Malt & Grain

Vermont is dairy country, not barley country. Cows graze the hills, and the short summers and rocky soil are poorly suited to brewing barley. The malt for these beers therefore comes mostly from maltsters outside the state. With Vermont beers, people associate the state less with the grain and more with the hops and yeast.

Malt in Vermont beers tends to play a supporting role rather than take center stage. The base is pale barley malt, which supplies sugar for fermentation without bringing much flavor of its own. It's meant to leave room for hops and yeast. Even in Heady Topper from Waterbury and Sip of Sunshine from Waitsfield, the malt stays in the background, even though both beers are strong enough to need a solid malt backbone.

Typical of hazy-style beer, though, is a portion of unmalted grain in the grain bill, the mix that gets mashed. This includes rolled oats and wheat. They bring proteins and cellulose that keep the beer in suspended haze and give it that soft, almost creamy body. On the tongue, this makes the beer feel round, despite the hops' high bitterness.

You can see the result in the glass. By style guidelines, a Hazy IPA has a color value of 6 to 14 EBC, so pale yellow to golden orange, and an original gravity of 14.7 to 20.5 °P. Original gravity refers to the dissolved sugar content of the wort before fermentation, and it later determines the alcohol level. Heady Topper is a Double IPA and falls into the upper half of this range. The extra sugar comes from more malt in the grain bill, not from added sugar.