The craft beer explosion has really taken the place by storm; I guess part of the reason is that small brewers - as in individual, single restaurant / bar breweries - can actually brew decent beer in small batches and not lose their shirts. It somehow makes financial sense, as the price of a pint in the US has risen to a point where you no longer need to serve diluted water to meet the demand. So experimentation is king of the hill at the moment. Vermont has some remarkable breweries. One famous brewery is the Alchemist, which developed initially to make a house brew for a single restaurant in Waterbury. The Alchemist is famous mostly for brewing Heady Topper, an unpasteurized, unfiltered moderately hoppy IPA. Heady Topper availability is guarded like a trade secret, but locals know when their store will be getting a delivery - say on Wednesdays at 2:25 PM. By 3:00 the store will be sold out, and most outlets limit purchases to a pair of four packs.
Stuff like that is happening all over Vermont, and I expect it mirrors other growth elsewhere in the country.
Ratebeer, a big online beer rating information clearinghouse, just rated Hill Farmstead Brewery (Greensboro, Vt) as the 2015 "Best Brewery in the World." I'm no connoisseur, but the beer tastes pretty good to me.
Hill Farmstead Brewery
I am not a huge fan of the over-the-top hoppy taste that seems to be the rage, and sometimes I'll prefer a pilsner. Otherwise I'd be drinking porter, or else a chewy red wine or a single malt whiskey. So who said I had to be consistent.
Ben Franklin is said to have declared that Beer is evidence that God loves us and wants us to be happy. Then again, Abe Lincoln always insisted that he never said half the stuff the internet claims he did.