Dogfish Head Brewing Company - An Interview with Sam Calagione

Dogfish Head Brewing founder Sam Calagione(r) and Beerdude.com/Celebrator writer Pete Ricks(r) toast a pint of Dogfish 90 minute IPA out on the boardwalk in front of the Dogfish Rehoboth Beach Pub. Dogfish Head Brewing Company Interview with Sam Calagione By Pete Ricks. I had the pleasure of visiting with Sam Calagione, and some of the other people at Dogfish, in late August of 2004. What follows is the full interview with Sam that took place out on the deck of the Rehoboth Beach Pub. PART ONE - NOVEMBER 2004 Pete: Sam, can you give us a little bit of history about Dogfish and when you started? Sam: Sure, we're actually coming to our 10th anniversary this upcoming year so we'll be 10 years old this upcoming June. We started in 1995 right in this building where you are. The banks didn't really feel like lending me money and I didn't really have a track record for business. We opened with really the smallest commercial brewery in the country. We made our brewery out of three kegs. We cut the top off the kegs and put propane burners underneath and we could yield about 12 gallons everytime we brewed. Pete: My god that is a small brewery. 12 gallons? That is a microbrewery! Sam: It was micro micro and it was really frustrating from a labor perspective because I was the only brewer and I would brew two to three times a day, five days a week. I would get bored brewing the same recipes so I would go into the kitchen and get some raisins or some apricots or some maple syrup and just start screwing around with non-traditional ingredients and that is where our reputation for experimentation came from. Having a bar is like having a built in tasting panel so it pays to get feedback on what works and what doesn't. So that is where most of the recipes that we are thriving with today came from. From that little system. Pete: Cool. And you started out as a homebrewer? Sam: Yeah, I started this in Manhattan. I graduated college in 1992 and was living in New York City taking college classes working towards my Masters and to pay my bills I was bartending at a place called Nacho Mama's, which was one of the first beer bars up by Columbia. I was a bartender and the owner and I got into good beer, started brewing in our apartments, and then we went up to Maine and took a little apprentice course that was offered through the Shipyard Brewery. Pete: So you started out at Shipyard, huh? So was Dogfish your first professional job or did you brew somewhere else prior to Dogfish? Sam: Actually I never even really had a real job until I opened this place. I had waited tables and tended bar. Pete: So this was your first entrepreneur job then? Sam: Oh yeah, I was doing interning at an art agency while my wife was finishing school. Then we came down here and I was waiting tables for six months while I was showing my business plan to the banks and stuff. Pete: You finally got someone to give you some money? Sam: Yeah, (laughing), we originally went in asking for enough money to build a 7-barrel brewery in addition to opening this restaurant and basically all we had enough money to do was open the restaurant so we built the little brewery ourselves. But then we only used that little half-barrel, 12-gallon system for one year. And then as you probably saw, all the rural farming when you came in here, there is a big canning industry and, like the brewing industry, there was some consolidation and some equipment available so we'd take them growlers of beer to keep them away from the stainless steel tanks. So this is the brewery that we have in there now, the 5-barrel brewery, which is the second one we built. Pete: So you still have a brewery in here? Sam: Yep, there is a five-barrel brewery right behind that wall. The five-barrel brewery we built after our second year of being open. Pete: OK, so some of these beers are brewed here and some obviously are brewed over at the Milton location? Sam: Yeah, the majority of beer is brewed over at Milton since obviously we have no economy of scale with this canning system brewery, but it's still a great place to do experimental brews, like the D'extra. We had that corked in Champagne bottles 2 years ago and now we are getting ready next summer to do 4 packs of 12 ounce bottles. So we wanted to get another batch under out belts before we went into full scale production. Pete: So this is a 23% beer? Sam: Yep. Yep. This is right out of our brewery here by myself and Mike Gearhart, who is our distiller. I met Mike and he's a good guy, well trained, he's got two degrees so he's definitely putting his mark on this brewpub. He and I are in this location playing around with our higher alcohol experimental beers. Brian Selders, our head brewer, and Andy Tveekrem, our production manager, brew the stuff we make in Milton and they have dialed into the 120 and the Stout, the other 20% beers that we brew. We just screw around with the D'extra now. Pete: Yeah, that thing is pretty dangerous. So how many barrels did you brew here your first year? Sam: Um, we brewed around, I think it was 350 barrels. Pete: 350 barrels with a 12 gallon system? You were busy! Sam: Yeah, I'm having flashbacks right now. (Laughs) I'd brew during the day and then help manage at night. Luckily we've always attracted good people but I did have a mattress in the cellar the first few months and I think I only slept at home 10-12 nights the time between June and Labor Day that summer. Just getting our feet on the ground, so we've come a long way since those days. Pete: Yeah, you guys are up to how many barrels now? Sam: We'll do around 22,000 this year. Pete: So you have a 50-barrel plant down there at Milton? Sam: Yes, we have a 50-barrel brewhouse there and we're putting in 2 more vessels, and whirlpool, and a bigger lauter tun. Our sales continue to skew towards the bigger beers so our 50-barrel mash tun doesn't hold enough grain for a full 50-barrel batch of big beers. Our 90-minute is selling so well nationally but we can only yield about 20 barrels every time we brew it. Pete: Are you using anything like with the D'extra to try and crank up the alcohol? Sam: We try to stay away from using simple sugars on that style of brew. If it's a 9% beer, we get it all from Barley. Pete: So what do you think of the new Double IPA style and that some brewers say there should be no malt characteristic, basically all hops and alcohol? Sam: I'd say that is a West Coast rendition of a Double IPA. We had a lot of fun, you know I'm great friends with Tomme Arthur, Tom Nickel, and Vinnie and I respect them a lot as brewers. You know but we did an event out here called the Lupulin Slam where a bunch of those guys came out from the West Coast and we came from the East. Pete: I read about that. Sam: Yeah, it was fun. A lot of trash talking. (Laughs). The beer was the main thing. We created this thing called Randall The Enamel Animal, which is a real time hopping device, and our 120 through the Randall won that competition, but it was very close with a West Coast brewery. I know if I did that event on the West Coast I'd probably get my ass kicked. Pete: Yeah, the Randall. That thing has really taken off here, hasn't it? Sam: We've made one hundred and ten of them so far. Pete: How old is that device? When was the first time you used it? Sam: It was for the Lupulin Slam which was late last winter. Yeah, it has really taken off. Tom Nickel said right there at the Lupulin Slam that he wanted one for O'Briens. Flying Tiger in New York City ordered one. Then the New York Times did and article on it. Then it just kind of exploded. Now they're in Scotland. Pete: So that one that you have in the pub, is that the original? Sam: That is not the original one. The original one is stainless steel. It's in the Milton Brewery. Pete: Do you guys have a tap room over there? Sam: No, we just have a bar for tasting. We're putting that one away in safe keeping. Behind glass. Pete: (Laughing). Yeah, it will be in a museum some day. Sam: Yeah, it works great but to build one its 380 bucks where we can make these other Randalls for around 90, and we just charge cost on them. Pete: Well, I wanted to ask you about one of those because after I saw that I was thinking of building a homebrew Randall. I mean, the ones you do are for 5 to 15 gallon kegs. The Randall to me is not something that you probably throw on a keg and leave it sitting there. You use it more for serving a whole keg in one sitting. So I went down to Home Depot and I found the smaller water filters. Sam: Yeah, that's what these ones are. Pete: As far as the guts in the middle though, what do you use? Sam: It's a slotted pipe of PVC and there's another slotted piece of PVC pipe inside of it. The hops are on the outside of the bigger piece and then the beer comes up through the middle piece. The only thing custom about that is the slotted PVC pieces. Everything else you can get at a pool supply store or a Home Depot. You can make them for about 60 bucks and we charge about 10 bucks an hour to put to put them together. We barely break even on them. Pete: Yeah, but that is kind of like your invention, not that it is what you guys are known for since you guys are known for the extreme beers. But this is kind of something in addition to the extreme beers. Sam: It keeps with the tradition. It takes a regularly hoppy beer and makes it an extremely hoppy beer! Pete: Yeah, I'm sure people go out to a beer bar and see one and say, hey, where did you get that? So it is a nice novelty item for them to have. So when is the next Lupulin Challenge? Sam: We're working on one right now and we're going to keep trying new things. Tomme Arthur is the captain of the West Coast team, I.m the captain of the East Coast team. The difference this year is Larry Bell from Kalamazoo is captaining the Middle America team. Pete: So you have a Midwest team this year, eh? They are really known for hoppy beer! Sam: Laughs. Well, you have Kalamazoo, Green Floyds brews great, hoppy beer. I think Munster in Indiana brews some hoppy beer. Not sure what else they will find out there but I'm sure they will find something. I hope Tom brings up Vinnie because he had to miss the first one since he was opening his brewery. So I hope he comes out as I'd love to see him. Besides us, I'm brining Garrett Oliver from Brooklyn, and Brandon, who brews at a little pub in Philadelphia called Nottinghead. They make good beers. Pete: So what special beers will you be bringing? Sam: I think everyone has to bring two beers. A regular IPA, and then you bring an over the top IPA. Pete: How many states are you distributed in right now? Sam: 28, or 29. Pete: How about out west? Sam: A good part of them. We're in Washington and Oregon. California. We go into Texas. I'm flying into Texas on Sunday, And then, Colorado. Pete: That is a great beer market. Your beers should do well there. Sam: We've been there for about a year and a half. Our big issue is freight. Once we get to the volume where we're shipping full containers, our beers should be more affordable out there. Pete: Who distributes for you in California? Sam: Right now its Stone. Pete: Wow, Stone distributes for you? Sam: Uh huh. In Southern California, and we're talking to some other people up in Northern California. PART TWO - DECEMBER 2004 Pete: Let's talk about some of the off the wall beers you've done recently. Sam: Well, we did a beer called Baltic de Belgium where we, at home, grew a little bit of Wormwood so that batch is an absent/Baltic Porter/government interlude waiting to happen. So that is one that we will never be bottling. (Laughs). Home experiment. Pete: Well, there are some beers that we've had out West that were experimental in their own special way. (Laughs). So really, the way that you got into these extreme beers is that you were kind of bored, right? Sam: Yeah, and since we were in sort of a beach area we have a great place to experiment and try different brews. When we first opened up here in Rehoboth Beach, people thought we were crazy for staying open in the winter, where we stay open 4 days a week. But Rehoboth Beach has really grown and now many restaurants stay open year round. We were one of the first. Pete: As far as local ingredients from the area, are there any that you use exclusively in your beers? Sam: Ah, we use local peaches to do our Festina Lente, which is a Lambic that we do, which we potentially ferment with bacteria. We use local pumpkins for our Pumpkin Ale. We're getting ready to do a fruit beer that will be brewed with local raspberries. Just a 5-barrel batch. We try to use local ingredients when we can but let's face it, this isn't exactly the hop and barley growing region of the country. Pete: I noticed that some of the beers on the menu contained local barley? Sam: We use that a little bit in the Shelter Pale Ale. Pete: How does your local barley compare with regular American barley? Sam: It really doesn't as there are hardly any fermentable sugars in it. We toast it ourselves and use it for flavor. Pete: Is it the climate here that causes that? Sam: It is the production too. Trying to convince the local farmers to grow anything other than feed barley is an uphill battle. They're just not interested in taking the risk and learning what it takes to grow high quality barley. Pete: So what can we expect in the future from Dogfish? Sam: Let's see. For the fall coming up here we did a beer called Burton Baton. We took an 11 percent IPA and added a bunch of bags of hops and we took some oak staves, 200 oak staves, so we took apart french oak wine barrels and we threw the staves into the fermentor. So the beer has been sitting on these oak staves for about 4 months now. So that beer will sit on the oak for 4 months and then a week before bottling it will get blended with a batch of 90 minute so it will end up being a 10%, oak aged, blended, double IPA. So its called Burton Baton and its kind of a nod to the old Burton Ales. Ballantine, a long time ago, made a very special beer called Burton Ale that they never sold. It was just aged in oak vats and it was only given to favorite customers and people who visited the brewery. And so we're kind of doing a tribute to that beer. Pete: A tribute with hops? Sam: Theirs was pretty hoppy too but this is probably the first commercial interpretation of that style in probably 50 years so it gets released through Michael Jackson's Rare Beer Club. He chose 12 breweries from around the world to each do a one month's supply and just us and Tomme Arthur are the two American breweries to be included. Pete: That is quite an honor. Sam: It is a nice honor. I think the beer will come out in the January part of their club. At the first of the year. We're going to do a little preview of it in 12 ounce bottle ourselves but the club version will be corked, bottled conditioned, champagne bottles. That's coming out. Our Old School Barleywine, brewed with dates and figs, comes out in mid October. World Wide comes out in November. And Pangea, which is a beer we brew with an ingredient from every continent, comes out in early November. So it has crystallized ginger from Australia. It has Kamut grains from South America, uh, a special rice from Asia, Antarctic water just because nothing grows in Antarctica. Pete: (Laughs). Just a little bit though, right? Sam: Yes, I think a 5 gallon bucket cost us something like 200 bucks. Pete: That is pretty extreme. Sam: Yeah, that was a fun one to brew. And that one goes great with food too. It's a nice, spicy 7% Ginger Ale that goes well with Indian foods so it's a great food beer. We do it a lot because we use to do our 90 minute and Midas in cork finished bottles but then the demand got so great that our little corker couldn't keep up. So we pulled it out and still do it on the machine, just not with corks. Pete: And those are 22 ounce bombers? Sam: 26 oz champagne bottles, actually. So we still do the Pangea right before the holidays so people have a nice bottle to bring to their occasions. Pete: Yeah, that is something I've noticed recently. Breweries like Stone have done very well with their limited edition bottles and packaging in general. To me, that is what craft breweries should be doing, the specialty packaging, high margin stuff as opposed to trying to compete with mass produced beer. That beer sounds great. How do you keep that extremism going? I mean, after you do a beer with ingredients from every continent on the planet. Sam: Yeah, it's like, what's next? (laughs). Pete: I mean, how do you keep that creativity going? Sam: Well, the brewers humor me and, you know, there's five of us here, and I still do all the, basically, recipe ideas, and new beer ideas, and occasionally brew on this 5-barrel brew house.

Pete: The experimental beers? Sam: Yes, but I never brew on the 50-barrel brew house. Basically, I've taken the idea for a beer and I trust my other brewers, who are better brewers than I am, to take that idea and create a full scale production recipe that works. So I'm really lucky to work with really good brewers. I know I can take a strange idea and make it work now, and some of us here have been brewing for 4-5 years, besides myself. When you have beers like World Wide Stout and Raison D'extra that are pushing the limits of what yeast is physically able to achieve with yeast, it makes you conscientious of all aspects of your brewing. So you're really hypersensitive to everything that happens with that beer at those levels, and making beers like those makes us better brewers. Pete: Yeah, you learn. Sam: Right. It's like there is no real template for what you are doing. Its kind of like brewing off the grid. Pete: That is the joy of brewing. As a homebrewer, I rarely ever brew the same beer twice because, to me, the joy of brewing is constantly brewing something that is unique or different. Sam: That is the joy of homebrewing, but its also, in a way, the frustration of commercial brewing because, you know, you can't change up a pale recipe. Now when we brew, we brew in like 100 - 200 barrel batches and you have like 1200 or 2400 cases of beer, it has to taste like the last 2400 cases of beer or you get a lot of email! So what we've done is make sure that the innovative aspect of the brewing continues to move forward as our production continues to grow. We have a 5-barrel brew house here that is open to any brewer who wants to come down here, screw around, and do something fun. Uh, we have a 10-barrel brewery that we're installing in Milton, so we'll have a second pilot brewery there. Basically, we'll double batch that. So we'll be able to do one off's that are at least to a semi reasonable production scale. Send out 250 cases of something special, for example, 3 months ago we did a Liquor de Malt, which was a bottle conditioned, 40 ounce malt liquor and we used different red, white, and blue corns to brew it. And, uh, we packaged it in 40 ounce bottles with hand stamped brown bags. And so that was an extremely labor intensive project. We only yielded 300 cases. Pete: (Laughs). Yeah, but that is something the consumer is going to treasure. Sam: Oh, they loved it. The beer tasted great and it was uniquely packaged. (Laughs). We can't really do that on our 100 barrel at a time system so that is why we put the 10-barrel brewery out there. So we can do 25, 250 cases instead of 1200 cases. So we're just going to continue to have fun every year. Because for 8 plus years it was just me and my wife, Mariah, calling the shots for the fiscal responsibilities for our company. Pete: Your wife helps you with the company? Sam: Oh yeah, because I'm a lot less fiscally responsible that she is. Yeah, I'm just like, screw it, and never really costed anything out until about two years ago when they started saying you should really be costing these issues out. But now we have a CFO, we just hired a Chief Financial Officer, who has his MBA from Carnegie Mellon. The great thing about him is his wife is a total beer head and he tells me he's not going to stop me from doing the crazy stuff that I do, he's just asking me to cost it out. Pete: Let's just try to make more money doing it! Sam: Right. We cost it out and if we know it is going to be a lower margin thing, at least we know what the margin is going to be. And what we really try to do to be fair to the consumer is take pretty much the same percent margin in everything that we make, but the difference is that if it is a more expensive beer, that margin means more dollars. We keep it very fair for the consumer. If you look at a case of World Wide, a 20% beer, that retails for 140.00 to 150.00 dollars, whereas, that is what a bottle of Sam Adams 20% beer costs. Pete: Well, this beer here has to be pushing Sam Adams for the high alcohol title. What was their latest high alcohol beer called? Sam: Yeah, the Utopia. I doubt we're going to break their record as I think they were at 23 or so. Like 24. And I think the record is 25 point something. Pete: (Laughs). Well, you're only two points away. Sam: Yeah, I know. But it is a critical 2 points! Pete: Yeah, I know. Getting that last two points is tough, and even tougher for homebrewers. So, as far as brewers, who has really had an impact on your career? Sam: For brewers, the guys that I mentioned before like Tomme, Vinnie, and Tom. As far as breweries, I have a lot of respect for what Unibroue is doing up in Canada, what New Glarus is doing for fruit beers out in Wisconsin. I'm a huge fan of all their beers. Lots of smaller breweries like Alesmith, Avery, and Alagash. I love the fact that they are not trying to compete in the six pack pale ale and lager formats. There are a lot of guys out there that inspire me both smaller and bigger than our brewery. Pete: With all of you guys it seems kind of like a one up thing. Sam: Yeah, we love seeing those guys. We had Adam, Adam Avery, in town recently and we took care of him for a couple of nights when he rolled through town. And then they take care of us when we go and visit them. The respect in our industry is really unique in that it's not very competitive amongst ourselves. Pete: Well Sam, I'm about out of tape so thanks for hosting us here tonight and taking the time for this interview. Keep up the extremism! Sam: My pleasure. DOGFISH HEAD CRAFT BREWERY 6 Cannery Village Milton, DE 19968 302-684-1000 DOGFISH HEAD BREWING & EATS 320 Rehoboth Avenue Rehoboth, DE 19971 302-226-BREW www.dogfish.com