Founder, Brewer of Dogfish Head & Director, BOSTON BEER INC -CL A
WILK Friday Beer Buzz 18 March 2016 - Dogfish Head Romantic Chemistry w/ Sam Calagione
WILK Friday Beer Buzz 18 March 2016 - Dogfish Head Romantic Chemistry w/ Sam Calagione.
About Samuel Calagione
Sam Calagione, co-founder of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery and a director at Boston Beer Company, has been active in several podcast interviews discussing the company's history, current market trends, and future plans. In a May 2026 interview, he described how he wrote the brewing and distilling statutes for Delaware after discovering it was illegal to open a brewery in the state, and noted that Dogfish Head's Milton facility now serves as the research and development hub for all of Boston Beer. He also discussed the company's 2019 merger with Boston Beer, stating that the portfolios were "more complimentary than competitive" and that the cultures aligned around a "people first" approach. In subsequent appearances, Calagione addressed industry challenges and innovations. On a June 2026 podcast, he mentioned that Dogfish Head is testing a new whiskey line through select beer wholesalers in coastal states, and observed that craft breweries with excess capacity are increasingly considering mergers with one another. He also commented on consumer behavior, noting that higher gas prices are affecting sales in convenience stores and that the price gap between on-premise and off-premise beer has become more pronounced. Calagione reiterated the company's founding philosophy of "original beer, original food, original music" and said that Dogfish Head continues to engage customers through grassroots marketing and education rather than traditional advertising.
Transcript (37 segments)
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Host0:02
Okay, now the two-time winner of the Pennsylvania Association of Broadcasters Award and the two-time winner of the Pennsylvania Associated Press Broadcasters Association Award. That's right. Promoting and advancing the crafted microbrew culture in Northeast Pennsylvania. Another edition of THE FRIDAY BEER BUZZ. AND THE FRIDAY Beer Buzz powered by Sabatinis and Exiter, one of the area's greatest selections of rare craft and imported beers. Growlers and Crowlers, a hand pump. Oh my. And 35 rotating drafts at Sabatini's Pizza and Sabatini's Bar and Bottle Shop, Wyoming Avenue exit. Here's Lindo Sabatini. Yay. Good morning, Lindo. It never gets old. I Oh my fantastic. Bill from mybeerbuzz.com. Happy Friday. I almost forgot it today. I know. A little delay, but that's There was a pregnant pause, but that was dramatic. Thinking about our guest and everything. Very excited for that. We have one tiny tidbit of news we have to break out there. It is big news. It involves two of our previous guests. Okay, from Cigar City. We had Wayne Wambles on. Cigar City got purchased and I know that's not the full technical term. There's a capital partner group involved in this, but thankfully they were purchased by another guest of ours on the show, Dale Ketchus from Oscar Blue. Oh, nice. Very good. So, very, very good news. We're excited about that. Excited to see what will come out of that collaboration. Perhaps it'll be a Texas style cage match. We can only hope. We have a guest joining us from Milton and Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. From Dogfish Head, we have Sam Calagione. Y Sam.
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Samuel Calagione1:30
Hey guys, how are you this morning?
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Host1:31
Oh, pretty good. Thanks for being on our show, Sam. Sam,
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Samuel Calagione1:33
my pleasure.
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Host1:35
I like to get the gushing portion of the show out of the way early. Uh, back in the mid-'90s, I was a brown ale kind of guy and so I enjoyed that sort of sweet caramelly kind of brown ales. And I discovered something called Dogfish Head India Brown Ale. And so I, good or bad, I blame you for my love of hops.
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Samuel Calagione1:55
Well, I got you. I got you headed over to the hop side instead of the dark side. That's good.
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Host2:00
Nice. And I've never come back. We're still over on the hoppy side. That's cool. You guys have done a bunch of interesting ventures. I know the Dogfish Head is one I'm excited to visit. But you just started something called the Chesapeake and Maine, a restaurant.
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Samuel Calagione2:18
Yeah. Well, it's a sort of a geographically enamored restaurant. So, all of our seafood, 100% is sourced as direct as possible from fishermen in those two regions, either from Chesapeake or Maine. And it's also a platform for some of our more exotic beers. It's adjacent to our brew pub and uses the same R&D brewery and distillery. So, we're featuring things like smoked raw oysters that we smoke the oysters in a pen. They eat smoked salt, so they taste smoky even though they're raw, paired with stuff like our Sequench ale, which is a hybrid beer brewed sequentially. It's a Kölsch that's fermented with a Berliner Weisse made with lime, that's fermented with a gose made with seawater from the Chesapeake.
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Host3:06
Wow. So, how do you stay? How do you not just spend every waking hour in there? I mean, like, you're killing me. I'm listening to you talk about that. I go, 'Oh, I'm getting in the car. I'm coming down.'
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Samuel Calagione3:16
Yeah. No, no, it's a special place for sure. And so yeah, I love my job. I'll say that.
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Host3:24
How about do you call that my work and go eat and drink those kinds of things?
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Samuel Calagione3:30
That's for sure.
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Host3:30
Do you wake up in the middle of the night, Sam, and say, 'I'm going to start with a Kölsch yeast and then it's going to go through a sort of being a gose and then maybe I'll sour it a little bit more.' I mean, where do these ideas come from?
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Samuel Calagione3:42
Yeah, that one for me was kind of like, how can I best give the middle finger to the Reinheitsgebot in the year of its 500th anniversary? Let's see. I think I'll take three traditional German beer styles and mash them up together and put some lime and salt in there.
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Host4:00
It's funny how you find inspiration in places like that, huh? Happy birthday to you. So, Sam, you have a new book out and a dog.
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Samuel Calagione4:10
My dog barking. Sorry about that.
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Host4:11
Your dog needs to go out.
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Samuel Calagione4:13
Yeah. Yeah. I'll move away from the dog.
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Host4:16
The dog is okay. The dog fits in the show really well.
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Samuel Calagione4:18
That's for sure. For sure.
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Host4:19
So, you have a new book out. It's called Off-centered Leadership. Tell us about the book because I think it's really interesting, the topics in the book.
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Samuel Calagione4:27
Yeah. I mean basically it's about my company's journey from a very small entrepreneurial company where me and my wife is the mom and pops leading the company wore a lot of different hats to our company has since grown to be one of the largest in the mid-Atlantic, I think the largest independent craft brewery in the mid-Atlantic now, and how we've been fortunate to bring other wonderful leaders with very complimentary skills to mine, Mariah, to join our company. And so it's about collaboration. Dogfish Head's always believed that there's more karma that comes with focusing on collaboration instead of competition both internally and externally as we navigate our way through the beer marketplace.
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Host5:15
Yeah. You know, but I mean early on it's got to be kind of scary because I know you have vision and talent and all that, but you still have to, there's a confidence factor. I'm reading your story on your website and you're talking about trying to get this brewery off the ground and your wife is actually still working a full-time job, right?
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Samuel Calagione5:34
Yeah, exactly. You know, Mariah, we had to she had to work her job so we had her insurance while I started the brewery because I couldn't afford insurance. A lot of startup entrepreneurs go through the same challenges we did. So we weren't unique in that but we have been fairly unique in that we've been able to build a business where we started with this semi-eccentric premise that a brewery can focus on beers made with culinary ingredients and sustain its way in the marketplace. And there were great first generation craft brewers like Sierra Nevada and Sam Adams that came before us and helped create a path for breweries like ours, but ours was really the first one to focus on exotic ingredients in the majority of beers that a brewery brews. So, we're really proud of our role in that niche within the craft brewing niche.
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Host6:25
And I love the focus on collaboration and not competition. And I know that becomes increasingly more difficult in this highly competitive beer market. But I'm excited to see that craft brewers seem to maintain that spirit of collaboration way more than many other industries.
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Samuel Calagione6:44
Yeah, I think that's definitely true. And certainly we're heading into the most competitive moment in the craft brewing sector that I've seen in my 21 years as a professional brewer. But for example, this year we're doing collaborative beers with a little brewery close to us called Burley Oak, with Other Half in New York, Trillium in Boston, Sierra Nevada. So Dogfish is still very much proud to be working with our brethren in this industry instead of focusing on competing against them.
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Host7:15
And you guys definitely fly the flag for small independent craft beer and I congratulate you for that, especially in this market. We have two of your beers sitting in front of us.
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Samuel Calagione7:28
I have one and a half.
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Host7:29
Yeah, I was going to say we're excited to get to them, but I think we probably already got to them. Our first one is called Romantic Chemistry IPA. First tell us about the name for Romantic Chemistry.
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Samuel Calagione7:40
Sure. I think we were the first brewery to do a fruit-infused IPA. We started with April Hop in 1997 and we've got a 10-gallon brewery, a two barrel brewery, a 100 barrel brewery, a 200 barrel brewery. So we have great capabilities to do R&D in our company. And so, we loved April Hop and we brewed it for 19 years in a row. We said, in our little research batches, we learned about this chemical compound called myrcene. And myrcene is a naturally occurring chemical compound that brings notes of citrusy and piney notes out of whatever contains it. And we learned in our trial batches that myrcene is prevalent in mangoes, apricots, and hops. So we said, let's try combining these in equal taste and aroma thresholds and see what we get. And that is why the beer is called Romantic Chemistry. It's about this chemical compound we are seeing found in the apricots, the mangoes, and the hops that are forward in this beer, this fruit IPA. And I was a huge fan of April Hop, one of my favorite beers. I love the IPAs that bring back that sort of mangoey, peachy, apricot kind of flavor. So this one's right up my alley. This is a spring seasonal, Sam. This is sort of a rotating season. Yeah, just exactly. It just hit the shelves March 1 and it should be around here for another month or two. So people should seek out the four-packs of Romantic Chemistry now because it's selling really well. Won't last for too long.
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Host9:18
And it is 7.2% ABV and 40 IBU. I think a very drinkable beer. I know the 7% will probably sneak up on you, but I think it's right down the middle for me on drinkable IPAs and nice hoppy IPAs. And we should give a shout out to the artwork on this bottle, Sam, because it's gorgeous. I can't believe how well it's selling for us. I mean we put it out two weeks ago and it's just been flying. We reordered it twice. Really awesome. It's excellent. Outstanding. I love hearing that. And the artist is Drew Millard and he does a lot of rock posters. He does the Fish and he does Foo Fighters as well. Really great. Radiohead as well. Yeah, really, and a segue into our next beer because our next beer is sort of a play on words and it involves music. Our next beer is Dogfish Head Beer to Drink Music 2. First again tell us about the name because the name sort of flows off your tongue but then you realize it's backwards.
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Samuel Calagione10:29
Exactly. Well, Dogfish Head has been the official sponsor of Record Store Day, now our second year in a row, which is independent record stores across America have very similar challenges to indie craft breweries. We're up against Anheuser-Busch and Heinekens and Coronas of the world, whereas they're up against Amazon and Spotify and iTunes. So for us to help bring attention to this passionate community when we're as much music geeks here at Dogfish as we are beer geeks was a great opportunity. So we do an album with Sony Legacy where I curate the album of really good songs that are great to drink beer to, and this year we got Patty Smith to contribute a song, Lou Reed's estate, OutKast. So the album is called Music to Drink Beer To, and we thought it would be fun to release, coordinated with that, a beer called Beer to Drink Music To. So you can drink the beer while you listen to the album. The beer itself has great music DNA in it. We took some of our favorite songs and added them as ingredients. So there's orange peel in this beer. It's a Belgian triple, but it's made with orange peels as a shout-out to Orange Crush, pink peppercorns as a shout-out to Sergeant Pepper's, and even has a little cardamom in it as a shout-out to this Stew Fish song.
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Host11:58
And I know the music force at Dogfish Head is very strong. The force is very strong with you guys. This is a classic spicy Belgian triple. Really nice. 9% this one will get your attention. 30 IBU, but still a very drinkable, very nice beer. And I love the concept of it. Well, thanks. And Sam, do you appear on the record, too? I know you have a rap history.
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Samuel Calagione12:20
Yeah. No, no, I'm keeping my day job as a brewer. My rap career is not advancing as quickly.
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Host12:28
We're enjoying Dogfish Head Romantic Chemistry and Beer to Drink Music To. Founder and president of Dogfish Head, Sam Calagione, our guest this morning. Sam, thank you for being on the show. Sam.
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Samuel Calagione12:36
Thank you, Sam. My pleasure, guys. Thanks for having me.
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Host12:39
You bet. So long. The Friday Beer Buzz powered by Sabatinis and Exiter, one of the area's greatest selections of rare craft and imported beers. Growlers and Crowlers, a hand pump, and 35 rotating drafts at Sabatinis Pizza and Sabatini's Bar and Bottle Shop, Wyoming Avenue exit. This is the Friday Beer Buzz, bringing good beers to good people together.