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We all have our memories. For me, a pint of Marston’s Pedigree will always be a glorious, mud-spattered afternoon on a Norfolk rugby field as gray and dismal as the Somme. A sip of Paulaner is engraved as an antic road trip across half of Europe to Munich, Germany, and a sunny, blearily happy Oktoberfest. A Guinness—or is it two?—is forever the reward for a thirsty hike along a silver strand in the west of Ireland.
I cannot be certain at this early stage, but I am confident that a beer from Dogfish Head will bob up again sooner or later, calling me back to myself. It is partly about the beer, for this most quirky of breweries on the Delaware coast turns out a range of ales and stouts of eye-popping power and singular quality.
But it is also partly about the passion Sam Calagione and his band of brewers bring to their craft, a peculiarly old-fashioned commitment that combines the purity and single-mindedness of the devotional with the contrariness of a rebel song.
It is a passion they are happy to share, so that touring the Dogfish Head Craft Brewery in Milton, Delaware, or sampling an India Pale Ale (IPA) at the Dogfish Head brewpub in Rehoboth Beach, where it all began 10 years ago, is to stumble on an entire republic of kindred spirits. Few pilgrimages are rewarded quite so deliciously or so quickly.
And a pilgrimage it was. Though it is difficult, at this distance, to recall the precise moment I first heard the name Dogfish Head, I do recall it coming in a murmur, and with a raising of eyebrows, as if to say that here were beers that required careful handling. Further encounters with other beer lovers yielded hushed tales of unlikely concoctions or rare tastiness, and always, always, button-bursting, ear-whistling strength. By the time I set to pondering a journey to the source, it had become a necessity. There are few myths left to us, after all, especially within a day’s drive.
Hop Head Dogfish Head Craft Brewery
(6 Cannery Village Center, Milton, Delaware; 302-684-1000; www.dogfish.com) is open for tours on Mondays and Fridays at 3 p.m.
Dogfish Head Brewings & Eats
The Inn at Canal Square  Sam Calagione |
The first Dogfish I ever tasted was a Shelter pale ale, plucked right off the bottling line. The American beer world is heaving with pale ales, and Calagione (who will tell you his name rhymes with “my little pony”) rarely lets his take on the old classic stray too far beyond Delaware, preferring to push his more exotic creations, his IPAs and Raison D’Être, further out into the world. But as a gentle introduction to the essence of the Dogfish, it is well-nigh perfect, as fresh as new-mown hay, with just enough bitterness to tickle the palate into life.
In the 12 years since he brewed his first batch of beer and announced to his smilingly disbelieving friends that he had just lit upon his life’s work, Calagione has succeeded in creating one of the fastest-growing breweries of the 1,400 in America and swept up a pretty haul of beer awards; he is now presiding over a $10 million expansion of his brewery. But he insists that Dogfish Head (named after a peninsula in Maine where his family had a summer cabin when he was a child) is about much more than dollars and cents.
Calagione traces the beginnings back to his first, life-altering encounter with quality microbrews at the New York restaurant where he worked. He recalls being “blown away that beer could taste so good.” He still talks of Sierra Nevada Bigfoot, Chimay Red and Anchor Liberty as tenderly as first loves, credits them with his passion for beer bursting with flavor and for the infinite subtleties to be conjured from the noble hop.
He set about concocting his own brews. He haunted the New York public library in search of brewing wisdom, worked briefly at Shipyard Brewery in Maine, put together a business plan that won over three eager investors: his doctor father, his orthodontist, and a man he built stone walls for one summer and converted to the cause.
By 1995, he had opened Dogfish Head Brewings & Eats in the little resort town of Rehoboth Beach. His first brewing kettle was a tiny little 10-gallon number that arrived in a UPS truck. Small beer, as they say, but its size meant that Calagione could experiment. He would make two or three batches a day, selling the result in the pub and changing the recipe whenever boredom set in. “We’d add apricots or licorice or coffee,” he says. “If it didn’t turn out well, we’d drink it ourselves.”
It generally turned out well. Soon, word of Dogfish Head’s ales and stouts began to filter out to the great world beyond, borne by vacationers returning to Philadelphia and Baltimore and New York and discovering they had developed a thirst that, absent a nearby Dogfish, was devilishly hard to slake.
Dogfish grew, steadily converting a large and growing following to the idea that in beer, too, taste matters. Calagione snapped up four 150-gallon steel tanks at a cannery auction, buying the compliance of the local farmers present with a few judiciously supplied gallons of ale. A little tinkering and he had a new brew plant.
There was soon a whole slew of new beers laced with new and unlikely ingredients, engagingly bottled and wittily named: oak-aged Immort Ale, exploding with flavor conjured from
vanilla, maple syrup and juniper berry; the dark and sultry Raison D’Être, combining green raisins, beet sugar and Belgian yeast; World Wide Stout, a dangerous little darling weighing in at 18 percent alcohol by volume. Every so often, the brewpub’s regulars would save Calagione from himself, a peppercorn and lavender ale igniting particular derision.
For all his success, Calagione swears he is not going to “dumb down” his beers as he goes. Sparkling new tanks aside, the Dogfish brewery still hums to a different rhythm. There are bocce courts outside for the use of visitors and staff. And the walls are daubed with snatches of the Dogfish credo: “Beer and Benevolence,” trumpets one, and another bears Emerson’s “Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist.”
Calagione’s myriad Rube Goldberg–style inventions are also in evidence, including Sir Hops Alot, the shuddering hop-box that holds 40 pounds of hops, which, when circulated into the beer every eight seconds during a process termed continuous hopping, produces his near-miraculous IPAs. The 60-minute and the 90-minute IPAs—at 6 percent and 9 percent alcohol—are his fastest-growing beers and testament in their massive hoppiness to the success of Calagione and microbrewers like him around the country in transforming the America brewing landscape.
It is in the brewpub, though, that the essence of Dogfish Head comes through strongest. At the bar is another contraption, Randall the Enamel Animal, a glorified pool filter loaded with hops through which the beer is pumped for superhopping before serving. Calagione says it gives the beer a taste “like fresh grass,” and he is right. He has sold almost 200 Randalls at cost to bars around the world, just to show the unsuspecting how tasty real beer can be. Among beer geeks, Randall is a legend.
In a far corner of the room, behind a big plate-glass window, Mike Gerhart, the distillery manager and pub brewer, is tinkering with what might be the next great beer in the Dogfish line. He has already concocted one brew, made of white grapes, honey, saffron and barley, based on residues found in a Turkish tomb thought to be that of King Midas. It became the award-winning Midas Touch, which has the sweet potency of a dessert wine.
Now Gerhart is working on another gift from the ancients, a 7,000-year-old brew salvaged from a Chinese tomb and containing rice, grapes, honey and chrysanthemums. Gerhart is worried, not that he cannot duplicate what was found, but that it will not sing on the modern palate. It is still early in the process. He draws a glass the color of honey, and it has the tart fruitiness of a Belgian geuze. He looks a little reassured.
Katie Muleh, assistant brewer and distiller, has her own experiment going on nearby, a spring wheat beer flavored with lavender, chamomile and dandelions that she hopes will taste “like flowers blooming.” Still an apprentice, Muleh has the happy fervor that seems to run in the genes at Dogfish. “I just love being in here, knowing the beer is coming to life in the tank,” she says. “In a way, it is more the beer bringing you alive than you helping the beer.”
It is a cheerful image, and one that also captures the relentless effort to coax spectacular new flavors from hops and barley that has always been the secret ingredient at Dogfish Ale. “I care a load more about making interesting beer than I do about growing the company,” says Calagione. “I love what I do, and fortunately a lot of people have caught on. But it has always been about the beer.”
It was a thought that stayed with me as I drove out of Rehoboth Beach the next morning, not just as a neat summation of what makes this wonderful little brewery what it is, but as an affirmation of one of life’s great shared pleasures, the simple joy of drinking a fine beer in good company. I may never get back to Delaware, but I doubt very much I’ll forget it. All I’ll have to do is find a Dogfish Head.
