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Brewery of the Month:
Fiddlehead Brewing Company
This month's Brewery of the Month is Lone Pine Brewing Company out of Shelburne, VT. We would like to thank Director of Sales, Matt Roth, for taking the time to talk to us about Fiddlehead!
When did you open: We opened on New Year's Eve 2011
Where are you located: Shelburne, VT
Where can people find you: VT, MA, NY, NH, and starting in January, we will be distributing in Rhode Island full time!
What is the history of the Brewery: We are brewer owned by Matt Cohen (aka Mattyo). He’s been in the industry since the mid 90’s. He was the head brewery at Magic Hat for quite some time but wanted to eventually strike out on his own. Furthermore he saw a need for more IPA, especially our style of IPA (what is now called New England IPAs). Our brewery started (which is our tasting room now) in a building that is shared with a pizza place right next door. So you could always grab yourself a growler and then grab yourself a pizza. But now we have opened up the space some more, and we have transitioned from BYOB at the pizza place to BYOP (for pizza) in the brewery. When Matt opened, we were so tight for space that in order to keep up with production, we used to need to empty the brew house of everything inside it just so we had space to physically brew. But the one thing that we have always been dedicated to is that we never run out of beer (and that’s a promise we have always made to our distributors and our accounts).
Do you have a philosophy behind the beers you brew: IPA is the majority of our business. We care the most about our consumer, so when our beer goes on tap at one of our accounts, we make sure they know that it is a quality beer that will sell! We want to make sure that our beer is always the best that it can be, and is always very consistent. We have some very formal quality control including a lab to ensure that consistency. We don’t cut corners. Our concern is freshness- our beer must be consumed fresh, and if we find out that an account of ours isn’t storing our beer properly, we reconsider our relationship with that account.
What styles of beer do you prefer to brew: IPAs. We are very hop focused. We are always cranking out something new and something special. We also like to experiment with a lot of new hops to create fresh, delicious IPAs. But for the non-hop-heads we have a fun beer called Hodad which is a porter with chocolate coconut and vanilla.
What are your core beers: Fiddlehead IPA, Second Fiddle IIPA (available in 16oz 4-packs). We do also have Mastermind IIPA- we brew it for the UVM Childrens Hospital and 25% of all proceeds go to them. That beer is phenomenal- it’s like a pineapple bomb!
Any plans for fun/cool new beers: We are beginning to approach the wild ale category. We have introduced some Foeders to our program. We are going to have 4 main products that come from that. Landscape with Haystacks is one beer (Saison base with brettanomyces and a mixed culture of other bacteria), and the other is called Shape Parade (brewed with Brett and lacto and brewed with Black Lava Salt (this is what we have so far). Those are the first two that have come from this program. From this program, we eventually plan to have 4 mainstay beers from them and we will create variations on them (especially with fruit). But the beauty of what we do is that we don’t lock ourselves into specific specialty beers. We try to see what people are interested in and give our unique take on them!
What can we expect from Lone Pine in the Future?: This January we plan to be distributing in RI- this is what we are excited about right now.
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