sam calagione – Beck's Beer Blog

“hawksbeerfan” out of new york started it all with this post:
What brewery out there gets too much hype for what they bring to the table? My money goes to Dogfish Head. Their IPAs are solid but most of their “big” beers really aren’t anything special and some are downright bad.

sam calagione responds:
It’s pretty depressing to frequently visit this site and see the most negative threads among the most popular. This didn’t happen much ten years ago when craft beer had something like a 3 percent market share. Flash forward to today, and true indie craft beer now has a still-tiny but growing marketshare of just over 5 percent. Yet so many folks that post here still spend their time knocking down breweries that dare to grow. It’s like that old joke: “Nobody eats at that restaurant anymore, it’s too crowded.” Except the “restaurants” that people shit on here aren’t exactly juggernauts. In fact, aside from Boston Beer, none of them have anything even close to half of one percent marketshare. The more that retailers, distributors, and large industrial brewers consolidate the more fragile the current growth momentum of the craft segment becomes. The more often the Beer Advocate community becomes a soap box for outing breweries for daring to grow beyond its insider ranks the more it will be marginalized in the movement to support, promote, and protect independent ,American, craft breweries.

It’s interesting how many posts that refer to Dogfish being over-rated include a caveat like “except for Palo…except for Immort…etc.” We all have different palettes which is why it’s a great thing that there are so many different beers. At Dogfish we’ve been focused on making “weird” beers since we opened and have taken our lumps for being stylistically indifferent since day one. I bet a lot of folks agree that beers like Punkin Ale (since 1995) , Immort Ale (wood aged smoked beer) since 1995, Chicory Stout (coffee stout) since 1995 , Raison D’être (Belgian brown) since 1996, , Indian Brown Ale (dark IPA) since 1997, and 90 Minute (DIPA) since 2000 don’t seem very weird anymore. That’s in large part because so many people who have been part of this community over the years championed them and helped us put them on the map.These beers, and all of our more recent releases like Palo Santo, Burton Baton, Bitches Brew continue to grow every year. We could have taken the easy way out and just sold the bejeezus out of 60 Minute to grow but we like to experiment and create and follow our own muse. Obviously there is an audience that appreciates this as we continue to grow. We put no more “hype” or “expert marketing” behind our best selling beers than we do our occasionals. We only advertise in a few beer magazines and my wife Mariah oversees all of our twitter/Facebook/dogfish.com stuff. We have mostly grown by just sharing our beer with people who are into it (at our pub, great beer bars, beer dinners, and fests) and let them decide for themselves if they like it. If they do we hope they tell their friends about. We hope a bunch of you that are going to EBF will stop by our booth and try some of the very unique new beers we are proudly bringing to market like Tweason’ale (a champagne-esque, gluten-free beer fermented with buckwheat honey and strawberries) and Noble Rot (a sort of saison brewed with Botrytis-infected Viognier Grape must). One of these beers is on the sweeter side and one is more sour. Knowing each of your palettes is unique you will probably prefer one over the other. That doesn’t mean the one you didn’t prefer sucked. And the breweries you don’t prefer but are growing don’t suck either. Respect Beer. The below was my favorite post thus far.

This thread is hilarious. Seriously, Bells, Founders, FFF, Surly, RR, DFH, Bruery, Avery, Cigar City, Mikkeller are all overrated?

Since I’m from Ohio, I’ll pile on and add Great Lakes, Hoppin Frog, and Brew Kettle to the list. Your welcome.

Hopefully soon we will have every craft brewery in the US on the list.

and shaun from 21st amendment responds:
There is a dust storm in the brewing interweb community today over at BeerAdvocate where a thread bagging on craft breweries that are getting too big and popular and calling them out because of that and also maybe how their beers are over-rated.

It reminds me of when Jack White of the White Stripes was asked in an interview years ago about how the early fans of his band back in Detroit would bag… on their success and popularity. He said, that their cool little indie underground band from Michigan was getting bigger, but the Stripes were doing the same thing they’ve always been doing just more people were listening.

In some peoples eyes you’re only cool if your not too popular. I call bullish#t.

Craft beer is becoming more popular and isn’t that the point? We’ve got a great thing going and we want the world to know about it. If you don’t like some breweries beer don’t wear their shoes, but don’t bag on their shoes because more people are wearing them, because someone likes those shoes. OK, I’ll turn off the analogy machine and get back to trying to figure out how to add arugula to a beer that I hope everyone on this planet will drink.

-Shaun

me, i say the most overrated brewer is anheuser-busch. period.
stop knocking craft beer while there is so much crappy beer dominating the market
brew the beer you want to see in the world!

dogfish head

i want this beer!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

May 1, 2011
The official press release….

Dogfish Celebrates100th Birthday of Mississippi Delta Blues Legend Robert Johnson with “Hellhound On My Ale”

Legacy Recordings Releasing ‘Robert Johnson: The Centennial Collection’ on Tuesday, April 26, 2011
* * * * *
May 8, 2011 marks the 100th birthday of singer/songwriter/guitarist Robert Johnson — the archetypal Mississippi Delta bluesman who purportedly sold his soul to the Devil at the crossroads of Highway 61 and Highway 49 in exchange for uncanny musical prowess. In honor of the Robert Johnson centennial, Delaware’s Dogfish Head Craft Brewery has created “Hellhound On My Ale,” a super-hoppy brew inspired by the otherworldly soul and complexity of Johnson’s music.

Produced in a small-quantity-limited run, “Hellhound On My Ale,” is 100% dry-hopped with Centennial Hops with sublime citrus notes courtesy of dried organic lemon peel and flesh added pre-fermentation (a taste-bud tribute to Johnson’s musical mentor, Blind Lemon Jefferson). “Just as Johnson’s unique style was a hybrid of Delta blues, country and even vaudeville,” said Dogfish founder and president Sam Calagione, “Centennial Hops are a recently developed variety that is a hybrid of Brewer’s Gold, Golding, and Fuggles hop varieties. Centennial Hops grow in the Northwest United States and have wonderful floral and citrus notes.” Rounding off the centennial spirit of the ale, Hellhound is brewed at 10.0 abv.

Coming in early May, Dogfish Head’s “Hellhound” will be available in Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.

The newly crafted Robert Johnson ale was created, according to Calagione, as a way to “celebrate his artistry and his centennial simultaneously. Johnson’s playing was so complex and full that his one guitar sounded like two. His voice and lyrics were as distinct as his guitar playing, and stood out as distinct beyond the other blues musicians of the day. Beyond that you have the legend of Johnson selling his soul to the devil in return for mastery of the guitar. We wanted to make an ale that paid tribute to all that.”

“Robert Johnson is an American treasure,” said Adam Block, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Legacy Recordings, “and his musical legacy and remarkable folklore are well worth celebrating. In this spirit, Sam and Dogfish Head have brewed an appropriately wonderful and delicious tribute to Johnson and his music.”

Dogfish Head and its “off-centered ales for off-centered people” were the subject of “A Better Brew,” an article in The New Yorker (Nov. 24, 2008) examining the rise of extreme beer. “Beer has lagged well behind wine and organic produce in the ongoing reinvention of American cuisine. Yet the change over the past twenty years has been startling,” wrote Burkhard Bilger. “Dogfish is something of a mascot for this unruly movement. In the thirteen years since Calagione founded the brewery, it has gone from being the smallest in the country to the thirty-eighth largest. Calagione makes more beer with at least ten per cent alcohol than any other brewer, and his odd ingredients are often drawn from ancient or obscure beer traditions. It is to Budweiser what a bouillabaisse is to fish stock.”

Now sixteen years old, Dogfish Head has grown to become the country’s 24th biggest brewery.

Dogfish Head first partnered with Legacy Recordings in 2010 in the creation of a limited edition “Bitch’s Brew” celebrating the 40th Anniversary of Miles Davis’s fusion-jazz masterpiece.

beer pairings

but wait, not beer and food pairings
although those are amazing,
this article is about movie and beer pairings

from sam calagione of dogfish head
click here for the huffington post article!

discovery channel

okay, this almost makes me wish i had television:

dogfish head founder sam calagione has a tv show coming out on discovery channel in january
he’ll be travelling to breweries to meet the brewers and discuss regionality

apparently he told beer advocate that he’ll be visiting allagash, stone, victory, russion river, sierra nevada and epic in new zealand

i also wanna see inside dogfish as they come up with new recipes…
too bad downloading is illegal…

beer advocate quotes calagione as saying “beer has always been my passion. it is so much more than what you see in the glass. i’m excited to share the diligence, daring and creativity that we pour into our work. i’m confident that discovery and this show are going to turn a lot more people on to the work of the amazing craft brewers around the world. i think that will be great for our whole community.”

(beer advocate issue #44)

ancient brew

stolen from npr:

Aged 9,000 Years, Ancient Beer Finally Hits Stores
by Brad Horn

July 17, 2010: “Dogfish Head brewery is known for making exotic beer with ingredients like crystallized ginger or water from Antarctica, so it might not sound surprising that one of its recent creations is a brew flavored simply by grapes and flowers. It’s not the recipe that makes this beer so special; it’s where that recipe was found: a Neolithic burial site in China.

Chateau Jiahu is a time capsule from 7,000 B.C., but to hear Dogfish Head owner Sam Calagione talk about what beer was actually like back then, it’s not the kind of thing that makes you say “Hey, pass me another ice-cold ancient ale!”

“Probably, all beer thousands of years ago — to our modern palates — would have tasted spoiled,” Calagione says. “In fact, in a lot of hieroglyphics, people are shown drinking beer using straws because they were trying to avoid the chunks of solids and wild yeast.”

So how do you go from “chunks of wild yeast” to a beer that you can get at your local store? You don’t start with a brewery. You start with Dr. Patrick McGovern.

The ancient recipe for Chateau Jiahu was decoded from molecular data found in pots from a Neolithic burial site in the Henan province of northern China.

McGovern is a biomolecular archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. He studies fermented beverages — otherwise known as booze — by analyzing the ancient pots that once held them.

“We use techniques like infrared spectrometry, gas chromatography and so forth,” he explains. McGovern helps Dogfish Head revive long-dead brews by figuring out what used to be inside the ancient pottery he comes across.

About 10 years ago, he set out to find some of this primordial crockery on a trip to China. In one town, he found pottery from an early Neolithic burial site. The pieces were about 9,000 years old — as were the skeletons they were found with.

The Neolithic period, which began about 12,000 years ago, is thought to be about the time when humans started settling down, raising crops — and apparently getting a little tipsy. McGovern suspects that once humans stayed put, it didn’t take them long to discover the fermentation process that led to the world’s first alcohol.

The molecular evidence told McGovern the vessels from China once contained an alcoholic beverage made of rice, grapes, hawthorn berries and honey.

“What we found is something that was turning up all over the world from these early periods,” he says. “We don’t have just a wine or a beer or a mead, but we have like a combination of all three.”

That’s where Dogfish Head comes in. The Delaware-based brewery owns a tiny but respected sliver of the U.S. beer market, which Calagione says it earned by being a risk-taker. Dogfish and McGovern have produced other ancient beverages, including their Midas Touch brew, teased from pottery found in King Midas’ 2,700-year-old tomb.

But, like Calagione says, Jiahu is different. It’s “the oldest-known fermented recipe in the history of mankind.”

This year, Dogfish Head will brew about 3,000 cases of Jiahu — a small batch by commercial brewing standards. At $13 for a wine-size bottle, Jiahu is about six times the cost of Budweiser. Luckily, Calagione says, his sales of Jiahu and other specialty brews have actually increased during the recession.

“What we do see in this economy is that people probably can’t afford a new SUV or a new vacation home, but they can surely afford to trade up to a world class beer,” he says.

And while Jiahu may not be cheap, it’s a lot easier to get than a plane ticket to Neolithic China.”