My delivery truck was just a Ford F-150 pickup truck and I just put a tarp over all the beer kegs in the back so the cops couldn't see that I was going over state lines with kegs of beer. And this one time I was delivering to Kelly's Logan House up in Wilmington and I was going up a hill in Wilmington and the top keg I hit a bump and the keg popped out of the tarp, hit the ground and it pierced the keg open and so this beer starts flying out of the keg and I'm going up a hill. But the way the hole went in the keg, it actually made the keg beat me up the hill. It rolled up the hill squirting beer and rolled past my car up the hill. I was like, 'Oh [__] I lost $100.' But it was definitely worth it to see my truck get passed by a keg of beer.
What up? What up? What up? Welcome to Bruising Banter Podcast. I'm your host Rob G and with me as always is the legendary Brew Crew. What up, fellas?
My name is Lou Belgium. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm wondering does the word have an actual culture?
This is the podcast where we talk about beer, but we also talk about a lot of things that's happening in the world. Politics, movies, anything really that comes to our mind while we're here sampling these brews. Grab a drink and pull up a chair.
What up? What up? What up? Welcome to Bruising Banter Podcast where the topic is the rocking and the brew. Well, that be the fuel. I'm your host Rob G. With me as always the legendary Brew Crew. What's going on fellas?
This is episode 327 of Bruising Banter Podcast.
And if you're a returning Bruiser and Bruisette, we're glad you have found us again for another episode of Bruising Banter Podcast because we do have a special guest. I think it's probably one of our most requested guests that we have had that people have asked us to have on the show. So we do have him here today. We have the co-founder of Dogfish Head Brewery out of Milton, Delaware. We have Sam Calagione joining the podcast.
Good to be here with you guys. Good to be here with you guys.
We are glad you can join us because like I said, most of the people who come on say two things: either Dogfish is how they got into craft beer and you should have him on your show. So we are glad we have both of them here today. But before we get into all of it, we always like to know what people are drinking. Also, what are we drinking today? And we always start with our guest. So Sam, what are you drinking today?
I'm drinking a Dogfish SeaQuench Ale. So this is our fruited sour made with sea salt and black limes. I'm drinking this because I'm joining you guys from Dogfish Head Maine. Not Dogfish Head Delaware. Today I'm up in Maine, which is where our namesake of our company is from, but our physical company, our roots are very much in Sussex County, Delaware. And this beer has sea salt both from the Chesapeake in it and from Maine. So I thought it was appropriate since you guys are down in Delaware and I'm up in Maine, have a little bit of both of the places that are dear to my heart in one beer.
All right. What did you say the fruit was?
It's lime juice, black limes, which are used a lot in Middle Eastern cooking. And then there's also different sea salts in it. Right? Yeah, look up black limes. You can buy them at specialty food stores. It's a very intense citrusy character compared to a normal green lime.
Now Sam, I know we're going to get into it later, but you guys distribute. Is that available in stores locally and throughout the country?
Yeah, and I got to say it's been a big part of our national core beer, you know, day in day out 365 day a year sales. SeaQuench is kind of right behind our continual hop IPAs and our Grateful Dead beers. This is right up there. But people, you guys are hearing it first on this podcast. We're going to pause on producing SeaQuench here later this fall because we're going to make it our summer seasonal next year. So I recommend your viewers and listeners go find SeaQuench where they can because we're going to take it out of the market to build more excitement for it when it comes back out, you know, late June next year.
What about you guys? You guys drinking anything today?
I have what I normally have. Water. High quality H2O. It's great for the body, refreshing and nourishing. But I do also have cucumbers from my garden and strawberry syrup from my garden in my water.
So cheers to farmer Andy over there. Who's Farmer Andy? Is that you? You the farmer?
That's me. I'm farmer Andy. I have different monikers everywhere I go.
Oh, you know what? I'm years old and I did not know that. I never heard the Andy part.
Yeah, I just started farming this summer.
Oh, so Andy is part of that persona. Gotcha.
All right. You drinking on something?
I actually am drinking on a Dogfish Head India Brown Ale. I didn't realize it was 7.2% though.
I also have my Namaste as well. But now that I see that 7.2, I think I only just need the one. I just needed one. Well like I said it's a dark India Pale Ale. It's 7.2%. It's refreshing. It's a limited release.
Yeah we used to brew that one year round. We started brewing that one in 1996 I think. So over 30 years ago and it was kind of one of the first dark IPAs or black IPAs in America. That was not really a category when we started making it. So we're really proud of that being a pioneering super dark, super hoppy beer.
And now, like you said, it's very limited edition. We do it once a year. So I'm glad to see you got that in your hands.
When you do that once a year, how many cases? How many barrels? What's once a year?
So for us that one is on our 200 barrel brew house. And we only do a single batch of it. So with losses that probably yields about 2,300 cases.
Yeah. For us it's less than 1% of our annual volume.
Yeah. I got it out of the variety pack.
Oh, good. Yeah. The music summer pack. Sweet.
All right. And I did taste it, so I'm gonna say pass me another for this. Yeah, because it is cool. I like a good brown India Pale Ale. It's not as bitter as I would think when you think of IPAs, you think bitterness. And it's actually pretty smooth. So if you are interested in trying it out, it's back on the shelves for a little limited time.
So Rob, that's something I would more enjoy. My type of IPA.
Well, it's not super sweet though. So it's not sweet.
No. It don't got to always be sweet. It just can't be IPA.
Yeah. It's not like a hop bomb. It's not like I don't punch you in the face with hops like that.
Yeah. I don't like getting punched in the face by my beer.
All right. Since it's just me and Sam drinking on something.
And all four of us are drinking water. We say this every week.
I ain't drinking water today. I'm going straight beer all day.
That's water. A lot of water in that beer. There's water in it. Yeah, I guess you got me.
All right. Well, everybody drinking on something. So once again, we want to thank Sam Calagione for coming on the podcast and we want to welcome you and the proverbial floor is yours.
Well, just want to start off to say congratulations to you guys. I believe this is episode 327 of Bruising Banter and that's a pretty awesome accomplishment. So thank you guys for getting the word out about indie craft beer in and around the sort of Delmarva community where we all get to live. So thank you guys for having me.
Well, congratulations to you as well because you just got inducted into the Craft Beer Hall of Fame in March.
Yeah. So very proud. It was started out from beer writers in Chicago and I think they got a board of directors from around the country but I'm in the second class. Myself and good buddy Garrett Oliver, the brewmaster from Brooklyn, we're in the second class. So it's only been around two years and the first class was folks like Ken Grossman who started Sierra Nevada, my compatriot Jim Cook who started Sam Adams. So I'm in rarified company and very proud that I got into that group this year.
Well, since we're talking about that, looking at 30 years ago, did you think that there would even be a craft beer hall of fame?
I did not. I didn't even know if there'd be a craft beer industry. It got pretty shaky there for a while. So I've kind of lived through two shakeout periods when demand for craft beer was over-eclipsed by supply and made for some hard years. And even right now, craft beer is not growing in America. And we've dropped from the highest number of breweries in the country at 10,000 maybe two years ago down to like 9,500. So it's definitely challenging times again, but good beer rises to the top and great breweries rise to the top. And there are a lot of breweries that are kicking ass and doing well even in these challenging times. And I'm proud to say Dogfish is one of them.
Nice. So Sam, take us all the way back to like the beginning of before the brewery even started. Like how did you fall in love with craft beer and how did that lead to you starting the brewery?
I graduated from college. I went to a little school right up the road from Delaware called Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA. I was an English major and the day I graduated I got in my piece of crap pickup truck and drove to New York City and lived on the Upper West Side, 111th and Broadway near Columbia. And I was taking classes thinking of trying to get my MFA in creative writing at Columbia, but to earn my rent money, I got a job at a bar across the street from Columbia. I just walked in, got a job, didn't know it was a great craft beer bar, but it ended up being. It was called Nacho Mama's Burritos, which doesn't sound like much of a craft beer bar, but the owner was only two or three years older than me, and he got in really good beer right out of the gates. We were serving beers like Chimay and Dupont and Brooklyn and Sam Adams, Sierra Nevada. So my shift drinks once, I had Sierra Nevada Celebration. I was just like, 'Holy crap, I didn't realize beer could have this much intensity and flavor.' I fell in love with beer working in there and stopped trying to write the great American novel at Columbia and started writing the business plan for Dogfish Head.
Now, do you still think you have a great American novel in you?
I don't know. I mean, I've written I think four books and I've co-authored a couple books so I do get to scratch that journalism itch but I write more about brewing and business than I do fiction these days.
Oh, good question. I mean, I'd say I wanted to go to Columbia because of the Beats, you know, Kerouac went through that program. Allen Ginsberg went through that poet program. So the Beat writers were a big inspiration for me. The Transcendentalists. I'm sitting here at my desk and I got a Thoreau book next to me. Let's see what else. I've got a Hemingway book next to me. What else do I have here? I got a Warhol book next to me and I got a Bob Dylan book next to me. So yeah, I'd say poetry and music and literature are probably my greatest reference points.
Yeah, I write about music. I've written articles in Creem magazine. I got a quarterly column in Creem and I just got to write an article for Rolling Stone for their big summer issue which is super cool to see my byline in Rolling Stone magazine which I read growing up and the next byline was Obama who wrote an article in that same issue. I was pretty proud to be in that company.
And here's another fun brewing Obama story. The guy that ran Michelle Obama's kitchen when they were living in the West Wing was this other guy named Sam and he was big on children's nutrition and he was a big Dogfish fan. He invited my wife Mariah and I to go see his homebrew setup in the West Wing. The Obamas would drink the homebrew that he made and I got to go in there and do that. And then when we got to tour the whole grounds of the White House, they took us through Michelle Obama's herb garden. I said, 'Hey Sam, do you mind if you turn your back for a second? I just want to pick a few things.' And so I got some parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme out of Michelle Obama's garden. And I made a beer called Saison DeBuff with it using her herbs with my friends from Stone Brewing and Victory Brewing. So that was the closest I ever got to the Obamas was hanging out in their garden.
That's crazy. That's awesome. That's a great story.
What was each of yours epiphany beers? What was a beer that got each of you into craft beer?
I always say it was Blue Moon, but actually I think Blue Moon actually started the thing like, oh I didn't know beer could have flavor.
I think I was used to like Bud Light, Miller. Then I think it was also Yards Brawler was the one that really said I really really like craft beer for real now.
I think I didn't like craft beer until I started this podcast.
Man, I think mine was Blue Moon because of Rob. Because Rob had Blue Moon one day and I tasted it and I'm like, 'All right, this ain't bad.' Here we are.
No, I was just going to ask if you feel like some of the things that your writing mind does, does that play into your beer mind as well when it comes up with some of the beer names or ingredients?
Yeah, for sure. I mean, any building of a brand is really just a different way of talking about storytelling. Trying to write compelling stories using creative language is the same whether you're trying to write a beer recipe and make that compelling and creative or trying to write a sonnet or a poem. They're very similar. And so I really enjoyed the opportunity I've had for 32 years running Dogfish with my co-workers. So many of them are so much better at the science part of our brewing or the bookkeeping accounting mathematical part of our business. But what I'm still pretty good at is the creative coming up with recipe concepts, writing the slogans for the beers, coming up with concepts for events. So that's what I really enjoy the most is the creativity that we get to express through the art of brewing.
All right. So how did you land on Dogfish Head?
So my question was how did Dogfish Head become a name? Is there a short story somewhere where this kind of started out? Like you wrote a short story about Dogfish?
So like I said, I was an English major in college and my wife was from Milford, Delaware. She grew up in coastal rural southern Delaware. But I grew up in western Massachusetts. I was born in New York City, but my parents moved to western Massachusetts when I was a little boy. And so I grew up right down the road from this high school that also had boarding students. And my wife who was from Milford, Delaware happened to be a boarding student at this high school up there that I was a day student at and we started dating and went to separate colleges but kept dating. And during our college years we waited tables and bartended down in Rehoboth Beach and that's how I fell in love with coastal Delaware.
And then I was writing my business plan while I was living in New York City and I went for a jog with my father up here in Maine. He's like, 'Hey Sam, how you liking your courses at Columbia?' And he was paying for them. I was like, 'Oh [__] Dad. I kind of stopped going to my classes. Sorry about that.' He's like, 'What do you mean you stopped going to your classes?' I was like, 'Well, instead of going to Columbia, I just every morning I walk over to the New York City Public Library and I'm working on a business plan to open a brewery.' And he's jogging and he's quiet for a second. I could see him thinking about it and he looks up and points at the sign and he goes, 'You know, Dogfish Head would be a good name for a brewery because that was the road that we would always jog on up here.' I was like, 'Oh [__] that's actually right. That is a good name.' So in that one sentence, I kind of got my dad's approval to go on this journey and the name of our brewery. So that's where it comes from. And I like the fact that not many people think of it as a geography. More people have heard of like Hilton Head in the Carolinas, but I'm looking out right now on Dogfish Head. It's this point of land in coastal Maine that you can see out here out my office window. So it means something geographic to me, but I love that the way the name is just kind of three random words kind of put together in a creative, whimsical way because I think that's what our recipes kind of aspire to be is creative and whimsical and unexpected.
I love that. So organic too. Instead of dad cussing you out for wasting his money.
Exactly. It was a special day for sure.
Now, was he an entrepreneur too? Because it seemed like he already had that entrepreneurial spirit.
He was the first guy in his generation of his family, second generation Italian, he was the first to go to college and then he became a tooth doctor and then in Western Massachusetts he opened up a group of five oral surgeon offices. So he oversaw the business but was still a doctor and built a staff up. So he was kind of both an entrepreneur and a doctor. And then my mom was a special ed teacher and she's the one who taught me to love reading and painting and the creative side of what I do. And my dad kind of taught me the business side. So I was very fortunate both parents with sort of complimentary superpowers that informed what I did with my life.
I like tooth doctor. You don't see that on a sign enough, do you? It sounds friendlier than oral surgeon, you know.
Now another question I think I seem to get a lot. Some questions that people always ask: with Dogfish being one of the more iconic brands now in craft beer, how did it end up staying in Delaware when you could have went to Philly, Denver? How did it stay in Delaware for 30 years?
People are always amazed that we're making hundreds of thousands of barrels, over a million cases of beer in rural coastal Delaware. And they're like, your state doesn't even have a big city in it. And that's true. It's a small state, but it's actually an awesome place to live and work and distribute a high-end product from because I get to live at the beach. I don't have to get dressed up for anything. I can commute 10 minutes to be at work from my house to the brewery, but that brewery is just two hours drive from DC, Baltimore, Philly, three-hour drive to Manhattan, three and a half maybe. And so we can hit all these awesome cities and be considered one of the local breweries in all these awesome cities, but we get to live at the beach. So it's kind of the best of both worlds.
But I will say, the scale of Dogfish Head has certainly kind of exceeded my wildest imagination. And when I drive into the brewery in Milton, I see those 1,200 barrel tanks that one tank at our brewery now, the biggest ones holds more beer than we made our entire first three years that we were in business is the scale of one of these massive tanks now. And that's surreal for me, but it still feels natural and right because those tanks aren't just filled with 60 Minute IPA, which is our bestselling beer, which we're proud of. They might be filled with pumpkin ale or SeaQuench or the Grateful Dead beer. So we were able to grow without having to become this thing that a company just focused on one widget and one product. We still get to be creative and do a lot of different things at scale. Even though we've been able to scale, we've kept the creativity top of mind in what we do every week.
Nice. Let me ask you this though, like do you think that Delaware, being in Delaware, specifically inspires the beers versus if you guys were somewhere else?
I think what it really allowed us to be really experimental in the '90s when frankly not a lot of commercial breweries in the big cities were being that experimental. I'd go to a beerfest up in Philly or Baltimore and I'd have like our Chicory Stout made with coffee and chicory and licorice root and the city beer geeks would get all mad at me. 'Why'd you put coffee in a beer? That's not respecting tradition.' So I think by being in the first brewery in the first state, we had a lot of latitude from the locals that would come in and be like, 'Oh, okay. What are you making?' They didn't come in with sort of the snobbery of the big city craft beer aficionados that existed before Dogfish had opened. So they really nurtured and supported our desire to color outside the lines and bring nontraditional ingredients into the brewer's art.
So are you saying that y'all created the local snobs that are out there now?
I always say the craft beer community is 99% [__] free. But that still means there's going to be a few [__] out there, right?
Now, with you being like when people see you now compared to I guess 30 years ago, they're like, 'Oh snap, Sam's here.' When they see you at a beer festival and stuff like that, do you get a chance to really sit down and brew nowadays or do you have to just always be on the go?
No, I still have a little brewing one barrel system up here in Maine and then we have like a five barrel and a seven barrel small brewing systems at our pub in Rehoboth and our big brewery in Milton. That's the scale that I can still get down with. I don't have the technical skills to brew on our bigger brewing systems. We have so many amazing brewers at our company that know how to run the big equipment. So I still play around with our brewers and distillers on small scale batches and then we kind of let customers decide from the feedback and social media. My wife Mariah did an amazing job growing Dogfish Head social media and we just listen to what people are saying online or when they come into our locations and that determines which of those small experimental batches get scaled up and distributed widely the next year. So it's kind of a really organic practice almost like farm leagues in baseball. The small brewing systems at Dogfish are kind of like the Bull Durham equivalent. And sometimes something comes out of that little world and swings for the fences and makes it to the big leagues like SeaQuench Ale. We didn't know if people coast to coast would want a beer with sea salt, black limes, and lime juice in it. We did it in small batches and people dug it and then we started distributing it nationally. So we have a very grassroots way of bringing new beers and spirits to market.
All right. So with you being so, well, you like music so much, how has that influenced Dogfish over the years? Like even in terms of in '95, what was your playlist if you were brewing in '95? What was on your playlist then and what's on your playlist now in 2026?
Oh, that's an awesome question. I'm even going to kind of go back further to when I fell in love with good music because I'm so proud that I was born in New York City. I was born in Queens, like one neighborhood away...
From Run DMC, but my parents moved me out of New York when I was 2 years old, but I still am like I'm from New York. I'm from New York and I live out in rural Massachusetts, right? And it's a pretty homogeneous, pretty kind of white population out there. But what was really cool is in Western Mass, I could in the middle of the night have my little boom box on in the early 80s when I was growing up and I could go on the dial and find, you know, the campus station for University of Massachusetts or the campus station for Williams College, Smith College. So that area in Western Mass had all these colleges that had all these indie stations. And I might hear, you know, two guys from the Bronx doing a hip-hop show on the UMass station. And then I go around the dial and I'd hear like a punk rock show from these ladies at Smith College. So I really fell in love with good music by just twisting the dial out there in the sticks of Western Mass. And that's where I discovered especially hip-hop and punk. And those are sort of the two genres that kind of informed my musical journey the most. And it's pretty interesting that both that punk, hip-hop, and craft beer kind of all took off at the same time in similar ways. All three of those American art forms kind of came from the margins and the outside and then they became the mainstream. Not because, you know, Wall Street or Madison Avenue forced it on the public. Those are three art forms that people found and discovered and brought them into the mainstream. So I always look at the punk and hip-hop worlds as inspirations for what we can do as craft brewers, you know, for sure.
And then you ask playlist. I'd say, okay, so playlist 95, when we opened, I was probably listening to a lot of The Replacements, punk band, the Minutemen, Sonic Youth, and then maybe from the hip-hop side, back then, still a lot of Run DMC, Eric B. & Rakim, Deltron 3030, Del the Funky Homosapien, Dan the Automator, De La Soul was big for me back then. So, those are some of my musical heroes.
Okay. How did the change after the change in 2026? What do you listen to now?
Okay. So, now let's see. On the hip-hop side, I like Earl Sweatshirt a lot. Listen to a lot of his stuff. Tyler, the Creator. So, they did a lot of work together. Odd Future. Let's see on the punk thing. I'm listening to a band out of England called The Clientele. I really like them a lot. Belle and Sebastian, Fountain of Wayne. So, yeah, mostly stick with the same genres, but always looking for... I start every morning kind of going to the music websites and reading the reviews of what was released that week. And that's how I decide what I'm going to listen to on either my bike ride or my paddle board. I try to either take a bike ride or paddle for an hour every day. So I say I work out for 60 minutes to earn my calories to drink 60 minutes later that night.
Nice.
Yeah. Speaking of 60 Minute, how did that go from... did it have that organic way that you talked about your beers? Was it like a two-barrel system that jumped into what it is today? Like how did it become so popular?
Yeah, it did. It was gradual. It doesn't seem like it today where, you know, I think every other beer that someone drinks from Dogfish is 60 Minute, about half of our volume. But a lot of people don't know that actually 60 Minute didn't come out until two years after 90 Minute. And so we brewed this beer called 90 Minute back before... it was the first beer in America to have the word Imperial on an IPA label. Like a lot of people think, oh, Imperial IPAs, they're from England. Because Imperial Stouts did come from England from over 100 years ago. But Imperial IPAs are a wholly American invention. No one put... no one called that before American brewers. And the 90...
Hold on. Is it an invention that you guys invented?
Well, we were the first to put the word Imperial on a label. I'm not claiming that. Maybe some other brewery brewed one and called it that somewhere else, but I think we were the first to put it on a label. And that label had a photograph that I found of a circus freak hammering a nail into his nose violently. And so people just started... the hardcore brewers in Philly and DC, Baltimore started calling Dogfish the one-and-done brewing company because we were selling this 9% Imperial IPA in a giant champagne bottle. And they're like, 'No one's going to ever drink more than one of those. Are you crazy?' And so people fell in love with that, but they were right. It's pretty strong. So that's what convinced us to come out with a lower ABV version of that called 60 Minute because 90 Minute is 9% alcohol and 60 Minute is 6%. So we released 60 Minute two years after we released 90 Minute and it became a runaway hit. So much so that when our distributors would order a truck full of beer, we would force them to take only 50% of the full truck of 60 Minute. We would go into every truck and look at it and say, 'No truck can be more than 50% green boxes.' You have to order other stuff because we didn't want to turn into the 60 Minute brewing company. We love 60 Minute, but we wanted to show off kind of the diversity of what we can make as brewers. So we still work hard to make sure people get excited about everything we do, not just 60 Minute.
I just felt like half, you know, it would be... it's easy to kind of visually figure out half of a truck in pallets. There's nothing more scientific than that.
Yeah, that's simple enough.
Can visualize that in the truck? Nope. Move that around. That's not...
Now, the overall visual brand of Dogfish has been pretty consistent throughout the years. Like, who came up with that imagery? Was that you as well?
