The Vermont Brewers Association congratulates their Executive Director Kurt Staudter, and Vermont historian and longtime volunteer Adam Krakowski for the publication of Vermont Beer: History of a Brewing Revolution by the History Press as part of their American Palate series. This book captures in one place the history of brewing in Vermont from colonial times to the present, and will remain the authoritative book on the subject well into the future.
Adam Krakowski took on the period from colonial times to prohibition. The book reveals new information about brewers that have long been forgotten, and chronicles the fact that Vermont embraced prohibition long before the nation as a whole between the years 1850 and the 1880s. Kurt Staudter picks up the story when Catamount Brewing and the Vermont Pub & Brewery burst onto the scene in the 1980s forever changing our definition of beer. During the next quarter-century Vermont grows from a handful of homebrewers with lofty ambitions, to a destination location for the craft brewing movement with some of the most celebrated brewers in the world.
“It’s amazing what a difference a century will make,” says Staudter, “Here we went from a place that outlawed brewing for all but the consumption outside the state, to a state with more breweries per-capita than anywhere else in the country.” Krakowski adds, “This is a tumultuous story that will grip the reader from the beginning to who knows where it ends.”
Adam Krakowski is a noted historian and University of Vermont graduate with an MS degree in Historic Preservation that has written extensively about brewing and hops production in Vermont. He was the recipient of the Weston Cate Jr. Research Fellowship in 2010 from the Vermont Historical Society, and presented the thesis A Bitter Past: Hop Farming in Nineteenth-Century Vermont. Adam has worked as a volunteer for the association at the annual Vermont Brewers Festival and traveled to Canada to pour Vermont beers at the Mondial de la Biere. Recently he has joined Kurt in writing the Vermont column for Yankee Brew News.
Kurt Staudter and his wife Patti have been running the day-to-day operations of the Vermont Brewers Association since 2008. During his time with the association it has grown from 16 member breweries to 37, and the marketing program “Vermont Brewery Challenge” has expanded to include thousands or participants from all around the world. For almost a decade he has written on the subject of Vermont beer appearing in the Springfield Reporter, Vermont Standard, and Vermont Magazine. In 2013 he took over covering the Vermont beer scene from longtime columnist Paul Kowalski at the Yankee Brew News.