Waterbury ice cream business the Udder Guys may operate on a tricycle, but its Adirondack Creamery product and 17-year-old owner, Eli German, are hardly third-wheeling.
In his fourth summer scooping with the trike, German is on a roll. The teen was easy to find at the Waterbury Rotary Club‘s Concerts in the Park series earlier this month: As the Jacob Green Band laid down blues tunes in Rusty Parker Memorial Park, customers lined up at German’s wheeled sweet treats shop, ready to indulge in any combination of the five flavors on his menu that evening.
German’s age belies his expertise, both in running a business and in curating the perfect flavor menu for any event — whether it’s a wedding, festival or memorial service. A preschool graduation, for instance, calls for basics like chocolate, vanilla and strawberry, he said, while “riskier” flavors — such as chocolate peanut butter and kashmiri kahwa, with its South Asian spices — triumph at arts fests and concerts.
At the park that night, I opted for the dichotomy of security and idiosyncrasy: one scoop of vanilla and one of kulfi-pistachio cardamom, a flavor inspired by a frozen Indian dessert. The sufficiently creamy, bean-y vanilla on top gave way to the cardamom enveloped by the cone. It had the right amount of spice without an overwhelming quantity of nuts, and it wasn’t too sweet.
The ice cream comes from family-owned Adirondack Creamery in Kingston, N.Y., which sources its ingredients from local farmers. German is the only purveyor in Vermont scooping its product.
He inherited that relationship when he bought the Udder Guys from Katya d’Angelo. The owner of Waterbury’s Bridgeside Books, d’Angelo started the business in 2017 and sold the trike to German in 2022. A rising ninth grader at the time, German had the entrepreneurial spirit that runs in his family: His mother, Nicole Grenier, owns Waterbury’s Stowe Street Café, and his stepfather, John, heads Grenier Engineering. At just 14 years old, German was ready to take on the trike.
Before he got his driver’s license at 16, German’s parents transported him to gigs to which he couldn’t pedal the trike himself. Vermont’s hills, potholes and puddles have posed challenges in actually riding the contraption, especially when he started taking on events up to an hour’s car ride away.
The family trio meets weekly to discuss finances, and German’s mom runs the Udder Guys’ social media accounts. “It can be an interesting balance of them being my parents and them being my business partners,” the teen said. But when it comes to business execution, German is on his own.
Running a biz is a lot of work, he said. While his ideal summer vacation would be spent relaxing outdoors with friends, his days are instead booked with events, and he also works as a barista at his mom’s café. But the grind pays off, German said: He’s saving his profits to pay for college.
When customers find out German is 17, “some of them are kind of shocked,” he said. “They think I’m just working as a summer job for someone else. But when I tell them it’s mine, I always get bombarded with questions.”
According to Al Lewis and John Malter, two longtime members of the Waterbury Rotary Club who organize the Concerts in the Park, the Udder Guys is an important part of the series’ legacy. The trike has been a vendor there since D’Angelo was in charge.
“[German] really has a way of handling the customers. And he’s got a very good sense of ice cream varieties and flavors,” Malter said, holding his own cone of kulfi-pistachio cardamom. “He gets some interesting stuff.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Ice Cream Brake | The Udder Guys, a teenager-owned tricycle scoop shop, rides into the summer”
This article appears in Jun 25 – Jul 1, 2025.
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