GLUTEN? NONE. FLAVOR? TONS.
Jan 14, 2025 03:00PM ● By MARIE EDINGER
There are those who say brewing is a labor of love. For Red Leaf Gluten Free Brewing owners Matt and Andrea Stanley, it’s been part of their personal love story.
Matt and Andrea say that when they first met, they loved going to breweries together. One year, Andrea surprised Matt with a 2.5-gallon homebrew kit to play with.
But about seven or eight years after they met, their favorite hobby seemed to fall out of favor. Andrea began having major issues digesting beer, and learned that she had celiac disease, an immune disorder that requires the elimination of gluten from one’s diet. After a bit, Matt wound up with the same sensitivity and adopted Andrea’s new gluten-free eating habits.
But the two of them refused to let go of beer. Matt started using his home brew kit to create their own beers.
At the time, there weren’t many gluten-free options for any food, let alone beer. The only option was to make it with a sweet extract of sorghum, a plant related to sugarcane. Matt says it produced a thin, one- dimensional taste.
“Gluten-free beer, by its nature, can be a little lighter,” he explains. “It’s not cultivated to have so much sugar ready to go.” Plus, with regular beer, many home brewers can look up recipes online to help guide them in the crafting their brews. Gluten-free brewers didn’t have that option.
“We were just kind of winging it,” Matt says. “For a number of years, we were just playing around. And then one day, you think, ‘Wow, this is really good!’”
He started making small batches— two and a half to five gallons at a time. It took a couple of years for Matt and Andrea to feel comfortable with the equipment and the recipes enough to move forward in creating an actual brewery.
“We really liked our beer,” Matt says. But then to actually see people latch on to us... There’s a couple of adjectives that come to mind. I think the first one is ‘validating.’” Nowadays, there are a lot more gluten-free ingredient options on the market that Matt says drastically improve the flavor and depth of the beer along with the types of brews they’re able to produce.
“We’ve had so many people come in who are just honestly surprised, saying, ‘I’d never would would have guessed this is gluten-free.’”
They finally opened Red Leaf in 2019, only for the pandemic to hit shortly after. That wasn’t entirely bad for the business, however. It forced Matt to figure out the canning side of things.
Red Leaf can’t use mobile canners because those facilities interact with products that contain gluten. “We’re just not willing to take any risk,” he explains. “So we can everything here ourselves in the brewery, one can at a time, by hand.”
Right now, the canning operation is still pretty small—because the brewery’s output as a whole remains small.
If you’re looking to try Red Leaf, it is available at a few other breweries and in some local stores as well. But your best bet is to check out the Red Leaf Taproom on Main Street in Jeffersonville.
The taproom is located in one of the oldest homes in the city, in a house donated to the area’s historic society. It was the site of the original telephone exchange for the village back in the 1930s. Matt has been working to renovate and modernize it a bit.
Matt says Jeffersonville has a “Small Town USA” feel to it, with year-round tourist traffic mixed in with locals who’ve supported Red Leaf and cheered them on through the years.
At the taproom itself, Matt says he and Andrea have created an intimate, cozy experience where visitors can have lots of one-on-one time with their server or even with the owners.
“We just get really, really thrilled...We really like just getting to know people,” Matt says. “It’s not abnormal for someone to come in the door and start crying because they're so happy to have a safe, gluten-free brewery where they can go and enjoy a beer and feel 'normal.’”
The taproom includes a living room area with a couple of couches and a coffee table where people can kick back and hang out. Matt says that he and one of their customers built the bar together. “It’s just a really tight-knit community, and we really enjoy being a part of it,” Matt says.
More surprising: Matt and Andrea’s brewery is just a sideline. They both have full-time jobs, which have prevented them from expanding the brewery as they’d hoped.
In the summer of 2023, they’d hoped to get larger equipment and increase their output from one barrel to 3.5. But a flood took out their electrical system and their furnace, which cost them $40,000 in damages.
The dream of expansion is still alive, but Matt says it may look different from what he originally planned. In the meantime, Matt and Andrea are working on new beers. They’ve resurrected a bourbon barrel-aged porter, and friends brought them some peaches from Georgia, which they crafted into a peach Saison. This summer, they plan to roll out a summer ale.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF RED LEAF GLUTEN-FREE BREWING
RED LEAF GLUTEN-FREE
BREWING
208 Main Street
Jeffersonville, VT
