Pi Day is a perfect holiday. Observed annually on March 14 — 3.14, get it? — it’s got something for math nerds and pun lovers, and all you have to do to celebrate is eat a slice of pie. It might be irrational, since I can only recite the never-ending number a few decimal places, but appreciating the significance of π while cutting into a perfectly round baked good makes it one of my favorite days of the year. I could go on and on.
This year, March 14 also brings the official launch of the Sisters of Anarchy Bakery on Fisher Brothers Farm in Shelburne. Its new product? Pie, of course.
Value-added treats have always been a constant for Becky Castle and Bob Clark’s fruit farm on Spear Street, which now boasts 35,000 row feet of blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, elderberries, Aronia berries and grapes. Their ice cream biz, Sisters of Anarchy, has churned out clever fruit-filled flavors such as Raspberry Beret and Respect Your Elders since 2016.
But even with steady growth of pints, single-serve cups and ice cream sandwiches — including wholesale and nationwide shipment — there’s more fruit to use.
“Pie just seemed to make sense,” production manager Amy McKinney said.
Putting her bakery background to use, she started developing recipes last fall, when the full seasonal staff was around to taste test. After eating “almost too much pie,” she landed on five filling flavors: blueberry, red raspberry, yellow raspberry, blackberry-ginger and mixed berry, with blueberries, red raspberries and blackberries ($25 to $28 each). Customers can choose a cinnamon-brown sugar oatmeal crumble topping or classic double crust, mixing and matching as they please.
For now, a preorder system with scheduled pickups on the farm lets McKinney handle the pie production solo in the farm’s bright new 15-by-30-foot bakery space, which looks out onto rows of grapes. With more staff, Castle estimated they’ll make 100 pies per day.
Later this spring, Castle and Clark will turn a small barn into a year-round retail store, stocked with fresh-baked or frozen take-and-bake pies, pints of ice cream, and wellness syrups. Several mornings a week, they plan to open at 8 a.m. with breakfast pastries and coffee from longtime partner Kestrel Coffee Roasters. The new space will also feature a scoop shop, broadening the months when customers can enjoy a cone on the farm. They’re targeting a mid-May opening, Castle said.
The scoop-shop offering I’m most looking forward to is an individual-serving 3-inch pie, heated and topped with ice cream. I’ll probably double down on blueberry, with a scoop of Crystal Blue Persuasion — my favorite Sisters of Anarchy flavor — atop an adorable cinnamon-flecked blueberry pie. But McKinney put in a strong argument for the zingy blackberry-ginger pie with Plain Jane, the honey-sweetened homestyle vanilla.
Pi Day doesn’t fall during the growing season in Vermont. In past years, I’ve relied on storage apples, stuck to maple cream or gone savory with chicken pot pie. But Fisher Brothers freezes all of its fruit the day it’s harvested, storing much of it at Vermont Commercial Warehouse in Williston. That step helps prevent waste, Castle said, and lets Sisters of Anarchy produce its full line of ice cream flavors all year long — and now, peak-summer pies.
“We call our ice cream ‘farm-to-cone,'” she said. “I guess the pie is ‘farm-to-tin.'”
With one additional Pi Day special, they’re also tin-to-pint. After talking to Castle and McKinney, I brought home a container of their March flavor: 3.14159, a vanilla ice cream swirled with big raspberry and lemon pie chunks. It’s not a traditional way to celebrate the holiday, but I think it counts.
Preorders for Pi Day pickup are due on Thursday, March 13, by 9 a.m. Order at sistersofanarchyicecream.com/sisters-of-anarchy-bakery.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Easy as 3.14159 | Sisters of Anarchy adds a bakery for farm-fresh pies”
This article appears in Mar 12-18, 2025.
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