A co-branded four-pack at Good Measure sends 10% of every sale to dam-removal work in the Winooski watershed. Here’s what that work actually does for a river — and why it matters.
World Fish Migration Day passed on May 23, marked by more than 150 events around the world. In Vermont it tends to move quietly. The day is held every two years, built around a single, unglamorous idea: rivers work better when nothing is blocking them. Elsewhere it’s marked with stream cleanups, fish counts, and, in some places, the removal of an old dam.
In Northfield, it was marked with a beer — and unlike the day itself, the beer is still here.
Good Measure Brewing co-branded a four-pack for the occasion. It sells for $13.99, and 10% of each sale — about $1.40 a pack — goes to Friends of the Winooski River, the nonprofit that has spent years quietly pulling defunct dams out of the watershed. It’s on the shelf at the brewery until it runs out. A photo of the four-pack was picked up and shared by World Fish Migration Day’s international account.
That’s the news. Here’s why it’s worth more than a passing glance.
Why the dams are there — and why they’re a problem
Vermont has more than 1,000 dams on its rivers. Most are not generating power or holding back a reservoir. They are leftovers — relics of a mill-and-mechanical era that ended generations ago. Hundreds of them now do nothing but sit in the current. River groups call them “deadbeat dams.”
A dam that no longer has a job is not neutral. It warms the water pooled behind it, which is bad news for the cold-water fish — brook trout among them — that Vermonters fish for, and that the Dog River, one of the state’s better trout streams, is known for. It blocks those fish from reaching the cold headwaters they need, especially in a hot, dry summer. And it traps sediment, piling up material behind a structure that was often never built to last.
The part Vermonters learned the hard way
An aging dam doesn’t make a flood; a storm does. But a clogged, sediment-heavy barrier gives a swollen river less room and more to throw — backed-up water, debris, and force aimed downstream at the roads, bridges, and basements in its path. River groups and state river engineers describe taking these structures out as a flood-resilience measure as much as a fish measure: a free-flowing river has more room to spread out and slow down before it reaches the next town. After two summers that put much of the Winooski watershed under water, that argument needs little translation here.
The proof is already on the ground a few miles upstream. When Friends of the Winooski removed the Camp Wihakowi Dam on Bull Run — a Dog River tributary — it reconnected roughly 26 miles of stream and let the river start moving its own sediment again. Colder water, fish passage, public access, and a channel better shaped to handle the next big rain, all from pulling out one wall that no longer did anything.
So, the beer
The four-pack isn’t really about the four-pack. It’s about $1.40 toward a local group doing slow, expensive, unglamorous work on the rivers that run past most of our towns — and a small way of saying you’d rather have a river that can take a punch than a crumbling wall that makes the next flood worse.