Claremont takes another step toward a sustainable economy

By BILL CHAISSON
Last night Eric Dean Rullo, who plans to open a small brewery on Plains Road, was perhaps surprised that he had to explain the concept of a “tasting room” to the Claremont planning board. He had to lead them away from the  idea that it was like a bar.

I spent 25 years living in or near the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, which has a large wine industry. In the early 1970s New York passed the Farm Winery Bill, which allowed the wine makers to also be the wine sellers, as long as the making and the selling took place at the winery, which was often also the farm where the grapes were grown.

Before you buy the wine, you taste it. When wineries start, it is generally the winemaker who does the pouring. You don’t get a full glass; you get an ounce or two, and you are supposed to swirl it in your mouth and spit it out, although hardly anyone does.

In 1978 President Jimmy Carter signed a bill that legalized homebrewing of beer, which had been illegal since the start of Prohibition in the 1920s. In the 1980s, after people learned how to make beer at home, microbreweries and brew pubs (there’s a difference) began starting up everywhere. The craft brewers copied the model of the farm wineries and added tasting rooms to their facilities. (Craft distillers have followed suit.)

Catamount Brewery opened in Windsor, Vt. in 1986, one of the first craft beer makers in the region. They had a tasting room from at least 1997 because Harpoon bought their facility in 2000 and now you can taste Harpoon beers there.

The making of wine, beer, and spirits on a small scale is part of the movement to develop a sustainable local economy. If you travel in England or Ireland, you encounter local beers wherever you go that you can’t find elsewhere because legislation in those countries encourages the preservation of that scale of production. 

In the U.S. Prohibition greatly disrupted the alcoholic beverage industry in the 1920s and ‘30s. Many small producers went under and did not reappear after the repeal in 1934. The Depression and the Second World War prevented new start-ups for a decade and the post-war economic boom saw large producers simply get bigger. 

Mr. Rullo’s brewery is apparently Claremont’s first entry into the revival of local, small-scale brewing. To their credit, the planning board have allowed him to go ahead with his plans.

Some of these operations, like Madison Brew Co. in Bennington, Vermont, stay small, and some, like Harpoon, get quite large. Many spawn the local growing of hops and barley. Some become tourist destinations. It is all part of building a sustainable, local economy for Claremont.