REVOLUTIONTHE NEXT

FESTIVALSTHIS YEAR’S BEER

MAY 2011 ISSUE 1

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THIS YEAR’S BEER

24REVOLUTIONTHE NEXT

We take a look at Sam Caliagone and the Dogfish Head Brewery to see the new beer Revolution starting on the East Coast

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BEER TASTING

FESTIVALS

HOST YOUR OWN

Steps you need to throw a brewparty!

Top spots to get your brew on!

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BREW OF THE MONTHWe’re sipping some stellar Suds

BREW WITH A PUNCHWe look at Brew Dog’s Viagra infused beer

BREWER OF THE MONTHWho wins this month’s award?

HEALTHY BEERA man lives on beer alone for one month

ALSO...

HOMEBREW TIPSThe Case for the Carboy

NEW BEER STOPSWhere to plan your next Brew Trip

EATINGSWhat to pair with that Stout

CELLAR THAT BEERTips for storing your top brews

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REVOLUTIONBEER

REVOLUTION

LEADING THE NEXT

The Italian word for chutzpah is audacia, but it might as well be “Sam A. Ca-lagione.” His Dogfish Head Craft Brewery packs an 18% alcohol content into its stout and gets $9 (retail) for a 12-ounce bottle. That’s twice what the Trappist monks in Belgium charge for their Chimay ale and ten times what you’d pay for a Coors. “We saw $100 as the magic number,” Calagione says, referring to what distributors pay him for a case of 24. “It seemed like the most outlandish figure we could charge.” Today his Web site posts a release schedule of brews, as if they were the finest Bordeaux.Starting as a home brewer 12 years ago, Ca-lagione has built up a business that makes 21,000 barrels a year of high-priced, and very profitable, beer. In 1995 he scraped

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SAM CALAGIONEowner

Dogfish Head Brewing Co.

BEER24

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 24together $220,000--$80,000 from a bank loan and the rest from his dad, his ortho-dontist and a man for whom he once built stone walls. Then he packed off to Re-hoboth Beach, Del., where his wife’s family lived, deciding that a growing resort town was the perfect spot for a restaurant.Microbrewers--which usually produce up to 15,000 barrels of beer a year--have got-ten to be something of a fad, with at least 382 in business, accounting for 3.9% of U.S. beer production. Many of them will probably fail, sooner or later. For now Dog-fish is doing fine, with pretax earnings last year of $800,000 on revenue of $7 million, according to Calagione.

Dogfish got off to a rough start when it ran into a Delaware law forbidding brewpubs to sell outside the establishment. So Cala-gione went knocking on legislators’ doors to win support and paid his lawyer $3,000 to help draft a proposal to lift the ban. It passed several months later. He used prof-its from the restaurant to build 300-gallon fermentation tanks. Three workers would spend eight hours to fill and cap 1,200, 22-ounce bottles by hand. The next trick was to get distributors to carry his beer. “I basically lived out of my box truck, slept in

the back and did business on my cell phone while driving around to bars, restaurants and liquor stores,” says Calagione, now 35.One of his first distributors, Edward Fried-land, had doubts. Dogfish had some intriguing recipes, but the quality wasn’t consistent and bottles sometimes explod-ed, he recalls. What’s more, some of Dog-fish’s less-expensive brands still cost twice what its competitors charged. “I told him ‘You’re out of your mind. No one’s going to pay $25 a case for pumpkin ale’ while I was paying $12 to $16 for some others.” But Sam was persuasive and offered to take back cases that didn’t sell. Friedland man-aged to unload them all. Dogfish broke even in its second year on revenue of $590,000, including restaurant sales.

GETTING THE BEER OUT THEREBy that time Calagione had set up a sepa-rate microbrewery 8 miles away from the restaurant and pushed into New Jersey, one of 24 states (along with Canada, Puerto Rico and the U.K.) where his beer is dis-tributed. He kicked off the expansion with marketing that has become something of a trademark, spending $1,500 to build an 18-foot rowboat. He then loaded a case of his beer aboard and rowed across the Dela-ware River, Washington-style (though in summer and without the frock coat). The crossing caught some press--and the atten-tion of Levi Strauss & Co., which invited the good-looking, 6-foot-tall chief to ap-pear in an ad campaign spotlighting gutsy entrepreneurs, shot by the late photogra-pher Richard Avedon.

“NO ONE’S GOING TO PAY $25 A CASE FOR PUMPKIN ALE”

Dogfish Head’s Punkin’ Ale is a seasonal favorite amongst many beer devotees. The spicy accents and distinct pumpkin flavor make it one unique brew. Punkin’ Ale is available in the Fall Season, perfect for your Thanksgiving Dinner!

“WE’RE MAKING OFF-CENTERED ALES FOR OFF-CENTERED

PEOPLE”FINDING THE INSPIRATIONIn 2000 Calagione teamed up with University of Pennsylvania Museum arche-ologists who were trying to discern recipes for ancient food and drink from chemical residues left on artifacts excavated from a tomb in central Turkey dating to 740 B.C. Says Penn researcher Patrick McGovern, “I met Sam and realized he was already making something that was similar—a medieval drink called bragget, made from beer, plums and honey.” McGovern sug-gested Calagione step back a couple of mil-lennia with a concoction of barley, muscat grapes and saffron. The result was Midas Touch Golden Elixir, an ale named after the mythical Phrygian king, which retails for $10 a four-pack. In return, Dogfish pays 60 cents per case sold to one of the collabo-rators on the recipe, who lent money for the research.Calagione is still hamming it up, spending at least two days a week on the road. You’d hardly know he was conducting business at restaurants. He often shows up dressed for various skits, rapping his own lyrics about Anheuser-Busch girls or holding forth on subjects like “Beer is from Mars and wine is from Venus.”

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FESTIVALS OF 2011Colorado craft brewers soon will have achance to toast one another on a year of unlikely growth when they take part in the Great American Beer Festival. The 28th annual event combines judged competi-tion for the most coveted awards in the industry with a massive consumer tasting of American beers - the largest number of beers available at any festival in the world. Some 46,000 suds lovers attended in 2008, the second consecutive year that the festival’s four sessions sold out in advance, says Julia Herz of the Brewers Association, the Boulder-based, not-forprofit trade as-sociation that presents the festival. “Ticket sales are faster and stronger than ever,” Herz says of the event, slated for Sept. 24-26 at the Colorado Convention Center inDenver. “When tickets advance two years in a row, expansion is a natural thought.So we are expanding the hall, and there will be more tickets available.