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Nevertheless, here is the Catamount Brewing Co., a tiny and unlikely throwback to the days when a beer barrel did not roll far from where it was filled, and big horses like the ones in the Bud ads did the rolling. Catamount has only five employees, none of them Clydesdales, but they actually make beer. Big sacks of malted barley are hand-trucked into the milling room at the top of a three-story brick building that once housed a meat-packing plant. After about three weeks of boiling, fermenting, cold filtration and conditioning, Brewmaster Steve Mason gives his mustache a reflective tug. He starts the machine that fills and caps bottles with one of two workman-like ales, Catamount Amber or Catamount Gold, then jiggles them down the rolling track toward the labeler. Here the likeness of a catamount, a virtually extinct Eastern mountain lion, is glued to each. Mason's partner Alan Davis explains, if this is an explanation, that the beast suggested itself as a symbol because Green Mountain Boys Ethan and Ira Allen used to drink a lot of ale at a tavern called the Catamount in Bennington, Vt., some miles to the south. Catamount's catamount looks moody and preoccupied, as if it had invested money in a small brewery.
Mason, for one, has no doubts. It is clear that he would rather work the valves and switches of his own brewery than pilot a steamboat down the Mississippi. He began brewing beer as a basement hobbyist in 1975, when he was an anthropology student at the University of Michigan. Home brewers give up, as a rule, after a few bottles of the first batch explode and must be swabbed off the ceiling. Mason persisted and eventually learned to mill barley, make his own wort -- the sweet, not-yet-fermented, liquid product of the barley mash -- and add hops during the boil for bittering. "This was pretty advanced stuff," he admits.
He was then, but only in the real world, an admissions officer at Goddard College in Vermont. In yeasty fantasy he was a professional brewer, and in 1983 he began to ferment. He traveled to England and, with surprisingly little difficulty, apprenticed himself to a small brewery called Swannells, in Hertfordshire, a proud producer of real ale. Real here is a technical term, and it means that the ale is unpasteurized, unfiltered, conditioned in the cask and delivered to thirsty believers by gravity or hand pumps not powered by CO2.