Heady Topper
Double India Pale Ale brewed by The Alchemist
Heady Topper is a double India Pale Ale brewed by The Alchemist primarily in Waterbury, Vermont and in Stowe, Vermont. It is unfiltered and contains 8% ABV. The Alchemist describes Heady Topper as having flavors of orange, tropical fruit, pink grapefruit, pine, and spice. Unpasteurized, it is kept refrigerated by authorized retailers until point of sale. It has been described as "a complex web of genius", and as of August 2018, it was rated the fourth best beer in the world by Beer Advocate.
Overview
At the beginning of 2013, production was 1,200 cases a week with plans to expand to 1,800 during the following summer. As of 2018, The Alchemist brews 10,000 barrels of Heady Topper per year out of their Waterbury plant. Heady Topper has gained a reputation locally throughout New England, and its reputation has been spread nationally and internationally. In the lead-up to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, The Atlantic reported that contender Bernie Sanders had "been photographed proudly holding a can of Heady Topper". In an article published by the UK's Esquire, journalist Michael Smith commented about Heady Topper that it was "so in-demand [that] [t]hey don't even get out of the brewery, let alone the country. Brewed in tiny quantities, they excite such hysteria that on the day of release buyers queue around the brewery fence: by lunchtime all the fresh beer's sold".
“Heady Topper” enters the record as double India Pale Ale brewed by The Alchemist. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Heady, Topper and Double can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q16995034. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2018, 2013 and 2016.
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This entry incorporates text from “Heady Topper” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.