It seems like every week in Vermont is “Craft Beer Week” — but this week actually is.
Billy Mossinghoff, co-owner and chef of Jeffersonville’s Brewster River Pub & Grill, has been busy turning out batches of beer from a brand-new half-barrel system since he got his brewing permit in April.
So far, a Belgian wheat ale, a rye IPA and a dunkelweizen have filled pint glasses at Brewster River, where house-brewed beers command two or three of the pub’s 13 taps.
Mossinghoff has been home brewing for years, he says, so this was a natural progression, though it entailed a year and a half of paperwork. “It’s kind of similar to what Three Needs used to do,” he says of his rotating roster of small-volume brews.
Those 15-gallon batches enable him to experiment, Mossinghof adds. Currently fermenting or conditioning are a hefeweizen, an imperial IPA and a “maple cream ale” for which Mossinghoff used 7 percent reverse-osmosis maple sap instead of water during the brew process.
Meanwhile, in nearby Morrisville, Lost Nation Brewing — the new 6000-barrel venture of former Trapp Family Lodge brewers Allen Van Anda and Jamie Griffith — released its first kegged beers last week.
A batch of Lost Nation’s inaugural Gose, a tart, German-style beer, went to the Farmhouse Tap & Grill in Burlington and the brand-new Mule Bar in Winooski. “It’s just trickling out,” says Van Anda, who is still waiting on tap handles but says he has made beer three or four times weekly since receiving his brewing license.
The opening of Lost Nation’s on-site tasting room is still about a month away, but Van Anda expects to be releasing new brews in rapid succession — a saison, a black ale called Pitch Black and a “light session Belgian” called Petit Ardennes, named for a Vermont-like range of Belgian mountains. “It’s awesome,” he enthuses.
The original print version of this article was headlined “The Pints Overfloweth”
This article appears in The Comedy Issue.
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