Vermont Pub & Brewery in Burlington continues legacy of 'genius' founder, 35 years later
This look at The Vermont Pub & Brewery is the latest in a series of profiles by the Burlington Free Press on long-standing restaurants in Chittenden County. How do restaurants that date to the 20th century remain relevant, while continuing to do the things that have given them such staying power?
It seems like The Vermont Pub and Brewery has anchored the corner of College and St. Paul streets in Burlington forever. In fact, the brewpub will celebrate its 35th anniversary in November, which in the competitive restaurant world pretty much does qualify as forever.
It’s easy to think of the business as being successful from the get-go, that it’s always drawn big crowds, and to some extent that’s true. But there was a time The Vermont Pub & Brewery seemed like an ahead-of-its-time combination of food and brewed-in-house beer that would fail before it could flourish.
Greg Noonan, founder of The Vermont Pub & Brewery with his wife, Nancy, had a successful late-1988 launch that carried the business through New Year’s Eve. Then, as his eventual business partner Steve Polewacyk put it, January, February and March arrived, with the cold and snow keeping customers away.
“We were tanking,” said Polewacyk, who came from his computer-consulting job in suburban New York City to help his longtime friend with his struggling business. Noonan was brewing beer and overseeing a restaurant but had little help, so the business operation was “chaos,” according to Polewacyk.
He used his computer skills, a rare commodity in those days, to help organize the business end of things. By the time Polewacyk became co-owner in 1990, The Vermont Pub & Brewery was humming along toward its position as one of Burlington’s stalwart food-and-drink destinations.
The business has endured many changes, including devastating ones. Noonan, a visionary and influential brewer, died of cancer in 2009. The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 threatened The Vermont Pub & Brewery with yet another treacherous tipping point.
The pandemic happened as Polewacyk stepped aside and new owner Elise Pecor stepped in. Polewacyk said Pecor comes close to matching Noonan’s do-it-all abilities in running The Vermont Pub & Brewery.
“Elise is unbelievably good. She has many tools in her toolbox. And she’s good at all of them,” Polewacyk said. “She’s the person that’s going to carry Greg’s legacy into the future.”
The ‘genius’ of Greg Noonan
Polewacyk met Noonan in 1968 through a mutual friend. By the mid-1980s Noonan was telling Polewacyk about an idea he had to open a brewery/restaurant in New England.
Brewpubs were rare in the United States. A few existed in California, Polewacyk said, and there was one in Northampton, Massachusetts, not far from where Noonan lived in Williamstown. Small breweries that didn’t serve food were almost as uncommon, with Catamount Brewery in Vermont among the few in the region.
Polewacyk knew his friend could accomplish what he wanted. He said Noonan was brilliant in many fields, including anthropology, geology, geography, Middle European history, linguistics and Irish history. In 1986 he published “Brewing Lager Beer,” a book that became a bible for homebrewers.
“Greg was unusual. Nobody really knew that about him,” Polewacyk said of Noonan’s wide range of knowledge. “He was down to earth and affable. He worked hard at being a regular guy.”
His multiple skills left Polewacyk confident that Noonan could run a successful brewpub.
“My reaction was, ‘Go for it,’” Polewacyk said in a conversation on The Vermont Pub & Brewery patio with Pecor and the Burlington Free Press.
“Genius,” Pecor added.
Three months becomes 35 years
Noonan was eyeing a location for his business in Massachusetts, New Hampshire or Vermont. Polewacyk said Noonan settled on Burlington in part because a schoolmate of his at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire, future Burlington Mayor Peter Clavelle, ran the city’s economic-development office.
Those first flush weeks at the end of 1988 ground to a halt by early 1989. Polewacyk, who had come to Burlington for a couple of weeks to assist at the start of The Vermont Pub & Brewery, told his friend he’d return for another three months to help straighten things out on the business side.
Few people knew much about spreadsheets and word processing back then, Polewacyk said, so he trained pub employees to run those systems. Polewacyk pitched in wherever Noonan needed help, from building shelves to running pipes.
“He was Batman and I was Robin. I was his sidekick,” Polewacyk said. “I did a lot of stuff, but Greg was ‘the guy.’”
Noonan reached out to potential shareholders to inject more money in his enterprise, according to Polewacyk. “There was no way I could bail on Greg at this point,” he said.
The Vermont Pub & Brewery looked to be on solid footing by early summer 1989, so Polewacyk planned to return to his computer-consulting work in metropolitan New York. But he remembers walking up Church Street and running into lots of people he knew, which made him realize how immersed he had become in Burlington. His planned three-month stay became three-and-a-half decades, and counting.
Direct line to Heady Topper
Vermont’s beer scene grew tremendously after The Vermont Pub & Brewery opened. With more than 60 breweries, Vermont has become one of the best-known beer states in the country. Hill Farmstead, The Alchemist and Lawson’s Finest Liquids are renowned around the world for the quality of their beers.
Much of Vermont’s beer fame began with Noonan. According to the 2019 book “Burlington Brewing” by Jeff S. Baker II and Adam Krakowski, Noonan’s wide influence on the Vermont beer scene can even be linked to one simple act: He provided the yeast former Vermont Pub & Brewery brewer John Kimmich used at The Alchemist to make what might be Vermont’s most-famous beer, Heady Topper.
“Noonan was a teacher. He was a student and a teacher and was constantly learning and was very open about sharing that knowledge,” Baker told the Free Press. “Some people who become the top of their craft often will kind of horde that information, but Greg was willing to share.”
Baker, who spent more than a decade in the beer-and-wine industry and co-hosted the “It’s the Beer Talking” podcast for the Free Press, said Noonan was instrumental in changing Vermont law so brewers could sell their beer to be consumed on-site.
“The Vermont Pub & Brewery opened the door for the modern taproom,” according to Baker. “Before Vermont Pub & Brewery, in Vermont if you had a brewery you sold beer to-go for consumption elsewhere; that’s just how things were done.”
Now, travelers arrive from other states and countries to spend time at Vermont breweries.
“Without that,” Baker said of Noonan’s work, “we don’t sit at Lawson’s Finest Liquids (in Waitsfield) sipping a beer or up in Greensboro (at Hill Farmstead) or at The Alchemist in Stowe.”
‘Spread like wildfire’
Noonan was working at the Vermont Brewers Festival at Waterfront Park in Burlington in 2009 when he fell, breaking a rib. On a resulting medical visit, doctors discovered more than a ribcage injury; they found spots on his lung, which would reach his brain.
From the cancer diagnosis until his death in October 2009, Noonan survived seven weeks. “It just spread like wildfire,” according to Polewacyk.
In the weeks before his death, Noonan talked at length with Polewacyk about all the details of operating the Vermont Pub & Brewery. After those intense discussions about work, the longtime friends would tell stories and share laughs about all their adventures through the years.
When Noonan died, he left Polewacyk with a hole in his heart and a business to run.
“The work was work,” Polewacyk said. “This was my best friend.”
He said he was unpleasant to work with for the next year or so.
“I basically went like this,” Polewacyk said, holding his hands on the sides of his face as if he had blinders on. “I just continued every system he created. It was all Greg’s systems.”
‘Someone’s living room’
Pecor came on board at The Vermont Pub & Brewery in August 2007. She took up restaurant work after studying art at what was then known as Johnson State College. Pecor said she isn’t a big partier, so as a customer she always enjoyed the vibe of The Vermont Pub & Brewery.
“It felt more like sitting in someone’s living room,” she said, as the taproom was busy enough so she didn’t feel lonely but not so overpacked that it was hard to have a conversation over well-priced food and a good beer like the pub’s signature Burly Irish Ale. “I really wanted to work here.”
She began as a part-time host and worked her way up to manager, a job for which she displayed innate ability. “I’m a bit of a control freak,” Pecor said, breaking into hearty laughter.
Her work ethic and abilities made her a natural choice for Polewacyk to tap on the shoulder when looking for someone to succeed him as primary owner of The Vermont Pub & Brewery. He approached her with that idea in 2017, and talks got serious in 2018.
Pecor’s husband, chef Trevor Smith, who now runs the pub’s kitchen, helped her figure things out.
“It’s a pretty big leap. I ultimately decided, with the help of my husband, if I didn’t do it I would need to find a new job somewhere, because I couldn’t work for someone else” at The Vermont Pub & Brewery, Pecor said. “It was very scary. It’s still scary.”
Surviving the pandemic, and beyond
She didn’t know how scary it would be soon after becoming owner in December 2019, as Polewacyk stayed to help with the transition. Three months later, the COVID-19 pandemic closed Vermont restaurants for weeks, leaving Pecor to reinvent a business she had only just begun to run.
Pecor began making changes out of necessity. She restructured the restaurant’s service model, instituted a contactless-pay option, created a QR-code menu (gone are the newspaper-style menus from the pub’s early days, though printed menus are still available) and oversaw updates of the pub’s food. For instance, the cock-a-leekie pie that evoked the British and Irish pubs Noonan was angling for with the restaurant has been upgraded and renamed the more-identifiable chicken pot pie.
The business stayed strong after the pandemic, according to Polewacyk. “It was all Elise,” he said.
Scott Gawitt is the head brewer and a co-owner with Pecor. He’s a graduate of the American Brewers Guild in Middlebury and former president of the Vermont Brewers Association.
“He brews exceptional beer,” Polewacyk said of Gawitt. “Between Elise and Scott, I am very comfortable turning the reins over to this team.”
If you go
WHAT: The Vermont Pub & Brewery
WHEN: 11:30 a.m.-9 p.m. Wednesday-Monday
WHERE: 144 College St., Burlington
INFORMATION: (802) 865-0500, www.vermontbrewery.com
Contact Brent Hallenbeck at bhallenbeck@freepressmedia.com.
This article originally appeared on Burlington Free Press: Vermont Pub & Brewery launched Burlington beer scene 35 years ago
