2 Dogfish Head Brewery

Sam CalagioneThink big and stay the course.In 1993 Dogfish Head Brewery founder Sam Calagione passed by a neighborhood bodega in Manhattan and picked up a few ripe cherries. At home he had a pale ale ready to brew. But now he had a way to play up what would be his "virgin batch.""That beer turned out really good, and I stood up in front of all my roommates and said, This is what I want to do with my life—brew beers using exotic ingredients," Calagione says. "And then my next couple batches of beer were not so good, but I had already told everyone that was what I was going to do with my life and stuck to it."When Calagione opened the Dogfish Head Pub in Rehoboth Beach, Del., in 1995, he had $220,000—$110,000 raised from his dad, his orthodontist, someone for whom he had done construction work, plus a matching fund of bank loans. Exotic ingredients were flying around in his head, along with the dream of making a food-centric beer, eschewing the English- and German-style beers then in vogue in the craft-brewing market. The pub started out with three beers: Pumpkin Ale, made from brown sugar, pumpkin meat, allspice, and cinnamon; Chicory Stout, made from chicory, licorice root, and organic Mexican coffee; and Immort Ale, made from maple syrup, vanilla beans, and juniper berries. It was the smallest commercial brewery in the nation.Dogfish's expansion started small, taking the Pumpkin Ale to Delaware's famous Punkin Chunkin competition. But his sights were bigger. "It was always my goal to grow and distribute my beers coast-to-coast, even when we were tiny," he says.Initially, Dogfish head was only available in Delaware, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. The brewery barely stayed afloat."Our production brewery lost money from 1997 to 1999," Calagione says, "and I had to use all the profits from our restaurant brewery just to keep our production brewery from going out of business—there wasn't a big market for wood-aged, maple-syrup infused, 13-percent alcohol beers like Immort Ale in 1996 or 1997. But we never dumbed down our beers or discounted them, and that small group of adventurous, off-center drinkers grew each year."In 2000 Dogfish Head launched two more of its mainstays, the Raison D'Etre (beet sugar and raisins) and the Midas Touch (muscat grapes, saffron, and thyme honey.) It was the first year the brewery drew a profit—though certainly not the last.Today new experiments abound. They've been importing palo santo wood for a brewing vessel, a South American wood that helps add caramel and spice notes to the beer, improving on oak aging's toast and vanilla. It's the biggest wooden brewing vessel in America since prohibition. Also, Dogfish is getting cedar scraps from a Maine surfboard company to age beer."To this day, we don't look to the brewing industry for inspiration; we don't want to be influenced by what other breweries do," Calagione says.