Dogfish Head a 20-year beer pioneer

Dogfish Head Brewery opened 20 years ago as America’s smallest brewery.

Founder Sam Calagione would brew 10-gallon batches two or three times a day. He experimented using spices, herbs and honey from the Delaware brewery’s adjacent restaurant kitchen.

“I was basically making beer with homebrew equipment,” Calagione said. “We barely survived in those early years.”

Two decades later, Dogfish Head Brewery finished 2014 as the nation’s 13th-largest craft beer producer. Calagione, who is friends with Delaware’s governor, said the state’s economic development team has used six-packs of their beer to woo potential entrepreneurs to the state.

“We were one of the first to be brewing outside of the (style) guidelines,” Calagione said. “People don’t realize that that wasn’t a cool thing back then.

“It shows you how far the industry has come.”

Calagione, whose original business plan featured the motto “off-centered ales for off-centered people,” has been credited as a pioneer in beer experimentation.

He had his own Discovery Channel show and now brews with celebrities on a Web series.

Dogfish Head Brewery bottled one of the first imperial India pale ales to hit the market and claimed its most recent release called Hoo Lawd is the hoppiest beer ever recorded at 658 International Bittering Units, thanks to a dark IPA blend of Alpha Beast, Simcoe, Warrior and Amarillo hops.

This year, the brewery also made a beer with 36 plastic trash bags full of freshly clipped Pennsylvania spruce tips and Calagione was honored at a winemakers ceremony for his work with barley wines and experimental grape varieties.

Dogfish Head Brewery’s 20th anniversary was honored with a commemorative beer that paid homage to Calagione’s first homebrew.

After that first homebrew, Calagione knew he had found a new career.

A CHERRY-FLAVORED START

Off-centered ales start with bodega sale

Calagione walked down the streets of New York City with a pale ale homebrew kit. On the way back to his apartment, he noticed a sale on overripe cherries at a bodega.

“On a whim I figured ‘maybe this would taste good,’ ” Calagione said.

Just before homebrewing, Calagione had tried a Belgian beer when working at a Manhattan bar. The job was to pay the bills as he attended grad school in creative writing.

“It was a Chimay red,” Calagione recalls. “My mind was blown. Within weeks I started homebrewing and within months I started writing my business plan for Dogfish Head.”

Calagione said his first homebrew with the cherries was a success. While he said his second and third batches didn’t turn out as well, he focused on improving his craft.

He chose Delaware because it didn’t have a brewery yet while other New England states did. He had also rented beach houses in the state while in college. The brewery was named after a peninsula in Maine of the same name where he had previously vacationed.

“I always forget how goofy the name sounds,” Calagione said. “People have always heard of places like Hilton Head (Island) in South Carolina but not many people have heard of Dogfish Head.”

The brewery slowly grew to one that distributes across the country.

STAYING OFF-CENTER ON THE BIG SCREEN

Dogfish Head brewer continues to challenge himself

In the middle of Los Angeles traffic, Calagione is brewing in the back of a stretch hummer limousine with NBA star Chris Bosh.

They are crafting the Texas barbecue-inspired Daddy Jack stout for an episode of the Web series “That’s Odd, Let’s Drink It.”

“That’s awesome — leg room and brewing,” jokes Bosh, a forward listed at 6-foot-11.

On the Web series, Calagione makes collaboration brews with special guests. Calagione was previously featured on the 2010 lone season of the Discovery Channel show called “Brew Masters.” The show was produced by Zero Point Zero Production, known for the Anthony Bourdain food travel show called “No Reservations” among other reality show titles.

“Making the show was a lot of fun,” Calagione said. “I have a lot of respect for the company that produced it. None of the shooting was forced or fabricated at all.”

Calagione hasn’t lost his quest to try different things.

The brewery currently uses more than 100 ingredients in the beer it distributes and is recognized for its contributions to wood-aged, pumpkin spice and coffee beers, among others.

Dogfish Head Brewery’s 90-Minute IPA was also one of the earliest imperial IPAs to be bottled — it originally came in a champagne bottle.

The original label featured a circus performer hammering a nail into his nose.

“That’s kind of how the beer felt when it hit you back in that era,” Calagione jokes. “Not many palates were calibrated to that level of hoppiness yet.”

That same feeling might be replicated with the new 658-IBU beer.

And while Calagione has stepped back from Dogfish Head Brewing’s day-to-day brewing, he still has a hand in the creation of all of the brewery’s beer.

“We are even more fearlessly experimental today than we were when we were America's smallest brewery 20 years ago,” said Calagione, who will be sharing many specialties at the Extreme Beer Fest on Feb. 5-6 in Boston, an annual beer festival sponsored by the brewery.

"I never dreamed that we would be selling a quarter-million barrels. I never thought there would be a marketplace to be this experimental at the scale we are at."

About this series

The #Beer Insider is a series that looks at brewery trends and news around the country.

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