In January of this year, Hill Farmstead was dubbed Best Brewery in the World by RateBeer.com—the world’s most comprehensive beer-review-and-rating Web site—just two years after being awarded the title New Brewer of the Year. In February, I sat down with its head brewer/founder/etc., Shaun E. Hill, in the 33-year-old’s home, located impossibly close to the brewery itself. When the doors opened at noon, the line for the retail shop was already so long for beers like Edward (its flagship American pale ale named after Hill’s grandfather) and Fear and Trembling (its smoked Baltic porter named after Søren Kierkegaard’s work) that it took the friends I arrived with the hour-and-a-half length of the interview to get growlers filled. Even Shaun himself was scratching his head at the crowd . . .

Shaun Hill: Oh man, I can’t even go out there. It’s just too much. I wish it wasn’t like that. My driveway is completely full. Someday hopefully I can build a house down in the woods. . . . And it’s only one o’clock—it’s just going to keep getting worse. Is the line out the door?

__VF Daily:__Yeah.

Fuck. . . . I don’t know what to do about it all. There really is no other brewery that is in that position. We seem to be the only ones who ceaselessly have people buying like 20 growlers and 12 cases of beer. Sorry, I have a very somber tone here, right? Anyone else sitting in this position would probably be like, “Man, everything is so great and we’re doing this and this,” and I’m just like, “Man, success is fucking stressful . . . ”

Well, the first thing I wanted to say is congratulations on all the recent accolades. You’ve hit this sort of consumer-driven zenith, and I’m wondering what that means in terms of the future?

Creating a little more space for me to have enough distance so that I can actually decide when I feel like being social. Because currently the retail shop is also where I work. If you’re in the middle of brewing and you’re not having a great day, that’s when all these people are really excited to talk to you and meet the brewer.

I wear everything on my sleeve. I can’t paint on a face and pretend. And I’ve gotten a lot of shit about that.

We’re adding more buildings [to the campus], but that’s also pretty stressful because Vermont in general is not really an industrial place. It’s not that easy to find people who know what you need done. But that’s what we’re doing, moving in a direction that will allow us to increase production if we wanted to. And I don’t actually want to. I don’t want to be a larger brewer. I just sort of want to build a playground.

At the moment, we have no debt; everything is paid for. Up until October, I only had two employees, and the October before that, I only had one, and the February before that, it was just me doing the work of five people. So I’m slowly adding people to take over different facets of the brewery, which will help separate my life from my work . . . if I ever have a personal life again.

I just feel like I’m managing chaos all the time. The crowds, however, hold great implications for Vermont tourism.

Why did you open Hill Farmstead?

When I was younger, I knew that I wanted to be a brewer. I started a home-brew club in college and fantasized about coming back here and putting a brewery in this woodshed and painting houses and just trying to create time for myself to read and write. I’ve kept all these kind of journaling notebooks since I was 18, and it’s really fascinating to go back and look at them, like, “Whoa—some of those things actually worked out.” I didn’t build an outdoor bread oven, and I’m not raising chickens or whatever.