The State With The Most Breweries Per Capita Is A Pilgrimage Site For IPA Fans

If you're looking to visit some of the best breweries in the country — or as many of them as possible in one trip — look no further than Vermont. According to the Brewers Association, the primary trade group for the American craft brewing industry, Vermont is the state with the most breweries per capita, clocking in at 15.4 breweries per 100,000 legal drinking-age adults. Indeed, the New England state is home to some of the scene's longest-running, most iconic breweries, as well as newer, exciting up-and-comers. Even casual craft beer fans may recognize Vermont brewery names like The Alchemist, Lawson's Finest Liquids, Foam Brewers, von Trapp Brewery, Zero Gravity Craft Brewery, Long Trail Brewing Company, and Fiddlehead Brewing Company.

With such an embarrassment of brewery riches, the best Vermont craft beers represent a wealth of variety. Think stouts, pilsners, wild ales, and traditional German altbiers. But there's a particular style Vermont is especially known for: IPA. Vermont breweries helped shape what today's IPA is, and plenty of the nation's best examples continue to pour forth from brewhouses across the Green Mountain State, making it arguably one of the top destinations for any IPA enthusiast.

To fully know the IPA, one must fully know the Heady Topper IPA from Vermont's The Alchemist. From West Coast to black to red to sour to cold, there are many different IPA substyles. But one of the best known and most widely consumed is the New England IPA, which all started with Heady Topper.

The English-style India Pale Ale had existed for centuries when American craft beer sparked in the late 1970s, and brewers began creating their own hoppier, more bitter versions with American hops. In the '90s, Alchemist founder and brewer John Kimmich endeavored to push hop flavor further. By 2003, when The Alchemist opened, Heady Topper debuted, unfiltered and bursting with hop aroma. The result of the former quality was a bit of haziness, then considered a flaw and is now embraced as a defining characteristic of the New England IPA. The allure of Heady Topper quickly spread by word of mouth among beer fans, planting an IPA-destination flag in Vermont.

Meanwhile, other Vermont breweries began releasing their own genre-defining IPAs, like Hill Farmstead in Greensboro Bend. Lawson's Finest Liquids opened in Waitsfield, Vermont, in 2008 and released the still widely beloved Sip of Sunshine IPA. Zero Gravity roared onto the scene in 2004 and didn't take long to introduce its crowd-pleasing Conehead IPA. Fiddlehead launched in 2011 and built a strong reputation with its eponymous IPA. Today, these breweries continue to draw crowds alongside other masters of the IPA craft like Foam Brewers, Frost Beer Works, Rutland Beer Works, and more. You'll find not only the famed New England IPA style, but plenty of others, as well as other styles, when even the most passionate IPA lover needs a break. Head to von Trapp, for example, for crisp, traditional lagers, and River Roost Brewery for lagers, saisons, and porters.