All right, hello and welcome to the Beer Temple podcast. I'm your co-host Mike Schow, is was brewing, and I'm here with Chris Quinn of The Beer Temple, your other host. Chris, how are you doing?
Doing well, just letting Serge fade that in perfectly. As everyone listening, they knew they can just tell from the subtle fade, thoughtful, subtle but thoughtful crisp fade, perfect fade that Serge is definitely in the house. And I'm not also playing producer tonight, so maybe we'll find that out with some other... yeah, apologies in advance. So yeah, we're back in studio, BT MH, and yeah, we've got some guests here, we got some virtual guests today. But before we get to that, people love the banter, that's all the feedback we get, people love the banter, love the meandering old school radio show like banter.
Yes, yeah, that was the feedback. So how are you on this crisp Chicago day?
I'm great, Chris. I got my identity stolen yesterday, which honestly, like, terrible person to choose. You stole a lot of debt, bud. So I've been on the phone with various banks cancelling every single credit card and debit card, and it feels very weird to basically have the same banking system as like the 60s. What do you mean I have to go to the bank and ask them and say, 'May I have my money please?' and then they like give us some proof and I'll be like, 'I don't have the card you gave me anymore.' Right, so and it's my wife's birthday coming up in a couple days, so we'll see if I'm able to even buy her dinner. I'm sorry, yeah, I'm killing, I'm doing a great job at life in general.
It's okay, you'll get better.
Yeah, changed all my passwords to the same password.
If they need this identity, they can have all of it, right? They want the TTB login, you can have it.
Well, I genuinely am sorry about that, that sucks.
Well, it's the dumbest of us.
Yeah, it's... can't... yeah, hasn't happened to me, but not for anything I've done, right? Just haven't kind of come up in that lotto kind of.
Yeah, yeah, you probably won't, you'll be kind.
Thanks for the jinx there.
Yeah, you're welcome. Have we talked since the big day? The big day you got one of the biggest, the biggest training start, the Phillies, right?
All right, well we can move on.
Okay, Super Bowl, go. What are you talking about? Yeah, anyway, go Birds.
Yeah, so the good thing that prevents our banter is being embarrassed by the guests that we have on to have stupid banter. Get better guests and then the banter goes.
Yeah, yeah, the banter, no offense any of the other guests we've had, but right, right. So we got a couple guests, we should probably just get right into it and introduce them. We always introduce our guest the same way, and that is order of seniority, the only type of seniority that we care about, which is how many times you've been on the show. So senior member is Gabriel Magaro of Half Acre. What's up, Gabe? How you doing?
I'm doing well, thanks. Thanks for having me and great to be here.
Oh, thanks. See, he's a pro, he's done it before. Yeah, what's new with you, Gabe?
Not much, easing into the year, I'll say, freezing like everyone else, and opted for a slow mount tonight to enjoy this conversation with you all.
Yeah, we were going to talk about beers that we've had that we've enjoyed, and I was going to be a complete suck up and say Slow Mount because it's genuinely very, very good. I legitimately love it. Have you had it yet, Mike?
Timbo reminiscent to me, so I think speak my language.
Yeah, exactly. You're a Timbo fan.
I'm a huge Timbo fan, yeah.
Highland Park, yeah, in LA, the other park, not North Park.
Yeah, yeah, no, it's solid. I'll have to get one during the show probably.
And it's a lager, right? Like Timbo, right, Gabe?
It does have a lager yeast strain involved.
Okay, okay, so I won't call it a lager, but there is a lager yeast strain involved.
Well, cool, yeah. Well, we shouldn't bury the lead, we should probably get right into our second guest. Yeah, the rookie. So first time guests introduce themselves, so if you wouldn't mind introducing yourself and let everybody know who you are. Take it away.
Um, Sam Calagione, founder of Dogfish. This is awkward, I thought I was on like the Italian American, like I'm only half Italian podcast.
Yeah, it's all right. I got a little... are you in Delaware, you guys, Mike, Chris, Gabe?
I am in beautiful coastal Delaware. I'm about three blocks down the canal here from our Dogfish Hotel in Lewes, and then our locations are one town south in Rehoboth and one town west in Milton. So yes, I'm calling in from coastal DE.
Right, down the bay from where Gabe grew up.
Oh, nice. Actually, Chris, you're a Blue Hen, so we're right up the road for us.
My family, my in-laws have a place in Fenwick Island, so I go there. The t-shirt shops are...
Yeah, that's where some of the finest t-shirt shops... well, that's just south in beautiful Ocean City, Maryland, the finest, choicest t-shirts. That's where I got Mike's wedding present.
Yeah, was from one of those t-shirt shops.
It was, yeah. My wife, once she became my wife, she's like, 'Okay, this is acceptable now.'
Right, well you did give me the Booty Hunter shirt for my wedding, not the Mil Hunter shirt, that was for earlier.
Right, right, right, when your one license expired.
I got you, I got you. Those are totally different occasions, like hunting occasions. It's like deer and moose, they're very different licenses. And those shirts are, they are also like, you know how stamps are technically legal tender, those shirts are technically licenses. So you are licensed to hunt booty when you have that shirt on.
Great, or your wife, either one.
That's right, she's actually the only... I gave it to both of you.
Yeah, so she did wear it for about 35 seconds to take one picture to send you.
Yeah, yeah, but anyway, yes. Yeah, Fenwick Island, Delaware, yeah, beautiful place. In fact, that's where I had my first Orange Crush ever, which is a big thing there. And Sam, you were thoughtful enough to send us out a little care package, one of which is your, your Crush, your Blood Orange Crush.
They're huge in coastal Delaware. I don't, I mean, have you ever heard of Crushes before, Mike?
They're huge there, they're like everywhere, every restaurant makes them.
What is it? You probably ask Sam what a Crush is. Sam, what's a Crush?
So those of you tuning in tonight that have been in the scrapple belt, which is a geography that allows the scrapple that can't go into a hot dog to be sold in local stores, I'm dead set in the center of also the crush belt. So I'm in the scrapple belt and the crush belt. The crush belt kind of runs from the northern Jersey beaches down to, I'd say, Virginia Beach, but yeah, the heart of it, as Chris said, is kind of like Dewey Beach, Delaware. It's like our girls gone wild town or boys, and then down to Ocean City, Maryland is kind of the fresh epicenter. And it's basically just super fresh half of a grapefruit or orange or some big citrus fruit squeezed like as you're watching it as the drinker, so you're not getting wamp or fake stuff. And then they add different spirits and like a pop of like Squirt or 7-Up to give it a little carbonation, but it's basically just fresh fruit and usually vodka, tequila. And ours is mango and blood orange. But we don't have to talk beyond beer tonight if you guys want to stay on beer, we love them both here at Dogfish.
I mean, it was fitting just because we were talking Delaware and it is, you go there and it's like everyone's drinking Crushes. They are... it's like the Bizarro Malort for you guys.
Yes, yeah, yeah, it is good because it is very localized there. No one else outside of there has ever heard of it. You go there and that's all anyone is drinking at all, like the kind of beach resort restaurants and bars.
Like Malort out of the bag, everyone now knows of Malort. A Crush maybe a little still under the radar. It's a beautiful thing. You guys have an indigenous aperitif, how many, whatever you call it, like digestif. How many cities in America, you know, have that? Yeah, not... you have a breakfast meat, you have two breakfast meats really, because you have pork roll as well.
So one of the nicest compliments I've ever gotten... don't get started.
Oh, you're a pork roll fan, Gabe? I bet that's G territory.
Yeah, yeah, I definitely grew up in the heart, Trenton, New Jersey is really where is an indigenous country for pork roll.
And or is it Taylor Ham to you? Because it's the same stuff, right? It just depends where you're from.
Taylor Ham is really the proper term. Pork roll, that's what we use in the streets.
Got it, got it. Well, I'm nothing if not a product of the streets, so yeah.
Yeah, it's slang, it's comfort talk between friends. And yeah, pork roll, egg and cheese sandwiches if you're a purist, just straight pork roll. Some do pork roll and cheese. It's unlike really any other processed meat, it's great. And I hope you've gotten your kids indoctrinated into pork, Gabe.
Oh, yeah, yeah, they... I have a Taylor Ham casing framed in the basement.
So you make it sound like that stuff doesn't have a shelf life that you can...
Oh, does it have a shelf life? Yes, you have to refrigerate it.
Really? All right. Sam, skipped over, is there anything that you've had lately, any beers that you've enjoyed especially or that you're looking forward to trying?
No, I pulled one out of my, my Mariah's beer fridge that's kind of from your neck of the woods over Newark, Delaware's line is Southern PA, kind of near where Victory started, Downingtown. But there's a little town called Downingtown, now not Downingtown, and they're called Midnight Oil Brewing Company. They're doing some nice stuff with lagers and hazies. And so I'm having their Love Seed lager. So Love Seed Mama Jump was a big regional brand here, it was kind of our Malort of beach band, and they rocked out pretty hard when Mariah and I were coming up and sneaking into the restaurants with our fake IDs, including Dogfish Head, we used to be called the Ruffled Duck, and I used to sneak in there with my fake ID with my wife and listen to Love Seed Mama Jump. So I'm drinking with some backwards looking love towards northern Delaware, little brewery up there.
Wow, wow, Love Seed Mama Jump, geez, taking you back.
Yeah, man, Stone Balloon, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, wow, yeah, flashbacks. Well, very cool. I also noticed, I have to mention, you sent along the latest iteration of the Grateful Dead beers, which is funny. My, and I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who have like a relative, like I never really hear from him ever, I don't think he drinks beer at all, but when the American Beauty came out, was just like incessantly hounding me about getting that beer. And someone was walking by the bar the other day, like right after I'd opened up the box and taken out that can, it has the Steal Your Face on it, and I mean it wasn't on the table for more than 10 minutes when an older gentleman was like, 'That's an amazing can, do you sell that?' And I had to kind of go through the whole thing and, you know, made me think of my uncle. Went on to Facebook Messenger, his preferred method of communication, sure, and who's... and said, 'Hey Uncle Dave, what's up, how you doing?' So yeah, so thank you.
No, that would be... that was mine.
No, you know, you traded it to him for some ganja goo balls.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Say your beer, did Gabe, you say your guest beer?
He did, he was a homer, he just said his own beer.
Nice, that's just what I happen to be drinking right now. But I don't have a guest beer, I'm not even supposed to be here right now. I'm supposed to be on the East Coast, but I'm home, so it was a little bit of a snafu, so I'm unprepared in a way. But yeah, okay, the best beer that I had recently that is not Half Acre is Suncatcher. So that's like a double, you know, Goober, you know, twice sending good things our way. But yeah, Suncatcher, current, all know Suncatcher.
I don't, what brewery is that?
That's my, my very good friend and business partner Matt Gallagher's got a little passion brewery, a bit south of us in the city called Suncatcher. It's a tiny little stamp on the map. And anyway, he's making some cool beers over there. His most recent batch of IPA is chef's kiss.
Nice, yeah, really nice. Very cool. Yeah, I was going to go Slow Mount, but then we popped on this Onex Voler on draft. Yeah, it must have been exceptionally fresh because I mean, talk about chef's kiss, they know what they're doing out there. Yeah, you know when you get a fresh beer, it's some of those like, you drink it, you're like, 'What was that? Yeah, is that that good?' Yeah, exceptionally good. So if you have the means, I highly recommend you pick one up. Yeah, they're very choice. So yeah, well, enough of that, we should probably get into the meat of the podcast. We've got, we're going to do it a little bit different, it's not going to be quite as topical, but it's not every day that we have the founder of a pretty monumental craft brewery on the show, so I think we kind of tailored some questions around that and try to make them inclusive.
Yeah, for Gabriel, exactly, talking about Half Acre.
Yeah, no, Suncatcher, yeah, exactly. So yeah, basically, I mean, just a few questions that I thought honestly both of you would be able to weigh in on, and don't worry, we'll weigh in as well, we don't need reason to spout our opinions. Can I lean on you a little bit, Mike, to kick things off? Is there a question in particular that you wanted to start with, or would you like me to kick things off?
I mean, the one that I was most interested in talking about, as someone who has developed many recipes for both my own brewery and Pipeworks before that, and dealing with, you know, somewhat wacky ingredients following in your wake, how has the process of dealing with the TTB evolved over time? And were there any like special incidents of like things you were using that they were just like, 'Huh, like no one's ever sent that across our desk before?' And just, I guess, yeah, generally, like, right, I mean, the history of Dogfish is tied to kind of culinary ingredients that exist outside the Reinheitsgebot, off-center, D for off-center people, right? And I would imagine there were probably a lot of ingredients that had not been brewed with prior to Dogfish using them.
Yeah, yeah. And for context, like, I think when, and you know, with Pipeworks doing a lot with fruited beers and wild fermentation, but I think by the era you guys were taking off, they'd already set, they had a list of like accepted ingredients you didn't have to navigate as a one-off.
And Gabe, it was 16 years or so young for your brewery, I'm not sure if that was in existence when you started, but for us, yeah, there was literally, because, you know, there were, you know, when Ken Grossman or Sam Adams started, there were less than 100 breweries in the early 80s, but when Dogfish started, there were 600 breweries. But there was the same guy when Sierra started and Anchor started, one guy was running label approval for the TTB, and the same when Dogfish started, it was that same guy. So he was at that seat individually for like 20 years. His name was literally Battle, Battle Martin.
Yes, Battle Martin, literally the most perfect name human in the world.
He was the same dude we dealt with for years, just him.
So imagine me like being like, you know, now I want to add crickets, or now I want to add human saliva, or mace, like industrial grade capsicum from India, ingredients in mace. They're like, 'What the fuck are you?' There were some great conversations. And yeah, so it was very different in that era, but it was almost like the name game now, right? How cathartic it is as brewers when we find a name that the IP's not been protected yet, you know, you put it in Google or Untappd, you're like, 'Ah, fuck, some little brewery in Spokane already got that one.' Cool, cool. But back then it was like finding an ingredient that no one had used yet and figuring out a way to get the TTB to approve it was kind of analogous to really today finding a name for a beer that's not been used yet. So different like cathartic moments, but still fun, like creative components to our journey.
Would you have to like prove to them that it was safe? Or like how, like, how do you, like, couldn't afford like lab testing for these things when you were small, but like how, like, how did you do this?
Like genuinely in awe and grateful for it, and I'm sure we each have stories about that. Our proximity to the labs in DC helped us on a couple occasions, two hours away. But they rarely, you know, test anything physically, it's more they were looking for research and supporting data. But as we grew, like example would be like monk fruit, which is a natural fruit, but had not been put on the GRAS list for stuff you can drink, just stuff you could eat. So the TTB didn't acknowledge it as an ingredient. So we had to spend, I think it was tens of thousands of dollars navigating it from the FDA side over to the TTB to be, you know, the first fruit to make beer, I think first beverage company to make beer with or something with monk fruit. But by then it was like beg forgiveness, set first, because we could afford lawyers and specialists for tens of thousands, whereas in the 80s or the 90s it was like just do it and see if you get... like I hand Sharpie the word 'Vigor' off of 2,000 cases of Worldwide Stout when they told me 'Vigor' strong and you can't have that on a label in 1999. I'm like, 'Well, if you take away this Worldwide Stout batch, I'll go out of business. Can if I will you let me sell it if I hand Sharpie every single one off?' So we would have these parties at our brewpub where I'd buy everyone drinks if they just sat there with Sharpies. It was kind of like painting the fence together. The word 'Vigor', V-I-G-O-R, so like they thought that would imply like it's a fortuitous drink, intensity equals drunkenness. Vigor bad.
Yeah, Vigor bad. Wow, yeah.
It said 'brewed with a ridiculous amount of dark barley' or 'ridiculous amount of barley, comma, vim and vigor.' And they made me, they left 'Vim'.
Cool, yeah, got it. Cool, Vigor not so much. Everyone uses 'Vim' on its own, so that didn't seem like strange at all.
Yeah, we made, we got a, we got a 'Vim' beer, yeah, get 'Met' beer, which it's ironic because I think it was whatever it was back in the early days, then it got really intense for a while, and I think these days it's actually backed off, you know, they're a little bit more flexible now based on, I think, making their own workload a little bit less than it needs to be and realizing that, you know, most of these ingredients that they've been working hard to protect against, it's like, it's mostly just fine, you know.
Yeah, it's mostly like, I agree, and it's more like about the IP infringement than it is the weird ingredient journey. And I don't know how many breweries you guys have been in where it feels like you're in a hunting lodge, but instead of the skulls of animals, it's cease and desist from Disney, Star Wars, Royal Season Assist.
Yeah, well, those early days, I loved it, you know. Sam, you guys are, you know, part of that first generation, a group of breweries, and we're a bit later, sort of like in that weird uncle stage. But even then, you know, there are so many things that you approached as a brewery that it was like this gelatinous thing that nobody kind of knew, like, yeah, you can do that or not do that. And there was a lot of enjoyment I felt in all that, you know, navigating those unclear waters, and a lot of the times, you know, winning against those questions and being able to, you know, do something that maybe was unclear if it was possible before that.
Yeah, and your city was all you guys, you know, Chicago was one of the first to kind of embrace a broader, you know, definition of beer, that having that Cask Festival there kind of invited people to go for it and do like exotic things. So I remember that. And then, for different reasons, Chicago was also, as you guys know, when craft was cutting its teeth, it was known as like the Wild West in terms of unenforced stuff and dirty stuff happening on the streets with breweries. So you had this weird dichotomy of the messiness of the third world system, or third world, but Third City, not Third World, come on, bud. Yeah, your market was super unique as craft was taking off for a few reasons. Were there ever ingredients that you just couldn't get them to agree to, and they're just like, 'Hard no, you got to stop making that beer,' or were you able to successfully kind of be like, 'Hey, no, we found ways that this is okay'?
Yeah, that's a good question. And chime in for any of you that have just been told no. I'm trying to think, I don't think, I think more internally our own legal people were like, 'Oh, don't make us spend capital on...' like crickets is a really good example. Like other breweries have done it, but our company was just, the legal appetite was not really there. So it's almost been more, I can't think of anything, like we put blue-green algae in beers, human saliva, garlic, and mace, and I'm trying to think if they ever said no. I don't know, Gabe, you got any?
No, I mean, you know, we sort of, the TTB is a little squishy in terms of what, you know, if you're crossing state lines and things like that. And so we, you know, if we leaned out there, which we weren't often leaning in the same way that you guys were, Sam, but we definitely kept a lot of stuff in state and made that our sort of open invitation to do a bit more of what we wanted without checking with our friends at... it was less risky state lines wise if your label was just a local label and not, yeah, if you weren't crossing state lines, that's where they get particularly prickly. So, you know, even today, like, yeah, we cross state lines, but pretty much on the, a bit more on the straight and narrow.
A bit more, oh yeah. Related question that I have, I think for probably all three of you, was there ever an ingredient that like your heart wanted to use really bad, but it wasn't necessarily the lawyers telling you no, it was just you couldn't make it work? It just, you know, I want to do it, but this beer is just, no matter what I do, it's just not good. I mean, Mike, for you at Pipeworks, must have won, I mean, you guys were coming up with like...
We did all of them after they, you know, there's now, you know, I used to say we're never going to run out of ideas. I think at some point you do run out of good ideas. I can't think of anything. There were some combinations we put together that weren't particularly well thought out. There's, we were messing around, there's an area where we were messing around with rotary evaporating ingredients with some restaurants and...
And is that like, how's that different than dehydration? So what's that like?
So the rotary evaporating, it's like a low pressure distillation, so you end up with like this liquid that you can dose into it where it's like highly aromatic but doesn't necessarily have the same flavor compounds. So we did one with Next restaurant that was rotary evaporated Fresno chilies and then mango, and the idea was that it would smell like it's going to be super spicy and then you would drink it and it would basically be like mango juice. And that was really a cool... there are a lot of beers where there were cool concepts and then you're like, 'I don't want to have much more of this,' or 'This is like, this is not, your brain's like, this is not supposed to be happening.' There's one we did where we were kind of the first to use butterfly pea flowers in a beer, I think. So like we were really intent on making this like bluish purple beer with rotary evaporated vanilla, and so it would smell like vanilla and then taste like lemonade. And we just, it looked cool, definitely looked cool. Stop there, we kind of biffed it though.
We worked with taro root one time and it was a very interesting beer, but it definitely like gave your face this tingling sensation that was maybe poison, but it was definitely a sensation that you asked questions, 'Is this should this be right?' Interesting.
Did you brew it a second time? Were some people like, 'Do that tingly beer again?'
It, you know, was one of those polarizing things that happened. Some people are like, 'Wow, that was really unique and cool,' people are like, 'Guys, what, why, what do you...'
It was a one and done, let's say that.
Yeah, how about you, Sam? Anything?
Yeah, I'd say, well, and while we were just talking, I remembered one that the TTB did get back to us after and say, 'You can't do that again.' And because I remember because it was back when there were still fax machines, like you'd be in your office and hear this noise in the corner. And in one week we got a email from the TTB or a fax saying, 'You can't brew with moon rocks. We don't care if eBay said they're certified that they were actually on the moon. Have not been vetted to brew Moon Rock.' And then so that was, and that same week the fax machine spit out like two days after the moon rock incident, this a reprimand from a record label saying the band you have promoted playing in your pub last night, last weekend, is not the Gypsy Kings. They might have told you they were the Gypsy Kings and sounded like the Gypsy Kings, but stopped promoting that the Gypsy Kings play at your restaurant. So we got ripped off by a wonderful couple Spanish guitar players in one week and reprimanded for making beer with moon rocks. I thought it was a pretty good week at work, you know.
That's a good, I love that. I think it's, I love that people are just like, 'Yeah, we're the Gypsy Kings, all right, cool.' When, well, the fax machine era, you probably could get away with that a lot easier than like Googling on your phone and be like, 'No, you're not.'
Yeah, right. Imagine them all being like, 'How's it ethical? The name of our band is the G... that's the Big Lebowski band, right? We're the Gypsy Kings, gypsies, we're the kings of it.'
I think doing a little bit of research for this, I saw an interview with where you talked about using St. John's Wort in something.
That's another reminder they made us stop that too. Thank you, Mike. Sorry, Stout was made with coffee, organic Mexican coffee, licorice, and St. John's Wort. And not on the label, but in the old beer magazines, like a street news and the New England beer magazine, like we would have ads that said 'Nature's first antidepressant.' And the feds are like, 'You can't do that, you can't.'
So they stopped you using it or they stopped you saying that?
I think it was actually both. I know we pulled St. John's Wort out of the recipe, but they definitely stopped us from saying, yeah, antidepressant.
Depressant, that's an amazing, that's an amazing turn of phrase, right? Yeah, the dang government. That's pretty good. Kudos to that. We take some balls. We just brewed a beer with Goldfinger that just came out with Bison Grass, and it was Tom's idea. And he couldn't figure out how to put it in a lager, so he talked to my dumbass and was like, 'Put it in a Saison.' And I'm like, 'Sure.' So I bought this Bison Grass, which is not very cheap per pound, and then literally the day after I bought it, he texted me like, 'Hey, I just found out like this isn't an approved ingredient.' And I'm like, 'What are you talking about?' Like I didn't even think about it. And it has like some, the same compound that's in cinnamon, that coumarin, I think it's something like that, where it could be like a blood thinner in high concentrations, but it has like one tenth of the percent of what's actually in cinnamon. It's just not an approved ingredient because they're like, 'Yeah, this is in there.' So I was like, 'Well, we're not sending this out of the state and hopefully the TTB doesn't listen to this podcast,' but I was like, 'I'm fine with it if you're fine with it.' He's like, 'Okay, yeah, I'm fine with it.'
What's the guy's name again, the TTB guy, the old school TTB?
Battle Martin, okay. They have a few people doing it now, but I did the first time I had one after it was finished bottle conditioning, it was another day like today when it was like 9 real feel, and I walked in from outside, I was CH testing the carb on it, I drank it and I'm like, 'It's tasting great, smells amazing,' and then I got super flushed and I was like, 'Oh no, like this really is like actually going to thin people's blood.' I'm like, 'No, it's just negative 19 degrees outside, you walked into a 70 degree tap room, so that'll do it, it's fine.' Yeah, yeah, that'll do it. But I was like panicking like, 'Oh no, I'm going to kill people.' But there's such a small amount of it in there to... if it's okay to turn things a little bit, something that Mike and I have talked about previous to this, but I think both of you, Gabe and Sam, I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts on it. We were talking about how back in my day of craft beer exploration, there seemed to be so many, you know, now this is all within the beer geek world, but there were household names within the beer geek world in beer, yeah, individuals. So there was, you know, Garrett Oliver and Sam and Vinnie and people like that, Rob Todd, Rob Todd, name in the game, six letters, six letters, that's all you need. Very efficient. And yeah, there were just these big personalities associated with craft beer. I mean, Jim Cook certainly, you know, and how today there are 100x breweries out there than when it first started, but there don't seem to be, you know, as many, hardly any more household names. Not even that it's slowed down, it's like there's not really many more. Yeah, if there are, the same people they were at that era. And just a few things, like, do either of you think there was a reason for this or that there aren't now? Was it needed more then? Is it needed now? Just, I don't know, have you ever thought about that, Sam? I mean, you are kind of acknowledged as one of the faces of craft beer especially when it was coming up, and there hasn't been like a second wave of like household craft beer names to kind of come along. I mean, Gabriel, no offense, I look forward to hearing everyone's view on this because I think every moment that we started in the brewing industry might have been slightly different, but you know, I would say that's a sign, it's a sign of victory that we're not reliant on...
Like individual pioneers, it shows that we're like no longer in the pioneering stage of our art form or our craft or whatever you want to say, business, industry if you're less precious about it. But I think the personality of our community of indie craft has kind of eclipsed the need for the individual faces. I also think, I don't know about how old you guys have kids are, but you know I got a son who's 25 who's in the culinary world out in San Fran and a daughter who's 23. He cares about craft and he grew up choosing to work in our brewery and summer jobs, and our daughter's like I want nothing to do with you guys and she worked at a vintage clothes store and stuff. You know, so he's still a beer drinker, but either way their friends all grew up, you know, stealing 60 Minute from our fridge and Anchor from our neighbor fridge and Sam Adams or whatever, you know, Daisy Cutter. And so it's like not no longer needed to be like holy shit, you know, someone who opened a brewery. You know, 10,000 people have opened a brewery. It's something that everyone in the neighborhood has done. So the younger drinkers now are not thinking about the names and faces of these pioneer people so much as they are hopefully thinking about how good the beers in our community are, you know, and the brands, not the people, the brands and the beers in our community. I would say that my view of it looking 40 year guys, yeah.
Gabriel, yeah. I mean I feel like those early days, I mean it was a terrible idea to open a brewery by all practical measure, right? Like I mean it was a turn back now, you know, it required these personal people like Sam to, you know, just have the balls to step out and do it in the face of what was a bunch of really difficult commercial scenarios. And it was that recipe between those personalities that drive that ambition and then the people that were interested in these things, it was that alchemy between those two things that created the magic that became, you know, the craft beer thing that we all think of. You know, it was that recipe that made it all possible. So I think because they made it possible because of that initial energy, it made it more possible to be a reasonable commercial endeavor. People with sound professional ideas could say I think it might be a good responsible choice to open a brewery and attracted something different with a different set of attributes. So I think it was all part of what was necessary to build an industry and each of those stages were required. And today you start a brewery, it might not be that personality that's going to see you through those early steps and it might be a specific professional acumen and resources that get you certain things. So it was just needed then and how great it was, right? Like it was sure, yeah, so wonderful experience and to witness and yeah, I'm glad to have been a part of all that.
Yeah, I mean there was definitely an element of, yeah, like I don't know, well thinking back like romanticism of this new thing, these new people doing this kind of, you know, avant-garde stuff. And yeah, I suppose the story is a little different when it's like I've opened up the 200th brewery, you know, ever in the United States or something versus the 200th brewery in Chicago. Yeah, and yeah, it's probably harder to kind of have a personality be, well I guess unique. And also this, I mean do you think that it's probably harder to have such a big stage? Yeah, I was thinking as the whole thing grows and there's so many more breweries and there's so many people doing different things within that, I think maybe the idea of this individual that people look to as like the head of something specific or the face of something specific, it's more at niche where there's people who like obsess about certain people who make hazy IPAs or obsess about certain people who make lagers in a certain way or geographically where there's people in different areas that are like that, but they just it's not the same as like having a reality TV show or something where it's like it has national appeal because the whole pie of craft beer is a different size, you know what I mean?
Yeah, I mean it is kind of almost impossible to imagine a brewery in coastal Delaware today having somebody who becomes kind of known within a, you know, defined circle across the country. And yeah, I think I kind of agree with what you're saying, Sam, is maybe the industry kind of needed these large personalities and maybe the fact that there were these people pioneering it, just kind of there was a certain alchemy to it, you know, like they needed champions to kind of make people aware of it. And because as you were saying, Gabe, you know, this was maybe not the soundest financial thing you could do, you know, you had these type of people doing it just oozing kind of passion for it. Yeah, it's interesting, but part of me, whether it's possible or not, is a little wistful for having some of these personalities. And I'm sure they're out there, it's probably just harder to, which is it doesn't make sense, how could it be harder for these people to break through in the age of social media? I wonder if there's something too, as you were saying, as it matures and it's more about the actual brand or the beer they're making, that it evolves and that part of like the craft beer consumer's arc that we follow on the show a lot is like a lot of those early breweries that had those people eventually grew into a place where they may not have been able to sustain growth in any other way than a way that they were very against in their messaging originally, right? Like we were talking about how like Tony McGee on this very show at one point sat across from you and I and said I'd talk to Budweiser and said I'd rather put my thumbs through my eyes than sell to you and then sold to Heineken and a couple days later.
Yeah, I think it was two weeks later, but yeah.
Yeah, I mean that's probably already in the works, but that's speculative.
Yes, it came out two weeks later, yes.
But I wonder if part of it is that people aren't paying attention to that anymore because there might have been a little bit of like this jaded feeling, like how do people reconcile that? That's something we talk about on the show all the time is like this industry that grew as this, you know, messaging of fiercely independent and actually kind of culture in opposition to this thing has matured and plenty of those places that were banging the drum for that don't live that lifestyle anymore, their businesses don't operate that way anymore. And so like I don't know, sometimes I wonder like what are drinkers that felt that and connected with that authenticity to think as something like the brew that, you know, says fizzy yellow water is the enemy sells to a company that makes like foreign fizzy yellow water. I don't know, what do you, anyone has any thoughts on that one? I guess that wasn't a great question, it wasn't really a question, it was a statement, but I think if I could form it into a question, sure, perhaps it would be, do you, yeah, I mean what is there to make of the fact that this thing started as kind of counter culture and now some of the champions of this, and not necessarily personality wise, but like from a brewery standpoint, have now literally are some of the same companies that they were defining craft beer as not being, right? Because craft beer was defined by what it wasn't as much as what it was. And I think some people who are really old like myself and have been drinking beer at The Stone Pony and drinking Dogfish at Indian Brown and stuff like that are like, well wait a second, what does this mean? And I do think there is kind of a, with the older heads, and maybe that doesn't matter because there's younger generations who don't care about this anymore, but there is a little bit, what would you call that, like cognitive dissonance? Is that the term? Yeah, either of you guys out there care to pick up that one? It's kind of a sticky question really.
First, G, you really tied that into a question there. Yeah, well I mean that's a sticky one. I think, you know, craft breweries are not all built the same way and are the same thing. And I think there's a lot of, time is complicated, evolution is complicated, and I think businesses, which craft breweries are, you know, require different things in different ways at different times. And I, as a brewery owner, if I hear of some type of evolution like this, if I hear about it from another brewery, all I can think is I hope that that change works well for them and their needs because I don't understand what they are. And as a craft beer fan, I think about continuing to observe them as a business and if the things that they're doing still resonate with me, well, you know, that's me still believing in the mission. And if it doesn't, then I have a choice to make as a consumer. And I think that's all okay, that's all just fine, that's how I feel about it.
