The 10 Beers that Made My Career: Sam Calagione

The Dogfish Head founder and craft-beer figurehead talks basement wine, partying with Ricki Lake, and—oh yeah—brewskis.

Sophie Brickman

Before Sam Calagione, founder of Dogfish Head, turned the brewing industry on its head with oddball ingredients and methods, he wanted to be a creative writer.

“I learned that I wasn’t good enough to ever write the great American novel,” he says. “But I knew I could apply that storytelling to writing creative recipes.”

Since he opened Dogfish in Milton, Delaware, in 1995, he’s been on a mission to eschew pedestrian tastes in favor of “off-center” ales—genre-defying stuff like Raison D’Etre, brewed with beet sugar and raisins; Theobroma, featuring Aztec cocoa powder and annatto; and Pangaea, which contains ingredients gathered from all seven continents.

These ludicrously creative new creations keep on coming, while flagship beers such as 60 Minute IPA have become foundational standard-bearers of the American craft-beer movement.

Here, Calagione takes us from his family basement, where it all began, to New York City, Delaware, Italy, and beyond.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

1. Family Wine

I grew up in a tight-knit Italian family in Milford, MA. Probably my earliest recollections of alcohol being interesting are memories of my uncles in the basements of their houses making wine. They all had very different careers—one owned a flower store, another was a dentist, another an optometrist, all over the map—but they came together making wine. They’d drink a little bit of last year’s wine while making this year’s, and I remember how joyful the tradition was. When we were 10, 11, 12, for special occasions, like Easter or Thanksgiving or Christmas, it wasn’t really a big deal if we had a glass of wine at the table. If we asked for a second glass, though, that wasn’t accepted. At least until we were in our late teens.
2. First few beers

In the cellar of our house, we had a backup piece-of-junk fridge, and my dad would keep beer in there. Even when I was 15, 16 years old, my dad wasn’t drinking cheap, generic light lager—he was bringing home Grolsch, Anchor Steam [pictured], Mooshead. I was lucky enough, when I found out that beer was my favorite of the adult beverages, to get to swipe quality beer.
3. Beer menu, Nacho Mama’s Burritos, NYC

In 1992, I moved to New York and was taking writing courses at Columbia. To pay the bills I worked at a Mexican restaurant, Nacho Mama’s Burritos, and the guy who started it was a beer lover, and he’d buy first-generation craft beers. In one week of working there, I tried Chimay Red and Sierra Nevada Celebration [pictured], and that was my “beer epiphany” moment. Two weeks later, I was at the home-brew store in Manhattan buying ingredients to make beer in my apartment.
4. First homebrew

My first batch of homebrew turned out great. I was living with my friends who were on an MTV show called “The State,” so it was this three-ring circus in our house. The first night we drank the beer, it was me and all of them and Ricki Lake, who was at our house, too. I stood up on the table and said, “This is what I want to do with all my life, open a brewery!” And they said, “Yeah!”, and were all supportive. The next batch really sucked. But I’d already announced it, so I didn’t turn back.
5. Wood-grilled pizza, Alforno, Providence

My wife, Mariah, was finishing up at Brown, and I went to Alforno when I was writing my business plan and was blown away by their pizzas. We [ended up opening] our brewery intentionally with a restaurant—as a brewpub—because I knew our beers were so unique and more like wine in their complexity, and I wanted to be able to describe to the customer how the beer paired with the food. Our whole vision was “rustic beers with rustic food.” So Alforno’s pizzas were probably the touchstone.
6. Immort Ale

I really felt like for Dogfish to stand out, we didn’t want to follow what other brewers were doing. Right out of the gates, we were brewing with maple syrup and licorice root and raisins and coffee. We wanted to create our own thumbprint on the community. Other brewers thought we were weirdos and heretics for adding all these exotic ingredients, but a beer writer out of London, Michael Jackson, tried our beer—the Immort Ale, made with maple syrup, juniper berries, and peat-smoked barley—and it he fell in love with it. He became one of our champions, which was really critical.
7. Ancient Ales

Some people had this opinion that we were doing really wacky things, and it drove me to research the longer history of the brewing tradition. I started brewing ancient beers to prove that in every culture around the world, before that monochromatic light lager took over, was brewing—with sake rice in China, saffron in Turkey, et cetera. [The beers in our Ancient Ales series are] liquid time capsules. We started working with Patrick E. McGovern [the Scientific Director of the Biomolecular Archaeology Laboratory for Cuisine, Fermented Beverages, and Health at the University of Pennsylvania], and he would find and describe residue discovered inside crockery in tombs, and Dogfish Head would bring [those ingredients] back to life. There’s Midas Touch, made with saffron, honey, and white Muscat grapes, and Sah’tea, made with juniper and rye from Finland. [The project] allows me to really travel the world and look at beer through the eyes of different brewers and cultures.
8. 60 Minute IPA

Our 60 and 90 Minute IPAs were inspired by the culinary world. Usually hops are added a couple times in the brew, once early in the boil for bitterness, and once at the end for aroma. I saw a chef on TV, and he was talking about how if you add pepper to a soup throughout an hour of simmering, the flavors of the pepper get woven in much more evenly than if you add it all at once. That got me thinking: what if I set up a system and added hops continuously? So I rigged up this system with a vibrating football game so it would drop the pellets down the game’s face into the boiling beer. Now we have a very sophisticated machine called the Sofa King Hoppy, a giant pneumatic cannon that shoots a dose of hops every minute into a 3,000-gallon tank. Our 60 Minute IPA accounts for over 65% of our beer.
9. Noble Rot

We love making hybrid beverages, and it’s a concept we’re proud to be championing as brewers. For example, there’s a complexity you can get by combining the world of mead and the world of wine and making something that’s a hybrid between those worlds. Think about fusion cuisine restaurants, or hybrid cars. A beer like Noble Rot, which is almost 50-50 wine and wine, might sound weird and gross, but it’s [the combination works]: It’s a Belgian ale, which has a sour component, and there Viognier grapes are infected with botrytis [a healthy fungus that bolsters the character of the fruit], which brings acidity. It won a medal at this year’s World Beer Cup, the largest international beer festival.
10. Beer at Eataly

We’ve had a great time working with Mario [Batali] and Joe [Bastianich] on the Birreria [a rooftop brewpub at Eataly in Manhattan]. We have two Italian brewing partners, Birrificio Le Baladin and Birra del Borgo, from Rome. Combining the culinary and brewing creative traditions of Italy with the culinary traditions of America has been a wonderful way for us to experience and learn from each other. We’re using Italian chestnut powder and tree resin from Italian forests, and American hops and wheat from the Midwest, then doing a mashup of the two different cultures. [Recently] we opened up another Birreria brewery in downtown Rome.

The 10 Beers that Made My Career: Sam Calagione

1. Family Wine

2. First few beers

3. Beer menu, Nacho Mama’s Burritos, NYC

4. First homebrew

5. Wood-grilled pizza, Alforno, Providence

6. Immort Ale

7. Ancient Ales

8. 60 Minute IPA

9. Noble Rot

10. Beer at Eataly

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