Jenny Rooke estimates that Vermonters have ordered Rookie’s Root Beer products on draft more than a million times since she and her husband, Dave, launched their small-batch soda biz in 2005.
As of early May, Rookie’s fans have a new, more portable option: 12-ounce cans of the Burlington company’s sparkling Vermont Maple Lemonade.
The summery drink is refreshing and balanced, tart and then sweet as its carbonation gives way to a maple finish. It’s nonalcoholic, but it’s also really good with a shot of gin. A month in, the cans are finding their way to coolers at graduations, lakeside picnics, mountaintop hikes and the kiddie pool in my backyard.
They’re for sale around the state, from Jake’s ONE Market in Burlington to Cask & Cork in Waterbury to Chapman’s General in Fairlee. I found singles in the cooler and four-packs on the shelf in the nonalcoholic room at Beverage Warehouse in Winooski ($10.99 for four). I cracked a cold one in the car on a hot morning, grateful for an on-the-go taste of Vermont to cool me down.
Notably, the Rookes’ first canned beverage isn’t their root beer, the drink for which they’re best known. Big Soda megacorps have made sure of that through exclusive contracts with many restaurants, bars and retailers aimed at quashing competition from other soft drink purveyors.
“Coke and Pepsi have blocked us from so many things in town — major things,” Jenny said. Canning the root beer with such a limited potential market would be financially irresponsible, she added. “We don’t have the money to fight them.”
But those companies don’t make sparkling maple lemonade.
“They can’t say, ‘No, no, little girl’ to that,” Jenny said with a laugh. “If you google it, it’s not a thing. We have something that doesn’t exist.’”
The couple made their first batch of sparkling maple lemonade in 2018 for the celebration of life of close friend Maggie Van Duyn, who spearheaded a “Lemons to Lemonade Fund” for people with terminal illnesses. Then called lemon mapleade, the drink took off and started replacing Rookie’s ginger beer tap lines around the state as the brand simplified its lineup. Of the Vermont establishments that currently carry Rookie’s, 48 offer draft root beer, 13 have maple lemonade draft lines and 62 sell the cans.
From lemon mapleade to maple lemonade, the recipe hasn’t changed: 100 percent juice from Florida lemons, carbonated water, a touch of cane sugar and dark, wood-fired maple syrup from Brigham Hill Maple in Essex — the Rookes’ neighbors at the Burlington Farmers Market for 15 years.
Rookie’s has offered canned products in the past, in the form of 32-ounce crowlers sold out of their garage brewery in the New North End.
“But we killed the crowler machine during the pandemic,” Jenny said.
When restaurants closed, the biz had 500 gallons of root beer ready to go. So Dave, 50, filled crowlers, and Jenny, 51, donned a dinosaur costume, bringing them around the neighborhood for driveway dance parties. The arrangement was so popular the machine couldn’t keep up. It had quadrupled in price when they went to replace it, so they didn’t.
The new cans are brewed and packaged by Burlington’s Zero Gravity, with 48-barrel batches that dwarf the 15-barrel capacity of the Rookes’ home operation. (The couple will keep making Rookie’s Root Beer there and selling it in kegs, as they always have.)
For now, Zero Gravity is making 800 cases of the maple lemonade every 13 weeks. That connection is “a full-circle moment,” Jenny said. In 2005, American Flatbread Burlington Hearth — where Zero Gravity got its start — was the first place to sell Rookie’s on draft, thanks to then-bartenders Matt Wilson and Jeff Baumann, now CEO and general manager, respectively, of the Pine Street beer hall.
When Jenny tasted the first can batch at Zero Gravity, “I cried,” she said. “This has been 21 years in the making, and it’s a big deal.” She and Dave run Rookie’s full time, along with their Whoa Nellie Kettle Corn truck, which they launched in 2022.
“We’ve been the little guys forever,” Jenny continued, “fighting our way and trying to find our place without getting kicked down by the big guys.”
With this good idea, the big guys should watch out. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Can Do | Rookie’s sparkling Vermont Maple Lemonade hits the market in a new package”