, and Greg Noonan, then a home brewer, was instrumental in changing state law to allow them. In the years leading up to the 2010s craft beer boom, Vermont Pub & Brewery was the place for aspiring brewers to gather and learn.
“Greg was beer,” Gawitt said of the pub’s late founder, who died from cancer in 2009. Gawitt apprenticed at the brewery in 2011, returned as assistant brewer in 2013, became brewmaster in 2019 and joined Pecor as co-owner in 2022.
Since taking over, Pecor and Gawitt have worked to maintain Noonan’s legacy.
“His whole motto was ‘Great beer, great food, great service, great people — and at publican prices,’” Pecor said. “We’ve spent the last six years trying to hold onto that vision.”
As many breweries across the country chased trends, VPB “kept it more traditional,” Gawitt said. The pub favored a wide variety and classic styles, particularly lagers, on which Noonan wrote the book, Brewing Lager Beer, in 1986.
Like Pecor, I, too, fell for Forbidden Fruit early in my drinking career. When I went last week, I’d hoped to order a more recent favorite: Burly Irish Ale. But I was thwarted: That flagship beer, on tap for all 38 years, was the first to sell out.
The patio was buzzing on an unseasonably warm day; the whole restaurant has been since the closure announcement, Pecor said. That first Friday “felt like a Friday in 2007,” she added.
Through Saturday, VPB will be open regular hours for lunch and dinner. Instead of a funeral, Gawitt said, “it’s an end-of-life celebration.” Staff — including longtime managers Tammie Brownell and Deb Chase — are sticking it out to the end, Pecor said. All of the business’ bills are paid. Brewers, local homebrewers and regulars from across the decades are stopping in to share stories over fish and chips and a final pint.
It’s an end-of-life celebration.
Scott Gawitt
For my last VPB libation, I settled for another classic: Handsome Mick’s Irish Stout, named for Mick Bowen, Noonan’s friend and a onetime VPB comanager. As I drank the smooth, dark ale at the bar, Pecor taught a bartender how to fill growlers — now a popular souvenir.
Other than occasional collaborative beers brewed with the likes of Magic Hat or the Alchemist, VPB’s beer has never been packaged. Canning wasn’t a realistic way to increase revenue, Gawitt said. The 14-barrel brewing system takes up the entirety of the pub’s basement. Noonan had to cut one kettle in half to get it through the door, then weld it back together.
They could’ve contracted another brewery to produce and can their beer, “but what makes it special is the system that Greg designed,” Gawitt said. “It would be a beer on the shelf, but it really wouldn’t be the same.”
That brewing equipment — including an old ice cream tank used as a fermenter — will be sold at auction at the end of November, along with other items from the restaurant. The space will then be available for lease.
Black Flannel Distilling in Essex will be distilling what’s left of Thunderhead Barleywine, one of VPB’s uncarbonated beers. Some of the more sentimental memorabilia is headed to the Alchemist, whose owners, John and Jen Kimmich, met at VPB in the mid-1990s.
The brewpub’s sidewalk-level sign, topped with a bespectacled crow, will have “a place of honor” at the Stowe beer café, John said. A metal VPB arch will find a home in its memorial garden, with climbing clematis growing over it. The two bronze lions that have long guarded the pub’s patio will now keep watch over the Alchemist.
Burly Irish Ale — and soon Vermont Pub & Brewery — might be gone, but they’ll forever have a place of honor in Vermont beer history. ➆
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