Episode 202

Sam Calagione on the Past and Future of Craft Beer

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Sam Calagione on the Past and Future of Craft Beer

Episode 202

What’s shakin’ cocktail fans?

Welcome to Episode 202 of The Modern Bar Cart Podcast!

This time around, we talk about what for many people is the on-ramp to distilled booze and mixed drinks: that lovely liquid we call beer.

Our guide is James Beard Award winning brewer Sam Calagione, founder of Dogfish Head Brewery. They’re headquartered in beautiful, coastal Delaware, but you can find their beers on shelves and in tap rooms across the country. Every once in a while, you know we like to take a break from the hard stuff and the mixed stuff to return to our roots in the fermented beverage world so that we can get a fuller view of what’s happening in the drinks space as a whole, and in this conversation, we do just that.

In this interview with Dogfish Head Brewery founder Sam Calagione, some of the topics we discuss include:

How Sam took his creativity from the writer’s workshop to the brewery, scaling Dogfish Head from the smallest commercial brewery in America to a top 20 craft brand over the course of two decades.
What it means to make “off-centered ales for off centered people,” which requires us to travel back in time over 500 years to the publication of the reinheitsgebot – Bavaria’s infamous beer purity law.
How Sam invented the practice of continual hopping using a vibrating football game that now resides in the Smithsonian.
Why Dogfish Head’s acquisition by the Boston Beer Company was like a merging of kindred, yet complementary souls.
What the future holds for Sam and his beer, including tropical fruit farming in South Florida, art and music collaborations, and much, much more.

The nucleus of this conversation is about how to scale creativity. It’s something we’ve always admired in the beers from this brand because it’s usually something that gets swept under the rug and sacrificed for profit when a brewery or distillery gets as big as Dogfish Head has grown to be. Sam shares his secrets for cultivating a competitive, yet creative work culture that pursues innovation using culinary ingredients.

FEATURED COCKTAIL: THE ARROWHEAD LIMITED

This episode’s featured cocktail is the Arrowhead Limited. Developed by bartender Damon Boelte (of the New York bar, Grand Army), this delicious drink pairs mezcal and bitter, aromatized ingredients with a hoppy IPA to achieve crisp, hoppy perfection. To make the Arrowhead Limited, you’ll need:

1/2 ounce mezcal (preferably Del Maguey Vida)
1/2 ounce Campari
1 ounce Carpano Antica vermouth
3 – 4 ounces of your favorite IPA – something like Dogfish Head 60 minute IPA

In a large highball glass (or a pint glass) with ice, combine all your liquid ingredients, making sure to add the beer last, give the drink a quick, gentle stir with a straw, then garnish with a grapefruit slice and enjoy.

One nice thing about the Arrowhead Limited is that it bucks the current trend of beertails being exclusively relegated to the “session drink” category. Don’t get us wrong – we love a good sessionable beer, but if that’s the ONLY way we think about beer in the cocktail space, we’re very much imposing a limitation on our creativity. Is it tempting to just put a shot of Campari in your beer (making something referred to alternately as a “Hobo Negroni” or “Spaghett”)? Absolutely. But, Damon Boelte’s boozier, more complex approach to the “cerveza con aperitivo” format begs the simple, yet universal question: what if a mezcal negroni and a beer had a baby…and you drank it?

SHOW NOTES

We covered a lot of ground in this interview, but we’ve assembled some of the most important links and pictures below so that you can soak up even more off-centered goodness.

To locate where you can enjoy a pour, can, or bottle of your favorite Dogfish Head beer in your neck of the woods, check out Dogfish Head’s Fish Finder.
Dogfish Head’s main brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. They also operate a Brewpub in Rehoboth Beach, an inn located in Lewes, DE, and a newly-opened brewpub in Miami. Check out all their locations to plan your next visit.
If you’d like to learn more about the 25+ years of Dogfish Head’s history, including the beers that made them famous, check out the upcoming Dogfish Head Book (pictured below), set to release this fall.
Not a beer drinker? No problem. Dogfish Head is releasing an entire lineup of Ready-to-Drink (RTD) canned cocktails made using their own distilled spirits and (of course) culinary flavors and ingredients.

This episode was made possible with editing and sound design by Samantha Reed, and craft beer and business insights courtesy of Sam Calagione and Dogfish Head Brewery.This has been a Modern Bar Cart production, copyright 2021.

This episode is also brought to you by Near Country Provisions. If you live in the Mid-Atlantic and want to enjoy ethically raised (and delicious) meat from local farmers delivered to your door every month, then you need Near Country in your life.

Head over to NearCountry.com and enter the code BARCART when you sign up for your subscription to receive 2 free pounds of bacon or ground beef in your first delivery.

Sam Calagione on the Past and Future of Craft Beer

FEATURED COCKTAIL: THE ARROWHEAD LIMITED

SHOW NOTES

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