Adeline Druart knows what diacetyl tastes like. The naturally occurring compound is what gives cultured butter its characteristic nuttiness, and over her 20 years in the butter business at Vermont Creamery — rising from cheesemaking intern to president — she worked to produce as much of it as possible.
In beer, detecting diacetyl is an important skill for the opposite reason: The buttery flavor is a defect.
"I thought I'd totally nail finding it," Druart said. After a suspenseful pause, she shook her head and laughed. "I needed to start from scratch."
Diacetyl detection aside, much of Druart's skill set did translate when the 44-year-old made the leap from dairy to beer last September by becoming Lawson's Finest Liquids' first CEO hired from outside the company. She's also one of a small number of women leading top craft breweries in the U.S. On an early May day in the brewery's Waitsfield beer garden, Druart racked her brain to come up with a list. "There are five that I can think of," she said, "and I'm one of them."
It's a time of growth for the brewery, cofounded in 2008 by Sean and Karen Lawson in a one-barrel brewhouse next to their Warren home. Prior to opening the Waitsfield taproom, retail store and brewery in 2018, Lawson's Finest was a team of five. In the early days, batches were so small that devotees waited at the Warren Store for Thursday morning deliveries.
Now, more than 80 employees work on the Waitsfield campus — with its cathedral-like taproom, beer garden and fully stocked retail store — and brews are more widely available. Its popular Sip of Sunshine flagship IPA is brewed at the larger-scale Two Roads Brewing in Stratford, Conn., using Lawson's Finest's recipe and ingredients. Year-round signature beers and limited seasonal releases are brewed on-site and distributed to nine states throughout the Northeast. In December, Lawson's Finest was named Brewbound's Craft Brewery of the Year.
But it's the company behind the beer that attracted Druart, who drinks beer but loves wine. After all, she's French.
When Druart arrived at Websterville's Vermont Creamery as a 21-year-old cheesemaking intern, she didn't speak English. Fifteen years later, in 2017, she led the company through its acquisition by Land O'Lakes, then joined the Fortune 500 company's leadership team as one of its youngest VPs, and the only one without an MBA, she said proudly.
"I didn't go to CEO school," Druart mentioned more than once through the course of an afternoon, dressed in a pale-pink bomber jacket, wide-leg jeans and white sneakers with sunglasses pushing back her curly bob. As this reporter tagged along during desk visits, Druart casually rattled off each employee's work anniversary and life story: Lab manager Julie Smith has an English degree; Kelly Putnam joined as the company's first HR leader two and a half years ago and has recently become a mom, gotten a promotion and built a house. At a twice-weekly leadership meeting, Druart showed equal enthusiasm for a just-launched three-year strategic plan and the Olympic-themed surprise opening ceremony for the company's summer retreat.
For a brand associated with sunshine, the effervescent Druart is a natural fit. The Lawson's Finest job is a chance "to live my dream twice," she said. "I had this incredible growth story at Vermont Creamery, then wondered if I'd ever find something similar."
While searching for her next gig, she outlined her "four Ps" for a recruiter: awesome product, awesome people, awesome purpose and a profitable business. The recruiter told her she was picky and said to choose three out of four. Instead, Druart added, "Oh, yeah, I want all this in Vermont."
She found it. Her new commute is just 30 minutes from the home in Montpelier that she shares with her husband, Marc, and their two young sons. ("Pinch me," she said.)
Druart's enthusiasm for Lawson's Finest's purpose was "completely unique" during the company's CEO search, according to Karen Lawson. "This isn't just about selling beer," she said. "It was up to applicants to really do their homework about who we are, and Adeline was the one applicant that stood out as aligning with our values from the get-go."
The four Ps were the pillars of Druart's interview pitch, along with ideas for how to grow that purpose over the next three to five years. Everyone around the table, including the Lawsons, who still own the company, "was pretty dumbfounded," Karen said. "We didn't have any questions."
Before she started as Lawson's Finest's CEO, Druart had more than a few questions of her own — mostly about the beer. While brewing together over the course of a day at the original brewery in Warren, Druart peppered Sean Lawson with her queries about the process, the industry and the company.
"I said, 'Pardon me for my ignorance,'" Druart recalled, "'but I'm going to feel vulnerable and comfortable, so that when I come in September, I've flushed away a little bit of that naïveté.'"
"She had to learn how to operate a tri-clamp," Sean said with a chuckle.
The clamp, which attaches hoses and fittings in the brewery, is what allows liquid to flow through the original brewery's very manual system, he explained. Noting the poetry of the moment, he described how he and Druart brewed a beer called Freestyle, an approachable 6.1-percent-alcohol IPA. It was billed as "an ode to experimentation and the early days of Lawson's Finest, when recipes were created spontaneously."
With Druart in charge, co-owners Sean and Karen have stepped back from day-to-day operations. Both still have offices at the Waitsfield brewery and serve as the board of directors, working with Druart on big-picture, long-term strategic planning.
"We call ourselves the Sunshine Squad," Karen said. Their goal? "We'd love to be the No. 1 IPA in the Northeast," she said, while spreading the company's social impact to the other states it distributes to and minimizing its environmental impact in a resource-intensive industry.
Taking over from the founders is a big deal, Druart acknowledged, and "a delicate transition." The employees, after all, joined the business to work for Sean and Karen. Druart first met the team last June and spent the summer slowly getting acquainted.
In her first 45 days on the job in the fall, Druart met with every single employee one-on-one. She asked two questions: What's your life story? What is your advice for me as the new CEO? Now, she continues that open-door communication with regular "Coffee and Croissants With Adeline" get-togethers, featuring pastries from Birchgrove Baking or Red Hen Baking — "the good stuff," she said.
In her first nine months on the job, she said, learning about the beer has been the hardest part, though there are similarities between the businesses of artisanal cheese and craft beer: Both are essential to Vermont's food identity and center on the science of fermentation. And, as Sean pointed out, there's lots of stainless steel equipment.
Druart joins weekly quality assurance tastings with the Lawson's Finest brewers and lab manager Julie Smith to sample recent canning runs or evaluate tweaks to a base malt. Sitting in those panels, she puts her cheesemaker's palate to use while considering texture, aroma and defects (and still working on that diacetyl identification).
"We use different descriptors, and the product is different, but the approach is the same," she said.
Druart grew up in a small village in eastern France, where both sets of grandparents were dairy farmers. Her mother gardened extensively, and the family made jam and ate the region's Charolais beef.
"There were more cows than people, and it literally looks like Vermont," she said.
But when she arrived in the Green Mountains for her internship at Vermont Creamery, it was a culture shock. The first time she bought a tomato at the supermarket, Druart called her mom in tears.
"I said, 'What do they eat in America? I don't know if I can survive here. You should see the size of the potato chip bags,'" she recalled.
Between the food and the language barrier, "she spent a couple of nights crying herself to sleep," Vermont Creamery cofounder Allison Hooper recalled. "But we got her fixed up with some cultured butter and good bread, then she felt a little more at home."
Druart's two-month internship was part of her master's degree in biotechnology; it's also where she met her future husband, a fellow cheesemaking intern. Hooper and her cofounder, Bob Reese, were in the process of expanding their creamery, and Druart's schooling in the intricacies of dairy processing came in handy. After returning to Lyon to finish her degree, Druart came back to work for Vermont Creamery.
"I think she realized that, for a woman in manufacturing, there was a lot more opportunity here in the United States than in France," Hooper said. "It was a little less hierarchical."
Druart may not have articulated that she wanted to be president of the company from the outset, Hooper said, "but she set big goals."
"Adeline is ambitious, has high expectations for herself, and she's a very quick study," she continued.
She's also quick with ideas. At the June retreat before Druart started as CEO at Lawson's Finest, she suggested a dish for its taproom: raclette. The gooey, melty cheese — often poured over potatoes — comes from the Alps and would make sense in the brewery's mountain town, she said. By the first snowfall, it was on the menu.
At a recent tasting of the taproom's summer menu — led by food curator Jenny Rodriguez Welch — Druart deemed a grilled cheese with apricot jam, speck and Vermont Farmstead Cheese's Brie "the next era of the raclette."
A choripán sandwich, with Argentinean-style chorizo made for the taproom by nearby 5th Quarter butcher shop, was a harder sell at first.
"How spicy?" Druart asked tentatively.
"It's a six," Rodriguez Welch said.
"A six?!" Druart exclaimed. "I'm French. We don't do spicy."
A few bites in, she changed her mind: "I can handle a six."
As delicious as raclette is, another of Druart's quick decisions might have a bigger impact. Not long after starting, she implemented a monthlong sabbatical for all employees who have reached five years at Lawson's Finest. This year, members of the taproom's opening team — and half of the leadership team, including sales director Seth Talmon, head of brewery operations Scott Shirley and CFO Jonathan Wilson — will be able to take four additional weeks of paid time off.
"We reached out to staff to find out what matters to them, and it was a very consistent chorus of work-life balance and time with family," said Kelly Putnam, now the company's "director of people and purpose." "It's not prescriptive — just time to unplug and recharge."
The craft beer industry, after more than a decade-long boom, is seeing big changes. Competition from canned cocktails, nonalcoholic options and cannabis — along with changing consumer preferences — led to a production dip and roughly 1 percent nationwide decline in craft beer sales in 2023, as reported by the Brewers Association. Lawson's Finest finished 2022 "flat from a revenue standpoint," but total sales grew 5 percent in 2023, Brewbound reported. Things still look good: Even taking out the added traffic on April 8 for the eclipse, sales were up across the board last month, said sales director Talmon.
Druart hopes to continue that growth at the taproom and in the states where Lawson's Finest is distributed by reaching new customers, including female drinkers and those who recently hit legal drinking age.
Increasingly, younger consumers are looking to companies that treat employees well, promote sustainability and give back to their communities. Lawson's Finest has been doing these things for years with its SIP program — something the Sunshine Squad has discussed expanding outside Vermont, Karen said, if they can hire more staff in other states where their beer is distributed.
Achieving B Corp certification in 2023 "tells the story of the good we do through our business," Druart said. The rigorous outside assessment measures a company's social and environmental accountability; Lawson's Finest is one of just 18 certified breweries in the U.S.
In April, Lawson's Finest released its first-ever Impact Report, which highlights everything from its 70 percent staff retention rate and on-site massages for employees to the recipients of the $312,025 raised by the Sunshine Fund in lieu of taproom tips in 2023, including Mad River Riders, the Intervale Center, Jenna's Promise and Out in the Open. To make the report, the team looked at examples from companies such as Allagash Brewing and Seventh Generation.
"And voilà!" Druart said. "Those companies are much larger, but our story is of that scale."
As the late March recipient of the Sunshine Fund, Green Mountain Farm-to-School received a check for more than $15,300, which executive director Catherine Cusack said will support the Hardwick-based nonprofit's Green Mountain Farm Direct food hub.
"I'm so struck by how this successful, for-profit business — in a really flourishing area of the state — is doing good," Cusack said of Lawson's Finest. "It speaks to the leadership there and to the employees. That's a lot of money to give up."
Lawson's Finest's three-year B Corp recertification has already started, too. Druart and Putnam are putting together a group of employees from across the company, nicknamed "the B Team," to drive the process.
Supporting folks who are ready to step up and grow within the business comes naturally to Druart, who did the same herself. She's also particularly supportive of women and nonbinary team members, who make up 51 percent of the Lawson's Finest staff — an anomaly in the craft beer world, where only 11 percent of brewers are women. She's instituted a quarterly get-together for that segment of the staff, covering topics from the challenges of working in a male-dominated industry to personal finance.
"Having Adeline come in and be a working mom has been awesome," Putnam said. "We speak the same language in homelife and in what we care about at work."
In March, in honor of International Women's Day, Druart and women from all departments at Lawson's Finest brewed a special beer to benefit Pink Boots Society, an organization that supports women and nonbinary individuals in the beverage industry.
"We asked ourselves, 'What represents the women of Lawson's Finest right now?'" Druart said. They landed on Brewtifully Bold, a 9 percent double IPA with pineapple.
"It was a big beer," Druart said — one that paired perfectly with her big ambitions.