I’ve drunk Fou’ Foune by the wood-burning stove at Cantillon, sipped the legendary Trappists at Westvleteren, gulped Tankovna pils in Prague, hoisted steins at Weihenstephan, gulped Guinness straight from the factory, ticked the variants at Dark Lord Day, lined up for Younger, muled Julius, and pilgrimaged to Hill Farmstead.
I’m 46 years old. I’ve been drinking craft beer since college. I’ve been writing about craft beer for nearly 20 years. By now, I thought I had tried everything that would ever wow me. I had settled into a life of quotidian beer drinking. Then recently I was in Vermont at The Alchemist’s Stowe brewery and beer café.
For those who want to drink on-site, the only options are packaged; not just the brewery’s more common cans, like Heady Topper and Focal Banger, but also limited releases like Luscious, a British-style imperial stout, and Light, a lager, alongside some bottled wild ales.
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But there was one thing on tap.
There, at the step-up counter where guests order their beer, stood a young kid with shaggy hair pumping the long, black tap handle of a British-style beer engine. What was being slowly dispensed through the metal swan neck dipped midway into the Willi Becher glass below was identified by an animated screen on the wall above: hand-pulled Heady Topper.
Intensely aromatic, bursting with tropical fruits, and luscious in body, it was the most eye-opening beer I’ve had in years. Oddly, it’s been available for some time, though it only seems to have developed substantial buzz this year. In fact, it might just be the best beer in the country right now.
Primed to Be Pulled
Believe it or not, John Kimmich, The Alchemist’s longtime co-owner and brewer, has served Heady Topper from some sort of beer engine since the earliest day of The Alchemist brewpub, which was originally located on the main street in Waterbury, Vt. Beginning around 2004, Kimmich would fill a fresh cask and release it every Friday at opening. He’d learned the technique back in the mid-1990s when he was the head brewer at The Vermont Pub & Brewery, working under legendary craft beer pioneer Greg Noonan.
“We had cask-conditioned beer on most of the time,” Kimmich says. “Primed, double-dry-hopped, and conditioned in the keg using all of the traditional methods.”
But Kimmich never got hung up on the British tradition of exclusively putting lower-ABV milds, bitters, and whatnot on cask. Over the years he toyed with using a beer engine for lagers, stouts, sours, and, yes, Heady Topper. The citra-hopped double IPA worked well with the serving method, accentuating the beer’s tropical and piney notes.
“The action the engine provides creates that cascading Guinness effect, which lowers the carbonation level and creates that beautiful head of foam.”
The original Alchemist brewpub was lost to Hurricane Irene in 2011. The current Alchemist opened in 2016. Hand-pulled Heady Topper is now offered seven days a week, all year long.
I should have known about it a long, long time ago. Yet, the beer is hardly discussed online.
When I started writing this story in early February, it had less than 50 total reviews on Untappd. Today, it has a little over 100, though all but one of them have come since the start of this year. (It currently scores a 4.55, besting “regular” Heady’s 4.52, which has some 900,000 reviews.)
There is no entry for hand-pulled Heady Topper on BeerAdvocate. There is one little-watched video review from a year ago. This will be the first article ever written about it. There are a few Reddit threads on the topic, though those people are certainly in the know as they fawn all over it. In a recent thread, various Redditors label hand-pulled Heady Topper everything from “the current standard for my ‘perfect beer’” to “nothing better” to “the best beer I have ever had and its not even close. [sic]”
Or, as one man wrote: “It’s a bucket list sorta experience.”
A Cascading Effect
The more famous Heady Topper — the one in a can — used to be a bucket-list beer experience for many as well. Back in 2012, when it first became available in cans, I made my then-girlfriend, now-wife, drive with me up to Stowe where I picked up an entire case. Bringing them back to New York, I treated each of the 24 silver cans like liquid gold, only having one per night, savoring every sip.
Now, it seems, these same cans are in my local bodega at all times.
Now, to many, the legendary Heady Topper is deemed “overrated.”
It’s not, in my opinion, but even if you believe that to be true — even if you believe that more recent IPAs have usurped its status — you still need to try hand-pulled Heady Topper.
If the hazy, New England IPA that Heady arguably pioneered is the most modern of beer styles, the beer engine is one of the most old-fashioned serving methods. The device was patented by Dutch inventor John Lofting circa 1688, a manually powered device for dispensing ale.
“Traditional cask-conditioned beer is primed and naturally carbonated in the cask,” says Kimmich. “The beer engine is simply a method of serving. So that’s why we refer to it as ‘hand-pulled’ and not ‘cask-conditioned.’”
Kimmich breaks from tradition in several other ways. He uses a standard U.S. Sankey keg as opposed to the small, sometimes-wooden firkins used for cask ale. Kimmich does not use a cask breather, which allows oxygen to replace the displaced beer, something he considers a dated, inferior method as it accelerates the decline of the beer. Instead, he replaces it with a layer of carbon dioxide.
Hand-pulled Heady Topper is the exact same beer as that sold in the famed can; it just presents much differently. It begins with a much lower starting carbonation level before going to kegs. “The action the engine provides creates that cascading Guinness effect, which lowers the carbonation level and creates that beautiful head of foam,” Kimmich says. Less carbonation not only softens the mouthfeel but creates less carbonic acid, which softens the IPA’s perceived bitterness.
Much More Special
For years, so-called beer tourists flocked to Vermont to secure cans of Heady Topper, myself included. As was the case for many breweries, the pandemic prompted The Alchemist to open up distribution to farther markets. As I mentioned, I can now find cans of Heady in Brooklyn pretty much whenever I want, which is why you need to make Hand-pulled Heady Topper the next tick on your beer bucket list.
Skiing with friends in Vermont, I had been sent to The Alchemist to pick up assorted cans for our Airbnb. It should have only taken me 20 minutes. Instead I was gone for over an hour.
“Where were you?” my wife wondered when I got back.
“Seeing God,” I told her.
My wife and close friends know I can be prone to hyperbole, especially when discussing alcoholic beverages. Thus, I made our entire house — seven adults and eight children — return the next day for après-ski. This is a group of drinkers, but hardly connoisseurs, and definitely not beer geeks. Yet they all agreed that hand-pulled Heady Topper was the GOAT.
They all agreed that they would come back to The Alchemist whenever they could, specifically for this one beer.
“I don’t know if they’re traveling here to specifically try [hand-pulled Heady Topper], but people certainly walk away impressed,” Kimmich says. “The fact that our café is the only place on earth where you can drink this certainly makes it all that much more special.”
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