A secret weapon that nearly all writers keep in their back pocket is the knowledge that if you stay quiet and let another person speak, they’ll almost always fill the silence—often with more information than originally sought or would otherwise have been offered.
After nearly eight years as a freelance writer, I’ve gotten used to people opening up to me about their projects, ambitions, backgrounds, and goals. In fact, the vast majority of what people tell me ends up being extraneous information, serving no purpose other than as an opportunity for them to talk about themselves, resulting in a dopamine rush that triggers the same pleasure centers in the brain that light up when taking drugs, indulging in chocolate, or having sex. So, when faced with someone reluctant to talk about their accomplishments, it’s a bit baffling. Is it humility, or something else?
This is why it’s so strange that Fiddlehead Brewing Company rarely talks about itself, and even stranger that its founder seems, in some ways, to actively avoid it. The Vermont brewery is one of the most successful in the country, in one of America’s most beer-competitive states. In the last five years, Fiddlehead has quadrupled its production and built one of the bestselling IPAs in the U.S., an incredible accomplishment in a style category that’s rife with options.
Fiddlehead’s success story is one most founders would be ready and willing to gush about. It’s not just about achievement in craft beer, but a great example of an ever-growing business you might find written up in Entrepreneur or Fortune magazines. And yet, news coverage is sparse: A 2022 announcement about a new drainage press is among Fiddlehead’s top news results on Google, while similarly sized craft breweries like Creature Comforts and Revolution Brewing are highlighted in a variety of media with national attention.
After months of trying to get anyone from Fiddlehead to talk about Fiddlehead, I was shocked when I heard back directly from owner and founder Matt Cohen, who agreed to take me on a walk-through of their facilities in Shelburne, Vermont while I visited the area this summer.
Of course, it couldn’t be that easy. Even after several emails, plus a reminder the day before (which was confirmed), Cohen still seemed surprised to see me wandering uncertainly down the halls of his headquarters, peeking in doors to try and find signs of life. “I forgot you were coming,” he remarked, not unpleasantly, before leading me to the production floor. “Let’s take a look around.”
In a four-month span in 2008, I graduated from college, moved from Richmond, Virginia to San Diego, California, and went to Vermont for the first time.
I first visited the Green Mountain State when my boyfriend, who became my husband a few years later, brought me to his family’s lake house on the shores of Lake Champlain, where two things are always guaranteed: The lake water will be cold, and two refrigerators will be stocked with plenty of fresh Vermont craft beer.
The official beer fridge sits inside a small, screened-in gazebo perched atop a jagged sedimentary rock coastline overlooking the lake, which became a Great Lake in 1998 for a whole 18 days, until Congress revoked its designation. Beer, and nothing but beer, occupies this particular minifridge, ensuring that plenty of Heady Topper and Focal Banger from The Alchemist, Sip of Sunshine from Lawson’s Finest Liquids, and other iconic craft brands from across Vermont are always within easy grasp from a rocking chair.
“There wasn’t a brand that had taken the IPA in Vermont and Greater New England and really launched a whole brewery around it—so that was my focus from day one.”
Even nestled in such a luminous galaxy of stars, Fiddlehead IPA still manages to shine bright as part of Vermont's constellation of beers. Labeled as an American IPA, it’s a moderately hazy, surprisingly well-balanced, dry-finishing, bitter beer with lots of pine and dankness in each sip. It’s difficult to imprint a memory on one take of such a common style, but I vividly remember the first time I had Fiddlehead IPA on one of my subsequent summer treks to Vermont.
As intended by Cohen, it was on draft and it was as close to the source as it could be—in the small tasting room next to Folino’s Pizza, a stone’s throw away from Fiddlehead’s brewing facility across the parking lot. Drinking it on draft wasn’t just Cohen’s recommendation. It has been his canon since the beginning, the ideal upon which every beer of his should be experienced if at all possible. “I feel it’s the best way to drink beer, and it’s the best way for us to be represented,” he says.
Cohen built his brewery with the goal of keeping it draft-only, but that wasn’t his only goal. Before opening in 2011, he looked at the burgeoning Vermont beer scene, renowned for iconic establishments like Hill Farmstead and The Alchemist. But despite Vermont’s craft beer status and residents’ affinity for hop-forward beers, he felt “there wasn't a brand that had taken the IPA in Vermont and Greater New England and really launched a whole brewery around it.” Filling that perceived void with a signature IPA became his focus, and doing it on draft only became his goal, one he was able to stick to for years.
“The quality and reliability of Fiddlehead IPA is helping to build the brewery’s legacy.”
Fiddlehead IPA was a hit from the start. Terry Suskin, co-owner of Finnegan’s Pub in Burlington, Vermont, says they’ve carried it on draft since it came out. “I believe we were one of the first to sell it,” he recalls. “We’re not a big pub, and I’d still say we sell a keg a week. Easily.”
Jeff Boyer, beverage director at Tavern in the Square in South Boston, says they too have carried it in the group’s 15 locations ever since Fiddlehead IPA became available in Massachusetts in 2017. “It was probably the first Vermont IPA that came into the Massachusetts market that was initially hard to find, so once [it became] available, it took off,” he explains. Today, “it is [one] the top two of IPAs sold,” typically second to Maine Beer Company’s popular IPA, Lunch.
Suskin says that in a sea of beers, Fiddlehead’s managed to stand out right away. “It was the first everyman’s IPA coming out of Vermont—the first bridge-gap IPA, the first accessible IPA, an IPA for the masses that’s sessionable, but yet still hoppy and just a well-rounded, well-crafted, balanced IPA.” It’s the one beer Emma Arian, association director for the Vermont Brewers Association, says defines Fiddlehead Brewing.
“Fiddlehead IPA is definitely the first Fiddlehead Brewing beer I think of,” says Arian. “The quality and reliability of Fiddlehead IPA is helping to build the brewery's legacy,” a legacy that’s on the rise.
In 2021, Fiddlehead Brewing earned the No. 49 spot on the Brewers Association’s Top 50 Craft Breweries by volume list by producing 51,061 barrels of beer. This is after a decade of double-digit growth that then led to the brewery rising to No. 36 in 2022 with approximately 73,000 barrels. On the heels of that growth, Fiddlehead was named the Craft Brewery of the Year by Brewbound later that year. Cohen says they’re aiming to exceed 100,000 barrels by the end of this year, a growth rate of +7%, which sounds small but is practically unheard of for a craft brewery of Fiddlehead’s size right now.
The vast majority of this growth can be directly attributed to Fiddlehead IPA, which makes up just over 85% of annual sales. In 2022, the brewery sold 1 million cases of beer, which necessitated running the brewhouse for 24 hours a day and packaging five days a week. Fiddlehead doubled its brewhouse size in 2021, and currently operates out of a 60-barrel brewhouse with a Krones canning line able to fill 250 cans per minute.
Considering you can only get Fiddlehead IPA and a handful of other brands Fiddlehead packages—including Second Fiddle, their dry-hopped Double IPA, and Mastermind, their American Double IPA—across seven states within a day’s drive of Shelburne, that means beer lovers must be drinking a hell of a lot of Fiddlehead IPA. (The furthest account I could find is Pittsburgh, nearly a 10-hour drive away.) Just how much are they putting back? The IPA grew +76% in chain retail sales volume in 2021, then another +67% in 2022. It’ll grow around +15% again in 2023 while craft as a whole declines almost -7%.
The uniqueness of Fiddlehead IPA can't be overstated:
It's the 19th best-selling IPA in the country, but one of just two IPAs in the top 20 that aren’t part of a national brewery (like Sierra Nevada) and/or owned by a multinational company (like brands from Goose Island or Wicked Weed, owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev).
Fiddlehead IPA also has the third-best growth rate in sales volume of those top-20 brands over the last 52-weeks, behind only New Belgium Voodoo Ranger Juice Force Hazy Imperial IPA and Goose Island Tropical Beer Hug Imperial IPA.
“[Fiddlehead IPA] definitely keeps the lights on,” laughs Cohen. “People that are new to craft, it's approachable. People who are committed to craft for many, many years can find some really interesting features in the beer. It's kind of a beer for everybody,” a description Suskin echoes.
“The thing about Fiddlehead IPA, and the thing that made it so popular so quickly is its accessibility to people that don't even really like IPAs,” Suskin says.
In the early stages of recipe development, Cohen says achieving balance was paramount. “Not overly bitter. It has 45 IBUs, but it’s aggressively dry-hopped, so it gets a lot of those beautiful hop aromas,” he recalls—deftly avoiding any mention of the multiple hops used, to avoid confirmation bias or giving away competitive secrets. “[The aroma] gives the drink that perceived bitterness that makes it seem a lot more hoppy than it is.”
Still, for as big as Fiddlehead is—largely thanks to Fiddlehead IPA—the company could be bigger already. A lot bigger. Cohen is relentless about certain things, such as round-the-clock cold storage for all Fiddlehead beers, from the moment they’re packaged to when they arrive at a retailer. If he sees or even hears that one of his accounts left his product outside a refrigerated truck or shelf, he’s not shy about terminating the relationship. (It’s happened before, he admits). That means no unrefrigerated end caps and definitely no pallets in giant big box stores like Costco, which Cohen says is a disadvantage only to those less concerned with quality than he.
“People that are new to craft, it’s approachable. People who are committed to craft for many, many years can find some really interesting features in the beer. It’s kind of a beer for everybody.”
That obsession means a finite number of accounts, as well as a limited distribution footprint and keeping no more than a 15-day supply of product in-house at any given time. As of today, his largest market is Massachusetts, followed by New York, and then Fiddlehead’s home state of Vermont—likely due in part to the fact Vermont’s population ranges around 647,000 people to Massachusetts’ nearly 7 million, and New York’s millions more. Plus, Cohen admits, his immediate goal is growth. Establishing connections in places with more people is something with which he’s seen other Vermont brewers struggle. “They have huge success in our home market, but struggle once they leave,” he says cryptically. “We’re seeing that level of excitement in outside markets, which is great.”
Pushing further out, while maintaining his strict quality control metrics, would require either buying or building a new facility, two possibilities always in the back of Cohen’s mind. Any future expansion plans would be funded almost entirely through Fiddlehead IPA’s continued success. To say the brewery depends on it for expansion, if not survival, seems clear. Cohen maintains that Fiddlehead IPA has the stones to make it happen, without much marketing support—a lesson from his past.
When Magic Hat Brewing Company opened in Burlington, Vermont, in 1994, its carnivalesque branding and psychedelic brewery tours helped launch the marketing-savvy brewery to mass acclaim. Or at least extreme brand awareness, especially for Magic Hat #9, a strangely fruity and dry Pale Ale known for a prominent apricot aroma and floral hop notes. Today, #9 and the rest of Magic Hat’s portfolio remain a nostalgic memory of the early days of craft beer. It even left its home state in 2020, its parent company shifting production of Magic Hat beers to New York. To Cohen, the brewery served as a model of what not to do.
“It was very theatrical,” he explains. “Almost as if the beer was secondary.”
Cohen brewed at Magic Hat for 13 years. There, he witnessed first-hand the brewery’s successes and failures, and then—after he’d left to found Fiddlehead—Magic Hat’s sale to North American Breweries in 2010, which was then bought by Costa Rica-based Florida Ice & Farm Co. (FIFCO) in 2012. His lasting impression was of a brewery prioritizing a brand vibe rather than beer quality, as well as growth for the sake of growth without a strong foundation to support it.
His vision of Fiddlehead means investing very little in marketing efforts, relying instead on outlets like taproom events and social media. Cohen says he’d rather focus on nurturing existing key accounts than chasing new ones.
He also keeps the number of brands the brewery packages and sells in the single digits. Just six Fiddlehead beers have been tracked by market research company Circana, and his three main IPAs (Fiddlehead IPA, Second Fiddle Double IPA, and Mastermind Double IPA) account for nearly all of the brewery’s beer sold in chain retail. “That’s where I think a lot of people are making a mistake. With 20 [brands], you’re never going to get traction,” he explains. That’s why Fiddlehead has always focused on the single golden egg in its basket: making Fiddlehead IPA a success through dedicated draft lines and ultra-fresh, 100% cold-stored batches.
The company generally achieved that goal—until the pandemic.
Prior to COVID-19, Cohen estimates 85% of sales were draft. But still, he admits he likes to plan “for anything and everything, so we had cans ready to go,” he grins slyly. Within around a month after COVID lockdowns began, Fiddlehead’s canning line went into overdrive, first with 19.2-ounce cans and a few weeks later with 16-ounce cans. The first thing to hit store shelves en masse? Four-packs of Fiddlehead IPA.
"A few years prior to the pandemic we had released our flagship IPA in a 19.2oz format specifically for venues and festivals. Fortunately, we had a few truck loads of these cans and within days of draft accounts closing we were filling these 19.2s and four-packing them up," Cohen says. The Fiddlehead team did this for a month while they waited for new, 16oz cans to arrive. With nearly all sales for breweries shifting to retail stores or to-go from taprooms as bars and restaurants closed during the pandemic, Fiddlehead started bringing in mobile canners as demand surpassed what their own equipment could handle.
Within months, canning the beer helped Fiddlehead increase sales even more. It wasn’t draft, Cohen’s dream, but off-premise sales kept employees on the payroll. “I know it was a tough, tough year for a lot of our partners and restaurants and bars, but dollars over dollars, we grew 25% during the pandemic,” he says.
COVID forced Cohen’s hand in adjusting his business plan, but the draft-package divide continued to be a boon for the brewery while also letting Cohen and his team refocus on draft as the pandemic faded. With its disruption largely leveled out, Cohen estimates Fiddlehead IPA is now split pretty evenly between draft and cans. “Packaged is still growing,” he says, pointing to 12-packs of Fiddlehead IPA, which grew nearly +325% year-over-year, according to his calculations based on Nielsen data, which indicate a jump from 13,056 cases sold in grocery stores in 2021 to 55,263 cases in 2022. That’s just the beginning—with Fiddlehead IPA’s backing, he’s banking that in five years, the brewery will hit 200,000 barrels, a feat that only around a dozen individual breweries hit last year.
“Ambitious,” I mentioned in passing toward the end of the tour. Semi-jokingly, I added: “Does this mean you’ll be in the Top 30 on the BA list this year?”
He looked back at me and grinned: “Top 20.”
After the tour of Fiddlehead’s facilities, I shook hands with Cohen and walked into a drizzly New England afternoon, which ended up as a classic late summer thunderstorm sandwiched between the lake and the Green Mountains. My husband, son, and mother-in-law had the car at the nearby Shelburne Museum, so as I waited for my ride, I headed to the tasting room bar and ordered—you guessed it—a Fiddlehead IPA.
It tasted exactly as I expected—the consistency I expected and what Cohen prides himself on and what Arian says keeps people coming back.
“In a sea of IPAs, are you going to take a four-pack that you might not love, or are you going to take one that is so successful, that people are enjoying, and that you'll enjoy too?” she asks. It’s a no-brainer for me.
Later that evening, stationed in the gazebo and watching a dazzling New England sunset sparkle over Lake Champlain, I idly reached into the minifridge to grab a beer. What else could it be? A cold, 19.2-ounce, lip-smackingly fresh Fiddlehead IPA, same as it ever was.
Words by Beth DemmonPhotos by Judd Lamphere
