S5E9: Brewing Up History: A Chat With Dogfish Head Founder Sam Calagione

Transcript:

Jason Dressel 0:11
Today on The History Factory Podcast, Sam Calagione, founder and Brewer of Dogfish Head brewery.

Jason Dressel 0:25
I’m Jason Dressel, and welcome to The History Factory Podcast, the podcast at the intersection of business and history today, I’m joined by Sam Calagione. Sam is the founder and Brewer of the iconic Delaware based Dogfish Head brewery, which turned 30 this summer. If you’re a beer drinker, and certainly if you are a beer lover and a consumer of craft beers, no doubt you are familiar with Dogfish Head, and you probably know some of their more popular beers, including their 60 and 90 minute IPAs and their sequence Ale, which Sam and I talk about. But what you might not know is that since 2019 Dogfish Head has been a part of the Boston Beer Company, the company behind Samuel Adams. And interestingly enough, non beer beverages like truly twisted tea and angry orchard. And like Boston Beer, Dogfish Head also makes beverages other than just beer. And in Boston Beer Company and Dogfish Head, you have two genuine pioneers and leaders of the American craft beer movement and really the international craft beer industry, in Jim Cook, the founder of Boston Beer, and Sam Adams and Sam calgioni. And I’d be remiss not to add that Sam’s wife Mariah is also a co founder of Dogfish Head, and her role in the company’s success cannot be overemphasized. So Jim, Sam and Mariah are all really kindred spirits, and Sam and Mariah and the Dogfish Head brewery family are now part of the Boston Beer family.

Jason Dressel 1:54
So before jumping into our fun conversation, I first want to share a story about Dogfish Heads origins that I hope Sam appreciates that I didn’t ask him about because I know he’s told the story 1000s of times. So out of a courtesy to Sam and to use the time I had with him to share other stories, I didn’t ask him to tell this story, but it is really worth telling. So when Sam and Mariah pursued launching their brewery and brew pub in Delaware, which Sam will talk about. They discovered the brewing beer in the state was actually illegal, so they actually had to lobby the state, and it took months of work to convince and persuade Delaware lawmakers to change the laws on the books so they could legally operate their business. It’s a great story, and if you want to hear Sam and Mariah talk about it, the two of them are on an episode of the podcast how I built this with Guy Roz, and they provide much more detail to the story and the challenges and how they successfully lobbied the state of Delaware so that they could legally operate their business. So without further ado, here are more stories of 30 years of Dogfish Head as told by Sam Calagione.

Jason Dressel 3:18
Well, Sam, welcome to the history factory podcast and happy 30th anniversary to Dogfish Head.

Sam Calagione 3:24
Thank you, Jason, excited to be here with History Factory today.

Jason Dressel 3:28
Well, let’s start with, you’re literally just coming off of a multi day kind of apex of celebrating the 30th there, there in Delaware. So maybe, maybe we’ll start there. Did you have a good time? Did you have some DogFish Head? You know? What did you guys do to celebrate?

Sam Calagione 3:46
Well, I will say that I’m looking forward to having no alcohol today and tomorrow, just licking my wounds and lots of oversized bottles of Gatorade. But we absolutely went for it this past weekend, and it was perfect in that we got to incorporate every single one of our properties into the three days of programming. We got to focus our belief that it makes more sense to focus on the good karma that comes with collaboration and instead of the negative energy that comes with focusing on competition. So we launched, over this holiday weekend, for our anniversary, a collaborative beer called manifest the awesomeness, with our friends from North Park brewery in San Diego. The owners came for the weekend. For that, we also launched our collaborative co branded clothing line with our friends at Howler brothers clothing and a playlist of awesome songs to drink beer to while you go fishing to go with that clothing line, and we had lots of different really great bands, including a live karaoke competition that brought our coworkers and our customers together to fight. For the title of the most over the top costumes while singing the most over the top rock and roll songs.

Jason Dressel 5:07
I love it. And to that point, you know that was one of the things I was really looking forward to talking to you about, was the influence and the role of music in Dogfish Head in the culture. And I was curious, where did your love of music come from, and how has that really influenced your approach to building a business and a brand over all these years?

Sam Calagione 5:33
Yeah, music has been a central catalyst for expressing the creativity at the Dogfish brand even when we opened. You know, we had the dubious distinction of being literally the smallest commercial brewery in America. When we opened in 1995 I was just making beers in the corner of my restaurant on a little brewing system built out of converted kegs, 12 gallons at a time. So super duper small, but our holy trinity from day one was original beer, original food and original music. And so we’re at the beach, where there’s tons of like Jimmy Buffet cover bands, and, you know, just single people strumming, doing covers in the corner of a bar. And we want to do something really different than that. So we built a World Class Stage, and we’ve ever you know artists as diverse as the strokes and PM, Don and DJ Jazzy Jeff and Built to Spill and Bonnie Prince Billy, and we’ve had an amazing array of different genre artists play our stage and gotten collaborate with an amazing array of artists, from Pearl Jam to Flaming Lips to Julian Barwick to most recently, the Grateful Dead. And our Grateful Dead beer has become the fastest growing beer in the history of our company. So again, that Kismet that comes with combining our passion for creative brewing with music runs deep, and I think it for me, it started. I grew up in Western Massachusetts. I was born in New York City, but my folks moved me us to Western Massachusetts when I was two years old. But I was always proud to say I was born in New York City, born in Queens and Western Mass didn’t have any cities there, but we did have is all these awesome academic institutes like Amherst College and UMass and Smith and Hampshire College. And left the dial down around 8788 8990 on the FM dial were all these crazy radio stations being broadcast from these campuses in Western Mass so I got to hear, you know, in the in the mid 70s and early 80s, when I was a teenager, you know, hip hop music from DJs that were from New York City, that were going to school in Western Mass and amazing punk rock, you know, from from, also from New York. And I fell in love with these genres of punk and hip hop. And they, as they became a home brewer, I kind of saw, you know, the craft brewing rebellion against, you know, the the monochromatic, you know, international, you know, Light Lager juggernaut that dominated the beer scene back then. I thought I thought of craft beer could be a rebellious American art form in the same way that hip hop and punk rock were rebellious American art forms. So I really took a lot of the playbook components to punk rock and hip hop and applied them to craft beer. We designed our own labels. We created our own gig posters, you know, posters for events, and we created our own merchandise and clothing. I went on tours to different cities and slept on the couches of other brewers, much like the punk rockers did back in the day when they were touring. So I really took those ethos from those two American art forms and applied them to beer in a way that I think really helped us stand out as a brand coming up in this wonderful community of craft brewers.

Jason Dressel 9:11
I love that and to follow that up, then, where did the love for beer come from? How did those two passions kind of converge?

Sam Calagione 9:20
Yeah, so I’d say my mom was a special ed teacher, and maybe she’s probably the one most responsible for incubating my love of storytelling. And would buy me anything to read that I ever wanted, from comic books to Hemingway to Salinger to whatever I wanted to read. They would buy for me, which is awesomely supportive. Whereas, you know, my dad was a businessman, a tooth doctor, but he had his own practice. So, you know, he kind of instilled in me that, that love of potentially business, but he was also a beer drinker. He was buying good beer at a local This is. Eating by myself, but we had a store that sold rented VHS tapes of movies, and had a really good beer selection for some reason. So we would rent movies as a family, and then my dad would bring home a six pack of Anchor Steam or Sierra or Sam Adams lager in the mid to late 80s. And that’s the beer I would steal from his fridge when I was a teenager.

Jason Dressel 10:24
So you were, you were just raised on better beer?

Sam Calagione 10:28
From the start, my dad. So those are the ones I could tell. I could get away with stealing because there were more of them in the fridge and he’d be less likely to do a count on what was missing.

Jason Dressel 10:41
That’s amazing.

Jason Dressel 10:43
So the other big part of the Dogfish Head story is obviously your roots in Delaware, and, you know, there’s a legendary story which we, I can, I can, I can maybe speak to a little bit when we do the the introduction of the podcasts, because I know you’ve had to tell the story so many times. I’m not going to ask you to tell it again unless, of course, you want to. But there’s an incredible business story in terms of how you all went about making the brewery a possibility in Delaware, but, but why Delaware? What brought you down to Delaware to start a business from being up in Massachusetts.

Sam Calagione 11:25
Yeah, so the love of a great woman is what drove me to come to Delaware. I mentioned I grew up in Western Massachusetts, and I was a day student at a high school in Western Mass that also had boarding students at it, a school called Northfield Mount Hermon and my wife, Mariah, was a boarding student there, and she was from coastal Delaware. Her dad had gone to NMH. She was a great athlete there, and went on to become a great entrepreneur. So he sent her there, and so we started dating when we were in high school. We got kicked out in June of my or no March of my senior year. So I never actually got a high school diploma. I got a college diploma, but no high school diploma. That doesn’t happen to too many people, but we dated. We went to separate colleges, but stayed together. In the summers, we would come down here to coastal Delaware, rent a little shitty apartment with our other college buddies and wait tables and bar 10 and then lay around on the beach when we were working in the bars and restaurants. And then, you know, flash forward, after college, I moved to New York City with gold becoming a writer, and I was taking writing courses in the MFA program at Columbia, thinking I’d try to roll full time at that started, you know, still bartending, waiting tables that restaurant on the Upper East West Side that happened to be a first gen craft beer bar, and that’s really where I fell in love with craft brewing, and decided maybe I’d try and write the Great American Beer recipe instead of write the great American novel. And I shifted gears. I was 24 years old, and so I wrote the business plan, and by the time I got my shit together to raise the $220,000 to open Dogfish. All New England states already had breweries. And I wrote my business plan, you know, we’ll be the first brewery in Rhode Island to open. And so by being the first brewery in a state, that would give us, obviously, marketing cachet and PR, you know, fodder, but a brewery opening around. And while I was trying to, you know, raise the money, I found out that there was a brewery plan for Delaware that fell through. And so we said, Screw it. We packed up our bags from Providence, Rhode Island. We moved down to this area that my wife is from, and away we went. We opened the first brew pub in the first state, and I haven’t looked back since.

Jason Dressel 13:41
Amazing, a true entrepreneurial story.

Jason Dressel 13:45
And I, I’m curious, in those early years, what were some of the stumbles as you look back, there any of those moments where you think, wow, like, it’s, it’s incredible that we were able to get through that, that challenge and and make it.

Sam Calagione 14:00
Yeah, you know, we certainly, like most startup entrepreneurs, the early years when you’re really bootstrapping, can be really intense. And there were, you know, entire months where Mariah and I ate every meal at our restaurant, not because we loved the food, but because we couldn’t afford to cash our paychecks and to make sure our other co workers got their their paychecks cashed, we would have months where we wouldn’t take any money and would have to live off of the food and beer at the restaurant because we couldn’t afford groceries. And then we were, you know, had we opened a separate production brewery, a really crappy one, with just homemade equipment from the dairy industry, and we cobbled together a 30 barrel brew house about seven miles inland from our, you know, our brew pub, which is still in, you know, basically a few blocks off the beach in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. And we opened that second location. It was kind of when craft beer was facing its first big slowdown in the. Mid to late 90s, and we really had to stumble through that period. You know, we almost went bankrupt. I lost our GM, who was my best friend. I was the best man at his wedding. He was the best man of mine. He was married to a girl who was a waitress at a restaurant. They were running a restaurant brewery, while I was out in a box truck driving to Philly in Pittsburgh and New York and Baltimore and trying to sell the beer that we had just started bottling. And the production brew was not making money, but the brew pub was, and I was funneling all the profits from the brew pub to keep the production brewery from going out of business. The GM didn’t like that because he was running the small restaurant that was profitable. And I was like, You got to believe that there’s a bigger cause, and we’re going to break through all this noise and this friction and build a great national brand. He didn’t have that belief, so he left and opened a competing, beer centric restaurant down the road from us. It’s no longer in business, but Mariah and I, you know, stuck to our guns. We didn’t dumb down our beer, we didn’t dumb down our pricing, and we muscled through. And then in 1999 we came out with Midas Touch, which was based on archeological evidence found in the pores of crockery from a 20 902 year old tomb in Egypt believed to belong to King Midas. And that same year, we came out with a 90 minute IPA, which is considered the first Imperial IPA in America, the first one to have the words Imperial IPA on a label. And that’s really that inflection moment we came up with those two beers, New York Times, food and wine. People magazine, Esquire magazine started doing stories about Dogfish, and our brand voice was suddenly bigger than our production capacity and demand for our beer flourished. I think we enjoyed 14 or 15 years in a row of double digit growth from there forward to become a national brand.

Jason Dressel 16:53
That’s a huge pivot. And it’s interesting. You mentioned that kind of coverage in those kinds of publications, because I think one of the other really interesting things about the Dogfish Head story, and there’s certainly other craft beers that have this focus as well, but you shared, you know, the really, the kind of founding vision for for the business, in many ways, was this kind of confluence of beer and food and music. And I’m curious how the relationship with food has, really, you know, sort of shaped the approach to how you develop products. Because it does seem like more than many, you know, the approach that you all take is very focused on, you know, how beer pairs with food? Would you agree that that’s a fair kind of assumption?

Sam Calagione 17:40
Yeah, you know, very much. So, you know, I’d say the culinary influence is a real touchstone for, you know, the creative approach of our brewing or distilling and everything we do. And it started, you know, the second page of my business plan was a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote about going on this exploration of goodness. But on the first page of that business plan I wrote, Dogfish Head will be the first commercial brewery in America committed to brewing the majority of our beers outside the reinheitsgebot, using culinary ingredients. And back then, when I was pitching cans to carry our beer, I was bringing around Home Brewed samples of our pumpkin ale made with fresh crushed cinnamon brown sugar and pumpkin meat and raison d’etre, which is our beer we brewed with raisins and beet sugars. So right from the get go, we were focused on bringing these culinary ingredients in unexpected ways into beer recipes. And that was not popular in the 90s. You know, the great first generation craft brewers, Sierra Nevada, Sam Adams, they’re brewing really bold. You know, flavor forward, fresh interpretations of modern European beer styles. You know Sierra Nevada, kind of genuflecting towards England with pale ales and porters. Sam Adams, genuflecting towards Germany with, you know, pilsners and lagers. So for us, we wanted to not genuflect towards any modern country’s beer definitions, but rather look at the entire globe holistically for potential creative inspiration of ingredients that may have not been used in in commercial brewing before, or combined in the ways that we combine them for commercial brews, and it was an uphill battle. A lot of early craft beer enthusiasts thought we were assholes or jokesters for putting coffee into a stout or apricots into an IPA. I remember going to one beer festival, and after I talked about our April hop beer on the stage, the next Brewer got up to talk about his heifer bites and wheat beer and said, I believe that fruit belongs in your salad, not in your beer. And you know, looking down his nose at me in a Dogfish. So we took our lumps. But pretty soon, you know, these Cullen. Magazines and the culinary world really embraced what we were doing and helped us, you know, celebrate, you know, that creative journey we’re on. And I think the pinnacle of that kind of acceptance was when we won a James Beard award, you know, for our culinary influence in our brewing program, and that was great for all of us to validate the creative journey we run.

Jason Dressel 20:25
Totally, and who, where did that like, I don’t know how to frame this question, Sam, but it’s almost like, where did that sort of innovation come from? Like, like, the, I mean, just the level of innovation that you all have had with respect to, there’s so many things that you all have done over 30 years that I think are kind of taken for granted with respect to beer. I mean, it really is amazing when you look back at what beers you know tasted like and what the variety was 20 years ago, much less 3540 years ago, when really that kind of first generation of American craft beer started with that kind of, you know, first generation of pioneers, which, of course, was, was with Sam Adams, like, but where? Yeah, where did your kind of, where do you where that just drive innovation, and, you know, who are the people, in addition to yourselves, that are kind of pushing that envelope? Yeah, yeah.

Sam Calagione 21:21
Like I said, I think I took more inspiration from the art world and the music world that I did from my fellow brewers. You know, rather than looking to the left or right of me of what other brewers were doing, you know, I was, I was listening to music, but I think equally importantly, you know, reading a lot of music, autobiographies and biographies, to understand the creative journey of some of the the the artistic heroes in my world. And I remember, you know, reading about Miles Davis, when his nephew asked him, you know, how did you become such an iconic trumpet player in a world where there are so many great musicians? And he said, don’t play. What’s there? Play what’s not there. And I think we applied that as a brand, brewing brand, to the world of craft brewing. So if anything, we looked at the competitive set to decide not what to do, or to decide, yeah, what not to do, instead of to decide what to do. And we looked for spaces where we could be the first innovators, whether it was bringing monk fruit, into beer, which we were the first to do that with slightly mighty or bringing Kernza, which is a sustainably, you know, harvested and grown grain that sequesters carbon out of the atmosphere, like 5x what a acre of of brewers barley would, and that Kerns is now in Our Grateful Dead beer. We’re now the number one, you know, buyer and user of Kernza of any brewery in America. So finding these neat a niche, to scratch across all these different recipe platforms, and then not being complacent to just do that in beer, but to bring that approach into distilling, into the creation of cocktails, into a beer themed Hotel. Other ways that we could really create our, you know, express our creativity in ways other brands hadn’t done before. Collaborations with, you know, New Belgium or new balance and Merrill shoes. You know, at the same time that we continue to collaborate with actual other breweries, or we were doing these collaborations with clothing brands with bands. So the innovation didn’t just stop at the recipes themselves, but influenced all the ways that we bring our brand to life. You know, every day at Dogfish.

Jason Dressel 23:36
I love that and what, so I have to ask you, what’s your favorite product that you never understood why it wasn’t more commercially successful. Do you have I’m sure you have at least one. Just like, oh shit. Like, how did that never take off?

Sam Calagione 23:54
Yeah, let’s see. Well, to racial profile myself. We did a beer called garlic breadth, B, R, E, A, D, T, H. We added roasted garlic to every breadth of the fermentation moments, and it was a dark quarter designed to go with spaghetti and meatballs. And I absolutely loved garlic breath. But man, did that not sell well, every pore in your body smelled like it was excreting garlic oil for a day after you drink the beer. So that one was not really a success. On a different note, I would say we do a beer called Sea crunch Ale, which is brewed with sea salt and black lines. In the world of brewing, you can’t make any health claims of alcoholic products, but I can say we worked with the former leader at the Gatorade Research Institute, and on a molecular level, we designed a recipe that had more minerals than electrolytes than Gatorade. So even though we can’t talk about that sequential with COVID. Customers. That’s something that we really are proud of. And it’s the beer that 56 year old Sam Calagione me now that’s the one I drink the most. You know, I used to drink a shit ton of 90 minute and 9% alcohol, nine ABV beer, but now that I’m 56 I can’t bounce in the morning after a bunch of Imperial IPAs the way I couldn’t I was in my 30s, so Sequent jail, I think, is the underrated beer in our portfolio, because it’s just super refreshing and easy to drink.

Jason Dressel 25:29
Yeah, I will admit that I need to go back and try it, because it’s one of those products where I want to like it more than I do, in part, just because, like, I struggle with sours, writ large, but, but I really want to give it another try. Yeah? So you’re so you’re giving me a lot of a lot of rationale and validation for why I should at least go back and give it another try especially.

Sam Calagione 25:53
But dear to my heart, the sales for it kind of spike in the summer, warmer months, as you’d expect, because it’s such a great day drinking, beach, drinking, golf club, drinking beer, and then it slows back down in the winter. And so it’s not like a core focus beer for it, but it’s a stealthy one that we know people really appreciate.

Jason Dressel 26:13
Yeah, so I know, I know you probably have to run in a minute. So I’ll say, well, first of all, first of all, congrats again, on on 30. I mean, you know, if you know, don’t, don’t take it for granted. I’m sure you don’t know how hard it is for businesses to survive and to make it to 30. So it’s been an incredible journey, and certainly to reflect on just where the business has gone over the last five years. I mean, when the company, when you all were having your 25th It was shortly after the merger with Boston Beer Company. You then had COVID, unbeknownst to you at the time coming, coming around the quarter. So I’m just curious, what has the last five or six years been like now being part of a Boston Beer Company. You know, what do you kind of, what are you excited about for the future, and where do you kind of see the trajectory of craft beer, and sort of the beer space in a time that it’s certainly being, you know, challenged with, you know, how younger generations are adapting to the product?

Sam Calagione 27:12
Yeah, yeah. So that’s a great question, and you know, I’ll answer it kind of through the lens of two of our Boston beers.

Jason Dressel 27:19
I gave you like, four questions in one, to be fair, so.

Sam Calagione 27:23
Tracking, I’m tracking. So I’ll answer this through the lens of two Boston Beer values that I think are tantamount to what’s great about our company. And the first is happy customers make us happy, and it’s basically our way of talking about the golden rule that’s kind of central to any organized religion, you know, the good karma that comes back to you if you put out good karma towards other people. And I definitely am feeling that, both for our customers, but also for our coworkers, you know. So they’re really the first customers, the ones who chose to literally join us on this quixotic journey at Dogfish, and it’s really humbling. And the other value is our differences make us stronger, and I think of that both through the lens of our coworkers and all their complimentary superpowers, I have the humility to know there’s parts of being a leader of a brand that I’m good at and, you know, the creative side, recipes, storytelling, being out there as the face of the brand. But there’s parts that I’m not good at, accounting, HR, the actual physical brewing of massive batches of beer. I’m so humbled and gracious that there’s people that have those complimentary superpowers that are on this joint journey with us. The other component of our differences make us stronger is I’m really proud of the portfolio of brands that we have at Boston Beer Company. You know, you mentioned we’re facing a moment when the younger, 21 to 31 year old, legal drinking age person is just consuming less alcohol overall. And you know, we’re here to say, hey, we’ve got things for you if you’re on a sober, curious journey, you know, whether it’s our, our just the Hayes beer or the teapot THC tea that we do in Canada, and hopefully someday we’ll, we’ll make it here. But we’re all so proud that beer is the middle name of our company, and we’re not wavering from that just because beer is not the number one volume thing that we make anymore. Jim and I are brewers at our core, and we apply that brewers creative philosophy to everything we make, whether it’s tea or cider or beer. So that’s, you know, not going away. But I’m glad at this moment when younger consumers are looking for diversity of choices and not just sticking with one flagship beer that our portfolio has so much to offer, from Dogfish can cocktails to Sun cruiser to twisted tea, truly, Sam Adams lager. So we’ve got something for everyone, and that’s made the last six months really exciting, and I’m proud to say, Dogfish is back to growth based on the success of our canned cocktails and our Grateful Dead beer mostly. So it’s a really exciting moment for us within the Boston Beer Company, for sure.

Jason Dressel 30:10
That’s great. So last question, you teed it up perfectly. So notwithstanding having to, you know, worry about, you know what you’re consuming from a health perspective, but just pure passion, you got one Dogfish Head beer you can drink for the rest of your life, and one Grateful Dead song that you can listen to. What comes to mind.

Sam Calagione 30:34
Well, I guess I’d have to say, You know what I drank mostly this weekend, was that collaborative beer that we did with North Park. But if it’s one beer for one time with one dead song, of course it’s going to be your Dogfish Head, grateful, dead, juicy Pale Ale with a big steal your face on it. And I would actually go with the song sugary. Shake it. Shake it sugary. And I’d have it on a 90 minute max doll tape, like I used to tape off the radio shows in Western Mass and just repeated different versions of sugary as a reminder for how creative that band was to bring new components of their songs to life. You know, every time they played them live, there was something different that kept people going back. And to me, that’s what I love about Dogfish Head, is we try different things, and people keep coming back to see what that latest experiment from us looks like.

Jason Dressel 31:27
I’m sure you can find a 60 minute and a 90 minute sugary version in there.

Sam Calagione 31:34
So awesome for that. Jason, I’ll look for that.

Jason Dressel 31:36
Yeah. Well, hey man, congrats again, and thanks again for the time. Sam, best of luck.

Sam Calagione 31:41
Thanks for doing this. And when you guys haven’t edited, edited together, I’d love to share it with some folks, so maybe through Megan, our PR person, if you can, whenever, no rush, but wherever you guys have it done, we’d love to be able to share it

Jason Dressel 31:53
Sounds great. Appreciate your time, man. Let me know if there’s anything else we can do for you. All right, appreciate you guys.

Sam Calagione 31:57
Just give the quant tail another chance. That’s all.

Jason Dressel 32:01
I will. Yeah, I will. I promise. I promise, I will.

Sam Calagione 32:03
All right, take care of it. Peace, yep. Bye.

Jason Dressel 32:10
Thanks again to Sam Calagione, thanks to all of you for listening to The History Factory Podcast. Be well, and we’ll be back soon with a new episode.