Best Breweries in Vermont

How We Picked

Vermont's brewery scene is spread from Burlington's waterfront taprooms to small-batch operations in hill towns most visitors never reach. For this list, we focused on places that are genuinely worth driving to, where the beer itself is the reason to go rather than just a supplement to dinner. We weighted quality and consistency alongside the experience of being there. Vermont has more than 60 licensed breweries, and the picks below cover a cross-section of the north-central corridor that most travelers move through, including production breweries, a cidery working with Vermont apples, and one of the best craft beer bars in the state. For the full Vermont travel picture, regional guides can help you build these stops into a larger trip.

A note on planning: most taprooms keep reduced hours Monday through Wednesday or close entirely. Hours shift between ski season and summer, so check ahead. If you're planning a multi-day trip along the Burlington-to-Stowe corridor, our guide to Vermont inns and hotels can help you find a base that puts the best stops within easy range.

The Alchemist, Stowe

The Alchemist at 100 Cottage Club Road in Stowe is where Heady Topper was born, a double New England IPA that spent years on best-beer-in-the-world lists and remains the beer most craft beer travelers come to Vermont specifically to drink. The taproom is spare and focused entirely on beer, no food menu. What you get is a large indoor space, a wide outdoor field that fills on warm afternoons, and cans sold by the 4-pack (estimated $14 to $18 per 4-pack) or in mixed cases to take home. The Stowe location opened in 2016 and replaced the original Waterbury taproom, which flooded in 2011.

The Alchemist typically opens around 11am and closes by 7pm on operating days. Arriving before noon on foliage weekends (late September through mid-October) or busy February ski weekends helps you avoid the longest waits. The taproom is about a 10-minute drive from Stowe village heading up Mountain Road toward Vermont's best hiking trailheads, so a morning hike on the Long Trail followed by an afternoon here is a reasonable combination. One detail worth knowing: the bar provides complimentary cheese and nuts with your beer order, which is genuinely useful when you're sitting at a table for a while.

Foam Brewers, Burlington

Foam Brewers at 112 Lake Street in Burlington sits as close to Lake Champlain as a taproom can get while staying on dry ground. The outdoor patio faces west toward the Adirondacks, and on a clear summer evening the light over the water gives you a reason to be there even before the beer comes out. The focus is New England-style IPAs and experimental stouts brewed in small batches, and the quality holds up across the rotation. Foam does not run flights, which is an intentional policy, but the bar will pour smaller pours on request so you can work through the tap list without committing to full pints of everything.

From Church Street Marketplace in downtown Burlington, Foam is a 10-minute downhill walk heading toward the waterfront. It pairs naturally with the ECHO Leahy Center for Lake Champlain two blocks north, and the Lake Street neighborhood has enough going on that you can spend a full afternoon without moving far. If you want a second Burlington stop, Burlington Beer Co. is about 1.5 miles south on Flynn Avenue.

Burlington Beer Co., Burlington

Burlington Beer Co. at 180 Flynn Avenue runs one of the larger taprooms in Vermont, with a deep draft menu covering IPAs, sours, and barrel-aged options alongside flights. The food program is more serious than what you find at most Vermont taprooms: proper burgers, Korean nachos, sandwiches, wings. The space is family-friendly with games in the back, and parking is easy, which matters when you're loading cans into the car for the drive home. Burlington International Airport (BTV) is about 3 miles north, making this a natural first or last stop on a Vermont trip.

Burlington Beer Co. shares the Flynn Avenue complex with Citizen Cider, which means you can cover both craft beer and hard cider in one stop without moving your car. Together the two make the Flynn Avenue corridor the most efficient 90-minute brewery visit in the state.

Citizen Cider, Burlington

Citizen Cider at 180 Flynn Avenue makes hard cider from Vermont apples, running the range from bone-dry to slightly off-dry, with a few fruit-forward options in the mix. The Dirty Mayor, a ginger cider, stands out on most visits. The food program covers a full meal: chicken sandwiches, wings, fries, and a solid rotating menu. The patio is dog-friendly, which matters in Burlington where many visitors travel with dogs. Vermont apple orchards in Addison County and along the western Lake Champlain shore supply most of the fruit, so what's in your glass has a genuine sense of place.

Cider flights are the most efficient way to understand the range here. Five or six pours let you cover the dry-to-semi-sweet spectrum in a single sitting, which makes a real difference compared to picking one pour blind. For visitors who don't drink beer, or who have had enough IPAs after a few stops on the brewery trail, Citizen Cider is the right call.

Idletyme Brewing, Stowe

Idletyme at 1859 Mountain Road in Stowe operates as both a brewery and a cidery, with a full kitchen and a patio equipped with fire pits that stays comfortable well into October. Mountain Road is the main corridor between Stowe village and Stowe Mountain Resort, so Idletyme pulls skiers in January and February and hikers in July and August. The taproom also sits adjacent to the Stowe Recreation Path, a 5.3-mile paved trail running from the village toward the mountain base, which means arriving on foot from the center of Stowe is genuinely possible.

The IPAs carry the beer menu, but the experimental ciders made with locally sourced fruit are worth trying, especially late summer and fall when apple and stone fruit varieties are fresh. The bar fills up after 4pm on foliage weekends, and the fire pits make the patio a worthwhile spot well into October evenings. If you're driving Route 108 through Smugglers Notch in summer, Idletyme is a natural stop on the return down to Stowe village.

Soulmate Brewing Company, Morrisville

Soulmate Brewing at 74 Portland Street in Morrisville is about 15 miles northeast of Stowe via Route 100, a 20 to 25-minute drive through open dairy farm country. It is a small, vet-owned operation with an intimate taproom, a rotating tap list of hop-forward ales, sours, and hard seltzers, and a food menu that runs to waffles, beer cheese, and buffalo chicken waffles. The Black IPA and a rotating sour called Hops in Bed with Strangers are the most consistently talked-about pours among regulars.

Morrisville sits on the northern edge of the Green Mountains, close enough to the Northeast Kingdom that combining a morning in Kingdom country with an afternoon at Soulmate makes geographic sense. The taproom feels like a neighborhood pub rather than a tourist stop, and on weekend evenings it fills with locals, which is a different atmosphere from the production breweries in Stowe and Burlington. For craft beer travelers who want to see how Vermont drinks on a Friday night in a hill town, this is the right detour.

Three Penny Taproom, Montpelier

Three Penny Taproom at 108 Main Street in Montpelier is a craft beer bar rather than a brewery, but it carries one of the strongest rotating tap lists in the state, with a clear focus on Vermont producers. If you're moving through Montpelier on I-89 between Burlington (45 minutes west) and the Upper Valley towns, this is the practical afternoon stop. The list changes often enough that regulars come back multiple times a month, and the bar leans toward well-regarded local operations.

Montpelier is the smallest state capital in the country and has no chain restaurants downtown, which tells you something about its food culture. Three Penny fits that pattern: pub food done carefully, honest prices, and a crowd split between statehouse regulars, UVM researchers, and travelers coming off the highway. Building Three Penny into the Montpelier stop on a central Vermont drive works especially well alongside a look at Vermont's covered bridges, which cluster in the river valleys on the roads between Burlington and the Upper Valley.

Quick Comparison

Use this table to match each stop to your travel day and what you're looking for: