Have Another Beer

2020 was a year I was supposed to expand my wine drinking experience. We loved our 2018 Napa Valley trip so much that we decided to make a follow up visit just two short years later. I was excited. I had all the vineyards picked out and was ready to get out there to northern California and taste some amazing new (to me) wines. Combine that with some of the Valley's incredible food and it pretty much sounded like heaven. 

Fate, I guess, had other ideas. 

The outbreak of a global pandemic, working full time from home and all sorts of travel restrictions globally and domestically caused us to swap out that Napa trip for a week in the Utah desert. We just couldn't get our heads wrapped around getting on a plane headed all the way across this country of ours. My 2020 wine dream was dead. Some other time, maybe.

Sometimes, fate has a way of making things up to you. Instead of a few days exploring wine in California in June, I got a long weekend tracking down as much beer as I could handle in Vermont in August. Who'd have thought? Certainly not me. And I'm not complaining.

The last time I was on any sort of beer pilgrimage, it was in Portland, Oregon in 2018, right after I spent those few days in Napa I referenced a couple of paragraphs ago. We visited six of the approximately 60 breweries in that city in three days or so that got us some amazing beer drinking experiences. Now we'd have to do the same thing in Vermont, a state that has approximately the same number of breweries as Portland just spread out over an area about 66 times the size. During a pandemic. I like to think that I can embrace the challenges life lays out for me. I was up for this!

Vermont's beer history is perhaps not so significant to the history of American brewing as the city of Portland but that doesn't mean that this experience needed to be any less awesome than our time in Oregon two years ago. But because of the area we were dealing with here, I'd have to be a little more selective. Research would be required.

I started with the Vermont Brewers Association webpage, which contains links for about 60 breweries and brewpubs in the state. I then checked the website of every single brewery and read all about every one of their beers to get a sense of where I wanted to go to drink what I wanted to drink. That got me down to a list of 10 or 11 breweries that had the kinds of beer I would be interested in. A lot of them happened to be clustered around Burlington. 

Looks like we'd be staying in Burlington.

Fresh hops. Baird Farm, North Chittendon, VT.

My pre-trip research into Vermont's breweries identified some trends: lots of saisons (a simple, refreshing country-style beer); breweries that freely mixed the English, Belgian and German brewing traditions; plenty of fruit sours; the odd beer made with maple syrup; and a lot of different beers per brewery. This last point proved tricky because between the time I settled on what I wanted to go try while researching in July, the beers were frequently unavailable in mid-August. That meant heading to certain breweries with my heart set on specific beers only to find that what I wanted wasn't available any more. 

Now, ordinarily on a beer pilgrimage, I'd spend a good amount of time in bars or brewery tasting rooms sampling multiple different kinds of beer and talking with the folks working there about their product. This 2020 global pandemic forced me to alter that strategy and take beer to go. That meant plenty of cans, bottles and just a few growlers. Don't ever accuse me of not being adaptable.

I'll also point out that ordinary beer posts on this blog often feature photographs of gorgeous-looking glasses full of delicious beer in situ at whatever bar, pub or brewery we happened to be supping said beers. No such pics this time around. Instead, I've had to make do with images of (largely) empty taprooms supplemented with a couple of pictures of the actual brews taken in hotel rooms or right here at home. That means there are fewer pictures of beer than usual; there was no way around this, but I thought it was important to show some pictures of actual beer on this post. 

We ended up hitting six breweries in our (almost) four days in the Green Mountain State. Here's what I liked and what I didn't like, in no particular order.

Little Umbrellas beer, disposable cup, Best Western Bennington. Classy, right?

What I liked: Four Quarters Brewing

To kick things off, Four Quarters is officially my new favorite brewery.

Of all the Vermont beers that I tried on this trip, Four Quarters' beers were consistently the best. Now admittedly this is based on a super small sample size since I only tasted three of their beers but three out of three ain't bad. Or maybe it's like 2-3/4 out of three (we'll get to that soon). In addition to being consistently good across the board, the best two beers of this trip (in my opinion) were Little Umbrellas and Great Bear, and they were both brewed by Four Quarters. 

Great Bear is a brown ale whose label lists the terms "lightly smoked", "chocolate" and "oatmeal" which I assume is either the process of treating the ingredients used in the beer or the ingredients themselves. This is the smoothest, creamiest, most flavorful brown ale I think I have ever had in my life. Think about drinking a chocolate oatmeal cookie and you'll be pretty much spot on here. Amazingly sweet and delicious. I took notes on all the Vermont beers I tried. I wrote "Wow!" when I tasted Great Bear. This would be an awesome dessert beer. And yes, there is such a thing.

We picked up Great Bear at the brewery itself in Winooski, VT. We found Little Umbrellas at the Bennington Beverage Outlet, and already knowing the brewery was out of this particular beer, picked up the last four pack at that store. It's almost difficult for me to discuss Little Umbrellas, brewed with lactose, pineapple and toasted coconut, as a beer. It was more pineapple juice than beer on the initial taste but it was super refreshing, especially with a low 3.5% ABV level. This is likely the oddest beer I have ever loved. I've had beer with pineapple before but nothing so forward or complex as this. I'd have this anytime. It would be a great breakfast beer (yes, there is such a thing) or a nice starter to an afternoon of some sampling.

If I ever make it back to Burlington, I'm heading to Four Quarters for a few hours and sitting outside at one of their barrel tables and going through as much of their tap list as I can. Great can design too!

Empty bar pic number one: the bar at Rock Art Brewing.

What I Didn't Like: Gruit

One of the riskiest beers I bought on this trip was an ancient type of beer called gruit brewed by Rock Art Brewery in Morrisville, VT. Gruit was apparently brewed in the area of Europe where Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands come together today in a time when the use of hops as a flavoring for beer was not widespread. There's something about non-modern beer that fascinates me (see my banana beer post from Tanzania) so I figured it was worth splurging for a four pack of this stuff.

Rock Art's version of gruit is flavored with lavender, rose-hips, elderberry and chamomile and after one can the word that comes to mind most immediately after tasting this stuff is "medicinal". And that's not a good word to spring to mind when drinking beer. The yeast from the can floating around in the glass (it never settled for some reason) didn't make the drink any more appealing. I have three more cans of this beer at home. Anyone want to come over for some gruit?

What I Liked: Vermont Maple Wheat

Since I've just labeled one of Rock Art's beers as "medicinal", I thought I ought to make it up to them right away. Not that I'm looking to hand out praise that isn't deserved. This is.

One of my Vermont beer resolutions was to try at least one beer made with maple syrup. I absolutely had to do this, even though I expected that the taste of maple syrup mixed with beer would likely be an unpleasant experience. Not gruit unpleasant, but probably overly sweet and sickly unpleasant.

It wasn't. Not in Rock Art's Vermont Maple Wheat at least. This beer was actually one of the top probably four or five beers I had on this trip. Maple Wheat is a thick, dark colored beer which looks like cider (think cider mill cider, not fermented cider). It's a sweet, well carbonated beer that doesn't taste like maple syrup at all, although you can definitely get some burnt dark maple syrup which adds to the complexity. This wasn't the only beer brewed with maple syrup we picked up in Vermont, but it was the best.

This was a pleasant surprise. I have as many cans of this left as I do of Gruit. Maybe I can drown out the taste of the Gruit with the Maple Wheat? Assuming nobody's coming over to drink the gruit.

The outdoor patio at Four Quarters. Best Vermont saison based on our small sample size.

What I Liked (but not as much as I'd hoped): The Saisons

I love saison beer. It was initially brewed as a low-alcohol content, thirst quenching beer to be drunk after a day of hard work tending the fields in summer. Fortunately, this style of beer is available to those who haven't worked a day in the fields in their lives. In terms of August in Vermont, saisons (or grisettes, which are essentially a cousin of the saison) were available at five of the six breweries we visited. We picked up some at four of those five.

The saisons we bought up in Vermont were a mixed bag. Four Quarters' Fleur de Lis was light with a tart finish and almost exactly what I wanted in a saison, albeit I would ideally have liked a little more flavor. Good Measure's Tread Lightly (brewed with strawberries and rhubarb) was good but oddly not carbonated. I still have a second bottle of this in my cellar so there's a second chance to see if this beer is actually carbonated.

But overall I didn't get what i wanted of the saisons. I thought Queen City's Barrel-Aged Saison - Brett "C" fell flat and Rock Art's Black Currant Saison was barely recognizable as blackcurrant flavored in addition to being a little bitter on the back end, which I don't associate with a saison.

Well done again, Four Quarters. Not crazy about the rest.

What I Liked: The Green State Lager Can Design

We picked up just a single type of beer at Zero Gravity Brewing and that was a 12 pack of their Green State Lager. And yes, I bought it for the can design. Sort of. 

From a graphic design standpoint, the 1950s was probably the apex (for me) of graphic design in the United States, and any sort of product design that harkens back to that decade is an instant success. Beer cans are no exception. Green State Lager has full on 1950s going on in my book.

I love the gold and green (for Vermont) on the matte white can. I love the script "Green State" and the retro maple leaf. I love the clean-ness and verticality of the whole logo with the brewery name and mascot (the hummingbird) worked into the overall composition. This could absolutely be a product design I could see being on the refrigerator shelves some 70 or so years ago.

So I didn't deliberately limit myself to one beer at Zero Gravity and I didn't ONLY buy it for the can design. I would likely have bought more but Zero Gravity suffered from me wanting too many of their out of season beers (and too few of their in season beers). And I did want one American pilsner on this trip. Box checked!

I did, though, buy their Green State glass for the label. It was the only glass I bought on this trip. So they have that going for them.

Empty bar pic number two: Queen City. My order is on the bar.

What I Didn't Like: Taking Beer To Go

Honestly, this sucked!

When I go to a brewery or brewpub, I want to sit down in the drinking space created by the brewer and taste some beer. I don't want it to go in cans, bottles or even growlers. I want small tasters, I want full pints that I can sip and get more if I want or switch it up when I'm not enthralled by what I ordered the first time. I want to relax. I want to hold the beer glass in my hand and drink deeply and lovingly from it. I want to eat brewpub food or food truck food if that's what they do. I want to sit and enjoy. I want the place to improve my drinking experience.

Drinking in a hotel room or drinking at home after vacation...not the same. Not at all.

Now, truth be told, I could have drank in some brewery tap rooms maxed out at 25% capacity. But stopping and drinking beer outside at Zero Gravity or Four Quarters or Queen City or Rock Art seemed to be tempting fate virus-wise and sitting inside at Queen City was a complete no go. If I had stayed somewhere based on our quick stops at six breweries, it would have been at Queen City. I would have had glasses of Yorkshire Porter and Landlady ESB and more than the taster of Steinbier that I asked for when I picked up the six pack, two bottles and growler to go. Stupid pandemic!

By the way, the ESB was legit. I would have loved to have some Landlady from a cask. And the Steinbier (made with hot rocks in the parking lot apparently) deserved more than a taster.

Good Measure Brewing, Northfield, VT.

What I Liked: BLCK Vol. 15

It is rare that I find an English style mild outside of the United Kingdom. Travel to Northfield, VT and you'll find a good one at Good Measure Brewing right in their downtown space.

For me, a good English mild has to have a low level of carbonation (assuming it's not hand pumped out of a cask) and needs to have that tea-like taste that you find in good English pub beer. Good Measure has made sure the carbonation level is reasonably low and has guaranteed the tea taste is there by brewing the beer with actual tea. Now, sure, that sort of strategy is not totally traditional but the gamble totally works for me. 

And then Good Measure one-upped their inspiration. Milds don't typically carry a ton of flavor but this version totally did. Good dark roasted malt along with the tea improved on the original. Something different. Good beer. I'd put it right behind (and totally different from) the two from Four Quarters. 

What I Liked (although my research is incomplete): Burlington Beer Company's Fruits

So I'm not a huge fan of fruit beers. At the same time, I think there's a time and place where fruit beers belong. 

Our visit to Burlington Beer Company represented for me the biggest risk in terms of what we'd pick up to go. Part of this was their pretty much totally inscrutable beer names (how do I understand what Seances and Sacrifices is as a beer?) but another was the heavy reliance on fruit in the beers I selected.

I walked away from BBCo with four packs of Strawberry Whale Cake, Double Roadside Bandits (somehow a beer made with blueberry pancakes and some other stuff) and a key lime and kumquat You Can't Get There From Here (or YCGTFH, which sounds like some kind of H.P. Lovecraft monster). And yes, there are other flavors of Whale Cake and YCGTFH. And yes, I also made off with a four pack of Seances and Sacrifices, which turned out to be an imperial stout made with maple syrup and a 12% ABV level and $32 four pack price!

I was impressed by the Whale Cake and Double Roadside Bandits. You could taste legit fresh fruit flavor in both, although I'd probably give the nod to the Whale Cake because of the incredibly bitter yeast sediment in the Bandits. But the YCGTFH was like juice with a sour kick at the end. It was really pretty awesome and yes, let's face it, another breakfast beer.

If anyone living remotely near me is headed to Vermont any time soon, please get me the rest of the YCGTFH series of beers. Please! I'll pay handsomely. I need more of this stuff. Strictly for research, of course.

Empty bar pic number three: Zero Gravity. The people in this pic work there.

It is way more difficult to taste a lot of different beers from breweries during a pandemic. I mean it's just not possible to take one can of each beer to go. They sort of come in four packs or six packs. This was a real problem when we went to Utah and Colorado earlier in the summer. Buy a six pack of beer...you have to drink the whole thing before you move on to something else. It's not like you can bring it home with you on the plane. And God knows, I'm not leaving beer behind. Well...maybe the Gruit.

Fortunately for me, we drove to Vermont. That meant I didn't have to consume all the beers I bought up there in the Green Mountain state before we came home. We just loaded up the trunk with the excess beer and brought it on home. 56 cans and six bottles, if you are counting (I was).

Not only does this reduce the beer drinking stress level (yes, that's such a thing) but I also get to re-live one portion of our vacation every week for the next few weeks. Bonus!

We found some good stuff up in Vermont. I'm going to be sad when it's all gone. Going to have to stretch out some of this, although let's face it, there's no way I'm going to have any left by the end of October.

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How We Did It

We visited six breweries in Vermont in less than four days in state. Click on the brewery names in the information below to link to each brewery's website. I'm not posting hours for any of the six. This pandemic's probably got the hours all messed up and the best way to check current opening hours is by going to the source.

We visited Good Measure Brewing on our way from Bennington to Burlington. It's not exactly on the way but it's not a huge detour either. Was it worth tacking on 30 or 40 minutes on to our journey to bring home a four pack of BLCK Vol. 15? I think so. I'd do it again. We also picked up the Early Riser Cream Ale (get it!), the East Street Bitter (too much burnt caramel for me) and the Tread Lightly grisette referenced earlier in this post. The jury's still out on that one. If the second bottle I bought is carbonated, the rating on that beer has to go up.

Completing a pickup run to Four Quarters, Burlington Beer Company, Queen City and Zero Gravity took us less than an hour once our orders were placed in advance. There are probably other brewers that could be added or substituted in a similar time frame. I think all are worthwhile visiting. I'd go for the Yorkshire Porter, Landlady ESB and whatever else takes your fancy at Queen City; I'd stay all day at Four Quarters if the early returns are any indication; and I'd definitely want to spend time exploring at Zero Gravity and Burlington Beer Company.

If you are staying in Burlington or coming west from the eastern part of Vermont, it's a long ride to Rock Art Brewery in Morrisville. If I had to make that trip knowing what I know now, would I? Probably not, but that Vermont Maple Wheat is some seriously good beer. I'd definitely look for a four pack (or two) in a beer store if I'm ever in Vermont again.

Finally, I started looking at breweries in Vermont by visiting the Vermont Brewers Association website. I know it probably doesn't include every brewery in Vermont but it served me well as a starting point.

Finally finally, don't put too much stock in what I've written in this post. I believe I'm a knowledgable and serious beer drinker but I like what I like and that's not what everyone likes. Ultimately, we all need to drink beer that we like and not what someone else likes. If you make beer pilgrimage to Vermont, I hope you love what you find, even if it's not what I like. Clear enough? Good!

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Post-Original Blog Post Note (from 2021): I wrote this blog post about a month after our trip to Vermont. At that time, I had started going through the beers we brought back. Sometimes, beers endear themselves to you over time in ways that aren't apparent on the first tasting. Conversely, some beers become less appealing on repeated drinkings. After consuming my entire stash that I brought back, I most enjoyed Four Quarters' Little Umbrellas and Great Bear and Zero Gravity's Green State Lager. These beers were honestly legitimately awesome. On the flip side, I became less enthusiastic about Rock Art's and Burlington Beer Company's beers, particularly the Gruit (which I actually threw away) and the Double Roadside Bandits (which had so much yeast in it as to become unpleasant). I've left the original text of this post intact, but have elected to add this supplemental note. I crave Little Umbrellas and Green State regularly. Seriously amazing beer.

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Sugar Maples

Let's play word association, shall we?

Vermont.

Who said maple syrup? 

I did. 

A couple months ago I hadn't thought about Vermont as a vacation destination in...well, forever. When it started to be a serious candidate as a substitute for a scuttled trip to Maine (which replaced Costa Rica), the first thing that came to my mind about that state was pouring sweet maple syrup on a pile of fluffy pancakes. Now that I know a little more about the Green Mountain State based on a half week doing a little exploring and a lot more time than that researching where to go and what to do, maple syrup is still the first thing I think of when I hear the name Vermont.

Call it fate, karma, destiny, kismet, divine providence or whatever else you might want to call it but I was not getting out of Vermont without a little maple syrup experience. Maybe even more than a little.

Where to begin? New England Maple Museum? Sure, we went there. Local diner for those fluffy pancakes I talked about in the big paragraph above? Thanks, Henry's Diner in Burlington. But for the real scoop on maple syrup, we opted to pay a visit to a farm where this stuff is actually made and talk to someone who puts in the time all year long. That meant time in the sugar house, a walk in the woods and whatever else we could find on property. 

A quick internet search, some website checking out, a few eliminations and we settled on Baird Farm about an hour and a half north of Bennington. We kept a couple of alternates on our agenda in case Baird didn't pan out. We didn't even think about stopping anywhere else once we finished our time there.

Let's start with the basics. Maple syrup comes from maple trees. Specifically the sap of those maples, which from about late February to mid-April (depending on the year and the climate) can be extracted from the maples while the temperatures swing between freezing and thawing. This freeze-thaw action builds up pressure within the trees which allows easy extraction by simply sticking a tap into the trunk of the tree and letting the sap flow out. Easy enough? Good!

Now, traditionally, the tap inserted into the tree was a metal apparatus with a spout on the non-tree end and a hook for a metal bucket. Stick the bucket on the hook, wait for it to fill with sap, go collect all your buckets, process the sap and voila!...maple syrup.

That process may work fine for a small at-home operation or maybe even a larger commercial farm some decades ago. But harvesting today likely looks like a series of taps in trees connected to tubes connected to larger tubes going into a sugar house to get the 1.5% to 2% sugar content sap up to the 66.9% sugar content syrup so you can enjoy your pancakes or waffles or French toast in the proper way. Not too complicated, right? 

Those are the basics.

Today's tapping hardware.

Baird Farm was established by the current Baird family 102 years ago. The extended family can actually claim that the farm has been in the fam longer than 102 years but the current ownership goes back four generations to 1918 when the ancestors of today's Bairds purchased the property from an aunt. The farm today consists of the 65 acre farm proper with a couple of forests adding about 170 acres to the total operation. The extra land holds the maples. All 12,000 of them in two separate but about equal 6,000 tree sections.

With 12,000 trees on the property contributing to the harvest, there are no buckets attached to trees at Baird Farm. Try about 80 miles of tubing of various sizes delivering all that slightly sweet sap down to two pump houses at the lower portion of the property where it's collected into a tank before being pumped back up to the sugar house. The sap flows by gravity but is also pulled by vacuum down to the pump house to speed up the whole operation.

Twenty some years ago, the sugar house was the first and last stop after the pump house, where the sap (which is mostly water) would be boiled down to the required thickness and sugar content under the watchful eye of an experienced syrup maker, who could often tell when the syrup was ready for bottling by watching the way it ran off a spoon. But about the turn of the last century, the Bairds picked up a reverse osmosis machine which fairly quickly extracts some of the water in the sap to increase the overall sugar content from 2% or less up to 18%. Saves a ton of time apparently.

The sugar house is the next and final stop, consisting of a couple of 7,000 to 8,000 gallon holding tanks which feed into the evaporator where the final reduction is made. Today the final product is checked not by eye and the rolling-off-the-spoon check but with a hygrometer to ensure a more consistent product. The evaporator today also comes with an on-off switch rather than being wood-fired, which is a whole lot more effective at halting the cooking off process when it's either at the right sugar level or when a group of tourists like us interrupts production asking for a tour and tasting.

For the record, we did not halt any kind of production. We're months away from that.

The stainless steel holding tanks.

The evaporator, turning sap into syrup.

So how much sap goes into making a gallon of syrup? About 45-55 gallons of sap per gallon of maple syrup is the answer. The annual yield from the farm is about 6,000 gallons, or about 1/2 gallon per tree. To get 6,000 gallons, you need to extract and boil down about 300,000 gallons of sap. That's a lot of boiling down in the evaporator, even after the reverse osmosis machine (which sounds like some science fiction movie invention every time I write that). And it all has to be supervised. Think you put in overtime at work? It's not uncommon to shut operations down in the hot sugarhouse at midnight or 1 a.m. Heck, there might even be the odd 4 a.m. night every so often.

And since we are on the subject of work...each one of those 12,000 trees are tapped by hand every year and the taps are pulled within 30 days of the end of extraction. It's cold in Vermont. That sometimes means deep snow and snowshoes to get that job done. Depending on the conditions, upwards of 300 to 400 taps can be placed in a single day. And not just anywhere. Once a tap is placed the tree is scarred in that spot and you'll need to pick a different spot so the trunk can recover.

Slice out of a maple tree showing the scars of past tappings.

One of the two pump houses.

How many people are employed at Baird Farm to do all this? Three. That's it. No joke. Three people do all the tapping, the boiling and the untapping. This is some hard work. And that's just in the production season if things go perfectly, which they don't always do.

Sometimes lines stop producing. Maybe a squirrel chewed through one of the tubes. Or if it's not a squirrel maybe a chipmunk. Or a deer. Or a porcupine!!! Tree falls in the woods? Yikes! How many lines does one of those things take down? Remember, there are 80 miles of tubes. 80 miles!! Now, the drop in pressure can be measured in the pump houses and gauges out on the lines themselves can get pretty close to where the loss in pressure is occurring but that's about as close as instrumentation can get you. The lines need to be walked. In the snow. Maybe with snowshoes. For miles.

If I've made it sound like this is some hard work for only about six weeks a year, I apologize. There's plenty of work in the off season to be done too. Tubing needs to be replaced as frequently as every three years. Not all of it. But enough of the 80 miles to add up to miles and miles of the stuff being changed out each summer. 

And if you are thinking that maybe you can spread out the work by doing some of the tapping in the fall, when the freeze-thaw action is also going on, think again. Sure you could do it that way but there would be more issues with lines freezing and the trees can't produce but once a year so if you missed maximum production you'd lose product.

Who wants to be a maple syrup farmer? My hand is down. I'll just buy the stuff.

Shots of maple syrup, anyone? Yes, please!

Speaking of buying, you can do that at Baird Farm. I'm not going to say that this was the best part of the tour because we got so much great information out of 90 minutes (not a typo) there but the buying certainly was the tastiest part of our visit. Well, until the mint infused maple syrup sampling that is.

Maple syrup is graded by color and taste into one of four categories: Golden Delicate, Amber Rich, Dark Robust and Very Dark Strong. The first word (or words in the case of Very Dark) describes the appearance of the syrup and the second (or third) word describes the flavor. They used to be Fancy, Grade A Medium Amber, Grade A Dark Amber and Grade B but everyone wanted the Fancy stuff and nobody wanted Grade B just out of principles of labeling rather than letting their tastebuds be the decider of what they wanted. The color is determined by the timing of the extraction. Sap later in the season is darker than earlier sap.

Our six samples (the photograph above was taken mid-sampling) each covered the four categories plus a shot each of spruce infused and mint infused syrup. The spruce infused was interesting and not entirely unappealing. I hate mint (except in dental products and gum) so that one went unfinished for me despite its already small size. The winners for us in the straight maple? Golden Delicate which was so smooth and light and the Dark Robust, which packed a flavor punch that had some seriousness to it. This is some seriously good stuff. I don't know that I will ever think about maple syrup quite the same way again and for damn sure I'm not ever buying any of the fake stuff ever again.

I'm amazed that we spent an hour and a half on the Baird Farm but there was not a boring nor an uninformative minute. Our guide for the mid-morning was Jenna, daughter of the current Baird Farm owners and partner in the retail business. Jenna is one of those three people tapping her share of 12,000 trees on snowshoes every winter and cooking sap into sugar to all hours of the night and morning and replacing tubing and all other sorts of jobs to keep the place running, including spending time with us one Thursday morning in August. This was probably the most action packed and straight up fun thing we did in our time in Vermont. It was worth every penny of the free tour price plus the money we dropped on swag, including a bottle each of Golden Delicate and Dark Robust.

The sugarhouse at Baird Farm, where it all happens.

I mentioned earlier in this post that I had a backup plan in case our experience at Baird Farm wasn't everything I thought it could be. I wasn't joking; I had two additional maple syrup farms on my agenda that we could have visited in the event we were disappointed. There's no way that was going to happen. The first place we picked was the best I'm sure, even if I didn't get to the other two. Why mess with success?

From start to finish, we spent a bit under four days in Vermont but there was a little more maple-ing than just our visit to Baird Farm that we were able to pack into our time there. I ate maple chipotle beef tacos and a breakfast sandwich with maple bacon (OK, so that last one was at Dunkin'). I also brought back at least two kinds of beer brewed with maple syrup for post-trip enjoyment and of course, I did end up one morning with a stack of pancakes (to go) that I saturated with maple syrup. And I do mean saturated.

We also stopped by the New England Maple Museum, which is about a 10 minute drive west of Baird Farm. We shopped (including our one per trip Christmas tree ornament purchase), took advantage of an available restroom and hung out near the world's largest jug of maple syrup. I don't know if that claim is true but how could we not?

My hunch above about Vermont equaling maple syrup is statistically accurate by the way. While numbers out there seem to differ a little, it appears Vermont far and away produces more maple syrup (over 2 million gallons in a year) than any other state. Its output is about half of that in the entire United States and it easily bests the next five producers combined. 

New York, Maine, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, if you must know. Vermont is best. At least in the maple syrup department.

Mmmmm...pancakes with maple syrup. From Henry's Diner on Bank Street in Burlington.

Proof I was in Vermont.

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How We Did It

Baird Farm is located in the town of North Chittenden, Vermont. They are open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tours are by appointment or chance, according to their website. Email them using the link on their website or just give them a call. Go here. Seriously. It's an amazing tour. Say hi to Jenna from us if you make it there. And ask to see the trees. We didn't, but the tour after us did so we tagged along with them to take a walk in the woods. It was way worth it. The sugar house and even the reverse osmosis tanks are fascinating and all but there's nothing like seeing the forest with tubes hooked up to the trees.

I should also note that Baird is certified organic. Yes, pretty much all wild grown maple trees are organic, but the certification goes into sustainable farming practices right down to the type of cleaner that they use to scrub the evaporator while they are deep into the sugaring process. I don't know if it shows in the taste of their syrup but I do know that stuff is pretty amazing tasting.

If you are looking for some good pancakes, I can recommend Henry's Diner in downtown Burlington. We took our breakfast to go (pandemic, you know) but the atmosphere inside the place is classic old-school diner from all the way back to 1925. I get that it's probably not that difficult to get good pancakes most places in Vermont but the waffle was pretty darned good too. Henry's is located at 155 Bank Street.

If you want to see the world's largest jug of maple syrup, pick up anything maple syrup related ever made or actually see inside the museum itself (which we didn't do), the New England Maple Museum is about a ten minute drive west of Baird Farm in Pittsford, Vermont. It's worth it for the photo opportunity with the big jug.

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