The Music Lab Podcast 5.42 Sam Calagione Interview

I am wonderful. This is kismet. When Dog and Dogfish Head collide, who will prevail? Both of us. I hope.

No. Is that a good one?

Oh jeez. I got to see that. That's never happened to me, though.

It makes the gray hairs on my chin tingle because I started, I've never really had another job. I started working on the business plan after graduating from college. I went to New York City and was taking some writing courses, working at a beer bar, not knowing it was a beer bar. I just went in to get a job at a bar, but it was a first generation craft beer bar and I fell in love with good beer. Within six months I bought a homebrew kit and started writing the business plan for Dogfish. So I've been really lucky to make my passion my vocation the entire way. Time flies when you're having fun or 60-minute IPA.

Oh, it was amazing. I mean, just seeing shows and seeing Jeff Buckley at Sin-é and all the jam bands, like Blues Traveler and Spin Doctors playing tiny rooms there. And I just got really lucky. I moved in with these guys that we had mutual friends and they happened to be in a comedy group at NYU called The State. Right when we started moving in together, they got greenlit to do a show on MTV. So we were hanging out with all the folks on MTV. Craig Wedren from Shudder to Think became a good friend from that era. And it's full circle because a bunch of the guys had a great career, made movies like Wet Hot American Summer, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Reno 911. Now a bunch of them are traveling as a band called The Middle Aged Dad Jam Band and they sometimes travel with Weird Al Yankovic and a bunch of other cast of characters. So I've been really lucky to have all these creative people as part of my life since I started home brewing.

Well, I grew up kind of in the middle of nowhere. I was born in Queens, New York City, but my parents moved to the hills of western Massachusetts when I was 2 years old. I always proudly say I'm from New York. Being nowhere near a city, on the border of Vermont, the one thing that made me really lucky is again, this is the '90s, and to quote the great Minneapolis punk band The Replacements, they have a song called Left of the Dial. It's all about those indie and college stations that you'd find between 88 and 91 on your FM dial. Living in Western Mass, I could get the high school and radio stations for Hampshire College, UMass, Smith, Amherst. So I would spend my nights as a pre-teen just wandering the dial and I'd hear a hip-hop show from two kids from the Bronx that were at UMass, and then a punk rock show by these crazy women at Smith. It made me realize there were all these genres of music out there that weren't just top 40. That really informed my journey as a music lover.

When what do you mean which trek down to Delaware?

Yeah, I do. There was a song that we ended up using for when we did a show on the Discovery Channel by the Replacements called Beer for Breakfast. But I remember the first day I plugged in my brewing system in coastal Delaware and was, boom, the first day I was actually a professional brewer. I try to always listen to front-to-back albums in the brew house and the first one was Bee Thousand by Guided by Voices. That was a full circle moment when we got to collaborate with Robert Pollard and the band maybe 12 years ago on Beer Thousand. I think it was the 20th anniversary of that epic album. So I definitely remember that as the first album we played in the brew house.

Yeah. So, my son's now as big a music head as I am and we share a love of Grateful Dead and punk rock. He's a 25-year-old sous chef at a fancy restaurant up here in Maine, but he has the musical taste of like a 64-year-old environmental lawyer. He's like Dylan and Phish and stuff like that. But I remember when Robert Pollard and Guided by Voices came and played Dogfish, I took him for a tour through the brewery and Robert Pollard walked right up to the bottling line and we were bottling the Miles Davis beer that we did called Bitches Brew and it comes in a giant 750 ml champagne bottle. He just grabs it off the bottling line. Totally. That one. Holy shit. You're giving me flashbacks, dog. Hell yeah. So he grabbed that bottle right off the bottling line and just started pounding it. Then he got on stage like two hours later and the show was too big to play in our room, so I rented out an old theater in Milton that hadn't been open for music. It had only been open for movies. So Guided by Voices plugs in, turns the amps to 11. The room's vibrating so much that the gold leaf paint on the ceiling is chipping off from the bass sounds. It looked like we were all standing in a snow globe. We're all drinking our faces off and paint is falling through the room as they played. Robert Pollard kept passing a bottle of tequila to me from the stage. He fell off the stage that night. They set up a full service bar on the stage. My son after the show got a poster signed by Robert, and Robert forgot that he also signed one for my son before the show. On the car ride home, my son was looking at both of them and said, 'Dad, how come the poster Robert Pollard signed after the show looked like a person's heartbeat that went into cardiac arrest where it just flatlined after like two bumps in it? Because he'd been having such a good time on stage last night, I don't think he could write anymore.'

Yeah, probably. I could tell you so many. The most prolific artist that I have paintings of from the music world is a musician named Jon Langford, who is in the famous first generation UK punk band The Mekons, coming out of Leeds, England in the late '70s. Fear and Whiskey is an album I'd recommend to your listeners by The Mekons. So I have a lot by him, but maybe the favorite is here in my cabin in Maine. I have a painting of a diver, like a 19th century diver, that was painted by Shane MacGowan from The Pogues. I bought it at a gallery. He had a show. I just missed his wife at the show. This was a year before he died. The gallerist said, 'Oh, you just missed Shane's wife.' I said, 'Well, I think I'm going to buy this painting.' Funny story she told me about that painting: Shane MacGowan took acid and was listening to the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds when he painted that. He cracked the 33 and a third album of Pet Sounds with a hammer and started eating it. He loved the album so much when he was on LSD that he wanted to ingest Pet Sounds so it became part of his body. He did that while painting the painting that hangs in our kitchen above my stereo system. So that one's probably the dearest to my heart.

Yeah. As you said, it was one of the pillars. In fact, our sort of holy trinity was from the day we opened as the smallest commercial brewery in America in 1995. Our rallying cry was original beer, original food, original music. As you mentioned, at beach towns up and down the east coast, Jimmy Buffett cover bands are a dime a dozen. We had that in coastal Delaware and we said, you know what, we're going to do something where we only invite people where over 90% of what music they played was their own songs. We would have local acts that would kick ass sometimes, some would implode on stage, but then we'd get a lot of national acts on their way up or on their way down. We had The Strokes and Geese and Goose on their way up, and we had PM Dawn and Vic Chesnutt, rest in peace, on their way down. We had a whole litany of artists from across so many different genres. It's super cool to me. We have a whole wall as an homage to all the bands that played Dogfish that kind of made it, whether it was Japanese Breakfast or Chicano Batman. So it's a big part of our DNA. As we evolved from just booking original bands to collaborating with them, it really helped establish our bona fides as real music fans to talk to Miles Davis's family about having Nathan and the Zydeco Cha Chas play our stage, or Preservation Hall Jazz Band. It created real connections with musicians that led to really deep collaborative projects where it wasn't just about them on the stage but literally envisioning and creating beers together and labels together with so many artists. That has been central to our brand's distinction among 10,000 beer brands in the country, and also to our success.

Yeah, that room, as you know, was very small, very intimate, low ceiling. Maybe we get 140 people in there on a good day. The sound was wonderful. It was a very warm wood because it was all wood with wood rafters. It was a sweet spot of sound. We would ply the musicians with free beer all afternoon while they were loading in and make sure they would go home with a ton of beer. We had more beer than money in those days, so we were very liberal with the alcohol on the way in and on the way out, which made for some wonderfully loose gigs on our stage. The stage was only like 12 inches off the ground and we would pull the tables out and put them upstairs. So the audience and the act were essentially in this great equilibrium. It was very personal and passionate. I can remember so many shows where afterwards the artists would say, 'I haven't played a room this small in 5 years, but I had an absolute blast. Thank you for letting us come and play.' I used to let the artists stay in my house when I couldn't afford hotel rooms. There were some crazy nights back at home keeping the party going with Will Oldham, who records as Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, and The Handsome Family from Chicago would stay at my house. There was no separation of church and state when it came to how we embraced the artists that came through Dogfish Head.

Yeah. I have so much heart for touring musicians or just musicians in general right now. When you put the economics of a world that's shifted to primarily streaming into that mix, it becomes even more challenging. If I love an album, I'm very lucky that the brewery's been successful enough that I don't need to worry about paying my electric bill. So if I love an album, my wife's given me permission every month to go out and buy that album on vinyl because that is the way to buy music that usually gets the most percentage of that purchase into the artist's pocket versus streaming services that line the pockets of the executives and shareholders.

For those of you listeners that haven't gotten to visit Dogfish Head's music room, it's in downtown Rehoboth Beach. It's on the same piece of property that our original beautiful little wooden pub was, but that pub was really antiquated. It was super hot, like 110 degrees to work in the kitchen because we cook over a wood grill and wood oven. It was very uncomfortable for our co-workers even though it was a lovely place to drink beer and listen to shows. So we bit the bullet maybe eight or nine years ago and built a from the ground up state-of-the-art new pub. It had no more seats than the old pub, seats the same amount of people, but has a really comfortable air conditioned kitchen for my co-workers and a way more elaborate stage than the first one. A true stage. When you walk in there, you can tell it was a room that was purpose-designed for live music shows. The stage really is the centerpiece. If we're not having a show and there's a World Cup match on, we'll put other stuff on the big screen on the stage, but we shut all the screens off and give the artists the respect when we have live music on that stage.

Yeah, totally. I mentioned the jam bands in New York. There's a small club called Wetlands that had a very funky interior. I became good friends with the owner Pete Shapiro, who also owns Relix Magazine and all the Brooklyn Bowls. He's a great friend. But I did rip off some of the more quixotic and down and dirty graffiti-ish vibes from places like Wetlands and CBGBs to start Dogfish Head.

I'll tell you one that stood out in a bad way and one that stood out in a great way. A great way would be having The Modern Lovers play Dogfish. Literally, other than the Velvet Underground or the Ramones, I don't think there's an artist that personified the birth of punk quite as much. That one was meaningful, existential as a punk rock lover to have him and the band on my stage. But another crazy one was randomly we had these Spanish-speaking folks, very eloquent, show up and say, 'Hey, we've heard you guys have booked all these famous national artists. We are the Gipsy Kings and we have a night off and we're here on vacation in Delaware after playing Philly or New York. We would love to take your stage for $1,000 for an acoustic set.' I was like, 'Holy shit, that's so cool.' I looked on the internet and saw that the Gipsy Kings really did play in Philly or New York the night before. So we said, 'Fuck it,' put the show on, took flyers all around town because we had no time to promote. They played an amazing set, just three guys and their flamenco guitars. But the next morning I got to the brewery and I'm opening it up, this is still in the era of fax machines, must have been around '98 or '99. A fax comes through with Sony or EMI letterhead, some big record label, and they're like, 'We understand that you promoted a show last night by the Gipsy Kings. Those people were not the Gipsy Kings.' So it was a fake Gipsy Kings band going around the country doing fake shows, but they were such good musicians that people believed it. I just thought it was hilarious that they played as the Gipsy Kings because they were really like gypsies and they were kings at their subterfuge.

No, no, thankfully for them. The Pain Relievers is the name of my beer geek hip-hop band that I'm in with our longest tenured brewer, Bryan Selders. We like to say we're probably the finest beer geek hip-hop band of our generation. We're also the only beer geek hip-hop band of our generation.

Yeah, it was. We just played at the Craft Brewers Conference, a three-set in Philly like two months ago. But the absolute pinnacle of our career was the same night that it was probably the absolute bottom. What's the artist that does 'Wild Thing'? West Coast rapper. Tone Loc. So the Pain Relievers got to open for Tone Loc at a beautiful theater, I think in Portland, Oregon or Seattle. We love Tone Loc, he was awesome. His rider was that he wanted wings from Hooters and every different colored Gatorade. We loved that as a rider. So now the Pain Relievers ask for that wherever we play. There's a great video that somebody took of us going off the stage and Tone Loc going on the stage. They say, 'Hey Tone Loc, what do you think of the Pain Relievers?' He goes, 'Oh, they're really nice guys.' He listened to us playing, singing our hearts out, and he tried to say something nice. The only thing he could say nice about our rapping skills was that we were nice guys, but we'll take it.

Own people. So good. So yeah, that was fun. If people go to YouTube and look up Pain Relievers, the last word spelled V-A-Z-V-A-Z at the end, you'll see some really fun music videos that we've done throughout the years.

Yeah, so many. I would say Hall of Famer, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Joan Jett was existential for me because that was the first concert I ever saw. Then I got to interview her. I do a quarterly interview series for Creem magazine, which I grew up reading Creem, Rolling Stone, and Relix. I've gotten to collaborate with all three of those amazing music publications. That's been really heartwarming. I would also say getting an email from Phil Lesh from the Grateful Dead after he'd seen a show we'd done about Miles Davis. He reached out and said, 'Hey, we'd love to do something with you in the Grateful Dead.' When we launched our first Grateful Dead beer like 12 years ago, American Beauty, we launched it at a room called Terrapin Station, named after a Dead album, up in the Bay Area that he and his sons, who are also amazing musicians, run. Meeting him that night, he came out and said, 'Hey Sam, I got a brand new liver. I can't drink, but I smoked one up in your honor. Believe me, my sons are having plenty of your beers on that stage tonight. We're glad you're here.' That was a pretty heartwarming moment as a big Deadhead.

Yeah. Now it's super rewarding. It's probably the most robust, intricate, dynamic, longest tenured music collaboration we have ever or will ever do. Now the centerpiece, rest in peace Phil, the centerpiece of that relationship is the relationship between myself and David Lemieux, who's the Grateful Dead's archivist and historian. I was just texting with him yesterday to celebrate a new track released by the great band Ween. They're doing an extended album release for the anniversary of their country album. They put out a song about Jerry Garcia passing on. I shared that with David Lemieux and we had a great chat about it. So it's been the most rewarding, robust, multifaceted music collaboration we've ever done. There's a text thread with me, my son Sammy who's 25, a huge Deadhead, his best friend Dash, a filmmaker who's a Deadhead, and David Lemieux. We keep running lists of underrated live tracks from the Grateful Dead. From that text thread, every year we work with Record Store Day and Dogfish Head, and now three times in a row we've released collaborative Grateful Dead Dogfish Head albums on Record Store Day featuring live tracks that my son and Dave Lemieux and I curate ourselves. That's a really fun component, not to mention the beautiful recipes themselves. We decided to not just do them as a one-off in a big fancy champagne bottle, but as everyday drinkable beers. Now our Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale, last year it was the fastest growing craft beer in all of America from any craft brewery. That one's off to a great trajectory. This year we came out with a companion beer. The first one, the Juicy Pale Ale, is an ale, but this year we came out with Citrus Daydream. That's a lager infused with lime and fonio, which is a fruity African grain.

No, I think it's actually the other way around. I think Miles was the first one because Phil Lesh saw the show about Miles Davis. That show that we did. And I think maybe the one we did with Pearl Jam came out before the first Grateful Dead one as well. We did a beer celebrating the 10th anniversary of their first album, Ten.

Wow.

96. So The Bends wasn't out yet, but none of their most iconic albums were out yet.

Well, I see your Radiohead poster behind you. They're one of my favorite bands too. Like you, when I saw Joan Jett, she was opening for Bob Seger. I can appreciate Bob Seger now, but I was more excited to see Joan Jett. I'm guessing the same is for you between Radiohead and Alanis Morissette, not to throw any shade. But I do have to say not everything goes perfectly. The Miles one did, the Grateful Dead ones obviously have, I mentioned Guided by Voices, I can go on and on. But the Pearl Jam one was a little disappointing because basically they reached out to us, it was a manager not the band. They said, 'Hey, Eddie Vedder's a big fan of what you guys are doing. He saw the Miles thing and wants to do this with you.' I was like, 'This is awesome, but if we do it, we would love to work directly with Eddie so it's an authentic, equal creative input collaboration.' They said, 'Yeah, definitely, Eddie's all in.' I'm sure he had really good intentions, but they had so many things going on around the 10th anniversary of that album that at the end of the day, I got one sentence email from Eddie saying, 'Hey Sam, love what you did with the Miles Davis thing. For Pearl Jam, when you come up with a recipe, we mostly drink Pinot Noir red wine and Coronas. Can you make something that tastes like a blend of those?' That's all I got for creative guidance. So we did a beer made with black currants that gave it a red wine character, and we made it the same color and the same hopping level as Corona. But compared to the super in-depth collaborations we've done with The Flaming Lips and Grateful Dead, that Pearl Jam one was more superficial, frankly. The karma made it so the beer wasn't as exciting as some of the others. It was a good learning experience. We're still proud to have worked with that legendary band that we love, but we wish we could do that collaboration over.

Yeah. Dan the Automator from Deltron 3030 has stayed a good friend. When he named his kid Miles, that's how that one started too. Miles Davis is kind of the connector in so many of these. When we created a beer together with Dan the Automator, having learned from the Pearl Jam challenge, I said, 'Dan, I'd love to do this beer with you, but we're going to need to meet in person and drink together and create this beer together for me to want to do it.' He said, 'Cool. I'm in NYC.' He mostly lives in Cali. He gave me a day in NYC that I could get up there. I met him at the rooftop of Eataly, which is the great store that has a brewery that we helped design on the rooftop in New York City. I brought a cheese grater with me, different beers, ciders, wines, and all these herbs and spices. I started grating or chopping up different culinary ingredients and making tinctures of them with beers and ciders. That's how we aligned on that recipe that ended up being a beer-cider hybrid with him. The other really cool component of that collaboration is he's a huge foodie. So I reached out to a bunch of my chef friends and heroes, David Chang, Mario Batali, and a few others, and sent them samples of the beer and said, 'Create a recipe.' Deltron 3030 came out with an EP of all these special remixes of four songs to go with the recipe of the beer and to go with the four course dinner provided by the recipes from these four luminary chefs. When you bought a case of that beer, it came with the vinyl EP in the case, and on the sleeve of the LP were the recipes from these four famous chefs so that you could create a killer dinner party where you're playing the album, drinking the beer, and pairing it with the recipes. That was a really exciting and unique collaboration for its time.

Yeah. For your listeners that might not know, it's a new school digital jukebox platform where a lot of great music-centric restaurants and bars set up their TouchTunes station. If there's not live music on the stage or they're not a music venue, they just like to have good music that the customers can help curate what's being played on the sound system. Being a brewery with a music problem, we thought this is super cool. Let's sponsor a TouchTunes national program. We have like 4,000 participating venues. We curated a list with David Lemieux of Dead songs that's part of it. People can go into an account and earn a gift card from Dogfish Head to hang out with their friends and curate a list of songs they're going to listen to. As you said, this is an era when 21 to 31 year olds are drinking less alcohol than their cohorts of the same age group from the last five decades. So it's our way of trying to encourage younger people that might be more inclined to just netflix and chill in their house with one friend to say, 'You know what, tonight, Tuesday night, Thursday night, I'm going to go out to this bar with a bunch of friends and we're going to have a blast and socialize and play a bunch of great music to bring us even closer together.' We just love the concept of it as a movable feast that at the heart is designed to bring music lovers together in a real space to enjoy each other's company over really good beers.

No, I don't have a healthy relationship with it. I really want to work on my relationship with the robots in general. I'm trying to designate certain hours of the day, usually in the evenings. But for example, my ritual in the morning is I go to Pitchfork, Stereogum, BrooklynVegan, The Quietus. There's probably four or five music sites, Rolling Stone, Creem. Over my coffee, I get my music fix because every morning after that ritual moment, I decide what I'm going to listen to that day.

I consider myself a water mammal forced to live on land. I have my most creative ideas in a kayak or on a paddle board. Every morning I paddle board for an hour while listening to an album on headphones. In the evenings I try to let my phone die and spin vinyl, talk to family. I ask musicians about their ideal way to listen to music: headphones, car, living room, or live music?

Chris Lash, other than myself and Mariah, is the longest tenured person to get a paycheck from Dogfish Head. He's acted as our music advisor since 1996, helping us get artists into our room. He's a musician and beer geek who travels for beer. He established our live music program and still books 10 to 20 shows a year for us.

There's always great new music coming out. The discovery platforms change. The economics have shifted – Live Nation, Spotify, Amazon have made it harder for musicians in terms of revenue, but easier for listeners to discover music. The model has reversed: albums used to drive touring, now touring is the economic engine and streaming is promotion. It's a topsy-turvy world, but it's a great time to be a music lover because all of music history is at your fingertips.

We had hundreds of employees in hospitality. We shifted to to-go and ecom models. We couldn't have live music, so we sponsored virtual concerts with bands like Mount Joy. It was better than nothing but doesn't touch being in the room. We were glad when we could book live music again. Massive thanks to fans who supported us during that time.

That was my idea. There's a rustic way of serving beer called a beer engine – it's an analog way to serve draft beer without CO2. I thought, what's the music equivalent? Vinyl. So I combined my love of analog beer and analog music. We invite indie record stores and other analog vendors to set up at the brewery. This year's early November, check dogfish.com. One of the OG hip-hop bands is headlining.

We're on our 11th or 12th year as the official brewery of Record Store Day. The indie record store struggles mirror those of independent craft breweries – both up against global juggernauts. We identify an artist to create the official poster and release exclusive albums. Record Store Day now has two tent poles a year, in April and Black Friday. Bands like Metallica and Taylor Swift participate to support indie stores. We feel the same way at Dogfish Head.

In Delaware, I can walk to Vintage Underground in Lewes or bike/boat to Extended Play in Rehoboth. My daughter worked at Vintage Underground. In Maine, I'm on an island, but I can take a boat to a vintage bookstore in Bath that has used records. It's easier in Delaware.

Probably not. We were lucky to start in a quiet area without a developed craft beer scene. If we'd opened in NYC, Philly, Denver, or Portland, I think we wouldn't have made it. Being in coastal Delaware, two hours from DC, Baltimore, Philly, three from Manhattan, we could serve big markets without paying metro rent. It was a godsend.

When I started Dogfish Head, we were the only brewery in the state. Now there are five breweries between my pub and my house. The Route One corridor has grown from farms to supermarkets. Craft beer has gone from a niche genre to the heart of American culture, like hip-hop and punk rock.

In 1976, the Ramones' first album launched punk rock. That same year, the first woman in hip-hop was featured on an album and SNL with Funky 4+1. Also, Jack McAuliffe opened the first from-scratch craft brewery in America, New Albion. These three American art genres started at the same time. I wrote about that for Rolling Stone's July 4th issue, alongside essays by Obama. I'm very proud of that.

I used to buy Rolling Stone at the Inkwell in Greenfield, Massachusetts. Rolling Stone reached out to us because they saw what we were doing with bands. Now we have a wonderful relationship – we're doing a collaborative whiskey, the official brewery of their Stateside festival, and I wrote that article. The CEO Julian and I are scheming bigger collaborations next year.

I hope so. I had a blast in Austin. I feel at home there.

I'm super disorganized, probably have undiagnosed ADD. I'm most thankful for my wife Mariah who keeps the household running. My co-workers amplify my creative projects. I'm just one of many on the Dogfish team. I'm lucky I get to contribute on the creative side while others handle HR, spreadsheets, etc.

Surrounding myself with good people is at the heart. Mariah was the original digital voice of the company, grew our social media to 1.2 million followers. She also developed Beer and Benevolence. It was also timing – we started in 1995 before craft beer was cool, and the culinary world became celebrated as art. We benefited from the moment.

Our national sales leader Brian McNeel keeps his pulse on venues. We focus on smaller indie venues rather than giants like Madison Square Garden. SoFar Sound is about supporting independent venues. It's similar to our Record Store Day approach – we believe in the indie entrepreneur's journey.

Record Store Day and band collaborations were happening before the merger. But Boston Beer helped us negotiate like a bigger brewery and provided data-driven metrics we weren't good at before. We still come into meetings as music lovers first. Jim Cook appreciated our art-focused approach. The merger was symbiotic.

I do. My buddy Dean, publisher of Relics magazine, wrote a book about that dynamic centered on Live Nation. It's great to see attention and action in DC. We're hopeful for a more level playing field.

No, definitely not. I'm not a good manager of people and not good at accountability. I don't keep my word on timelines. I have hats off to politicians, but that's not for me.

I didn't know it was illegal to open a brewery in Delaware. I had to work with a local lawyer to write new statutes and argue on the floor of the Senate and House. That gave me a lot of respect for politicians. I wouldn't want to be a legislator, but we wrote the laws for craft distilling and brew pubs.

Exactly. I have to go FaceTime about dry hopping a beer in two minutes. That's my excuse to also drink the beer.