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[email protected].
George Hmel, not only was Home Sweet Home... I want to ask you about this, the story of you boating across the Delaware.
Was that George the reporter that was the only... Yeah, he was one of like three people that he and Nancy showed up. One other just beer lover somehow heard about. So like three people showed up at my first... after I rode... I built a boat and I rode our first six-pack across the Delaware, 18 nautical miles. As I get into the bar at Cape May, my beer's dusty and warm behind the bar. The posters I sent are still rolled up in a scroll behind the bar. Nobody showed up. But George wrote about it for Mid-Atlantic Brewing News. And then somehow USA Today saw that story. And then Levi's reached out to me because they saw my photo in the USA Today story like, 'Would you model in this campaign we're doing?' So even though only three people showed up, it actually really helped get Dogfish, you know, on the map.
Welcome back to the Brewed podcast. This is episode 100.
Yeah, this is a fun journey. Triple digits, boys.
Yeah, we've made it. So Richie Tavlin and Evan Blum.
Hello. Hello.
So today we have a very special guest, Sam... I'm sorry, I pronounced...
Calagione, full of baloney.
Okay, awesome. Thank you. We've heard from the man. I probably pronounced it like three different ways, but thank you. So, very special episode. I've told this story before, but I think you're the reason why a lot of people have gotten into the industry, kind of what you did with Dogfish Head and kind of like how you speak and you talk and you write about beer. When I was in college, I went to Penn State. I think that you are part of the curriculum now of the business school at Penn State.
Because as I was going through your book, Brewing Up a Business had just come out and all my professors, it was like part of the reading material, right? Because we were like learning about different things and they were like, 'What was your major that the classes were?' Business management. And it was kind of like, you know, what is happening and we were like reading your book as far as like, you know, things that were happening in class relating it to your book. I think my professor just really liked you and Dogfish so like that's why he pushed it on us. But it was like the first book that like really spoke to me. And I was just like, I knew I wanted to open up some sort of business, but like the way that you were kind of writing about beer and the way you were explaining about how you built your business was very interesting to me and then I just got a little bit more into it, a little bit more into it and now I've just kind of made a career about it. So this is cool to actually meet you and talk to you about it.
It's very heartwarming. So thank you. And certainly ours is an industry built upon relationships and inspiring mentors since it's a relatively young community, like 40 years for craft beer in America. But so similarly, I was inspired by Ken Grossman from Sierra and Jim Koch from Sam Adams. So, Michael Jackson, the beer writer who spent a lot of time here in Philly. So I had my mentors that inspired me. So, I'm proud to be one of the ones that got to inspire you.
Cool. So, I want to kind of get in, we'll kind of frame the conversation around the book because that's how I know you. But in your book, well, I guess we'll start off with you in high school.
The book was interesting to me for many reasons, but like I feel like a quarter of the book was you talk about high school, which is funny for a craft brewery, but that seems to like be something that shaped you or was that just kind of like... I know that's where you met Mariah.
Yep. And but it was a different type of high school.
Yeah. Has that kind of shaped... like was your family like that before or was it like kind of really the high school?
You know, my parents had an incredible work ethic. I grew up in West... I was born in Queens, New York City, but I moved when I was a year and a half old. But I still proudly say born in NYC and I'm here in the sixth burrow, although Philly doesn't like to be called that I don't think. But we moved to Western Mass and yes, I went to this high school out there that was four miles from my house but it had both boarding students and day students. So I was a day student and it's called Northfield Mount Hermon. My wife Mariah who co-founded Dogfish with me was a boarding student because she was from coastal Delaware. But the school itself is very unique, unlike traditional New England prep schools or like a Lawrenceville in this neck of the woods. It was founded by a minister and it was founded for kids of great talent but no financial means. So they would go into mostly Boston, New York and identify through the churches these really talented, hardworking kids with no money. And so the school didn't charge anything. But you had to work your ass off there. It was a working farm. You shovel the coal for the steam system. You clean the dishes in the dining room, prep the food. So the mission was educating the head, the heart, and the hand because they also expected you to take your education and bring it back to your communities and help them, you know, improve. And so that was dear to Mariah and I, that concept, and we really did apply it to Dogfish. The work ethic, as you guys know, in a small company, you got to wear a lot of hats. It's not a nine-to-five job. And then that'd be the head. The head would be like the academics and the recipes and the branding, but then the hard work ethic would be the hand. And then the heart was giving back to the communities that give your sustenance. So the case of Dogfish, the arts community, environmental causes, we've given over a million dollars to the Nature Conservancy. So we've kind of played the playbook of our high school to grow and define our entrepreneurial brand.
Yeah. Like Mariah went there, too. So she had the same upbringing as you kind of through the same high school.
Yeah. But the difference is she graduated. I got kicked out in March of my senior year. So I'm one of the few people that never actually graduated from high school, but somehow Muhlenberg College up the road from here in Allentown still let me in. They were kind of like, I think they were like, 'Is he a full pay kid?' And my dad was a tooth doctor so he could pay. They're like, 'Ah, screw it. We'll take him without a high school degree.' But my mom and dad were big influences as well. My mom was a special needs teacher and taught me to love storytelling and reading and bought me any books I wanted, comic books or whatever growing up. So, she kind of fueled that storytelling love whereas my dad fueled that entrepreneurial interest.
Mhm. It kind of reminds me of like, I know the Northeast, like self-reliance, like transcendentalism where it's like you were kind of doing everything and I was kind of getting the energy from your high school that was like kind of like the same type of energy like you're doing everything yourself. You're relying on yourself. You're writing your own story and I thought that you've been able to like talk kind of talk about yourself throughout your whole career. Like has that always been a part of your story? Like were you kind of writing it as you were going?
Yeah, I mean I would say, you know, when I went to Northfield Mount Hermon, that's kind of when I fell in love with storytelling and kind of started trusting my creative instincts. And first-time teachers are like, 'You're a really good storyteller, but in your short stories and blah blah blah, but you're using your powers for evil on campus. You're coming up with these stupid ideas, getting kids in trouble. You have leadership capabilities, but you're leading them towards disaster.' And then in college I kind of honed that a little better and focused on creative writing. Day after I graduated from college, I moved back to New York City with a goal of being a writer and I started taking classes at Columbia in their MFA program. But to earn my rent, I worked at a first-gen craft beer bar in the mid-90s, kind of like maybe the equivalent Monks would be today in Philly for the Upper West Side. There was a place called Nacho Mama's Burritos, which doesn't sound like a beer bar, but the owner was only like four years older than me, and that's where I cut my teeth on Sierra, etc. And that's where I started to see that I was a good writer in that Columbia cohort, but I was not world class to write poetry or novels. But I saw that I could maybe apply my love for storytelling to try and write stories of unique, creative beers and a business plan and tell the stories of a brand. And that's really what I shifted direction and started working on the business plan for Dogfish. To your point in the transcendentalist, the first page of the business plan was a quote from Emerson that's still writ large on all of our different buildings. I won't read it all, but at the heart it's about going on this exploration of goodness instead of following the status quo. Because the second page of the business plan said, 'Dogfish Head is committed to being the first commercial brewery in America to brew the majority of our beers outside the Reinheitsgebot using culinary ingredients.' And that was true when I was writing the business plan as a 23-year-old. And it's still true today as a top 30 craft brand that the majority of our beers are brewed with ingredients outside the Reinheitsgebot.
So, I know like your first craft beer was this cherry with some cherry beer.
Do you think that just brewing that beer had this idea that you wanted to use different ingredients, but like what was the idea of using different crazy ingredients and different techniques and everything?
Yeah, that was the first, that was the epiphany moment. I was walking home from buying a homebrew kit in 1990, and myself and the owner of that bar went to the same old store in New York called Little Shop of Hops that sold brewing equipment and he walked to the Upper West Side where he lived. I walked down to Chelsea where I live with my roommates. And on my way, as I was walking into Chelsea from Midtown, there was a bodega selling half-priced cherries that were all mushy with flies all over them. And I was like, 'Fuck it. I'm going to buy those and squish them into the pale recipe I just bought.' And the beer turned out beautifully. My next two batches sucked, as home brewers listening. But I stood up on my coffee table as we drank the first homebrew and told all my roommates, 'This is what I'm going to do with my life. I'm going to open a brewery.' And they're still my best pals.
So, weren't they like... weren't they like actors or something?
Yeah, they're all... they were when we were living together in New York, they were just starting a show called The State on MTV, which was a comedy show on MTV, but they've... David Wain and Ken Marino, Joe Lo Truglio, the short cop on Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Those are all my roommates, and they were there that night I first served the beer. And we stayed great friends.
And were they in Columbia with you or how...?
And then I moved there the year after they... and I graduated right after. And we all got, you know, apartments together.
Yeah. Awesome. And then how long did it take you from like you home brewing to like writing the business plan then moving down to Delaware? Is that a couple years?
It took me two years from when I wrote the business plan in New York till when we opened in Delaware.
So I think I was 25 when I opened Dogfish and 23 when I decided that I started writing the business plan.
Yeah. And you guys started off as a brew pub, right? You guys were making food.
Yeah. And still are. And so we, you know, kind of the holy trinity from day one was original beer, original food, original music.
So, you know, like a lot of ours here in Philly or certainly at the beach, there's a lot of cover bands and we wanted to stand out from that. So, we would book, you know, we would find these random... I was big music, had DJ in high school and college. So, I'd find these bands that I loved and sometimes they would crash and burn, suck or not show up or whatever. And sometimes... I mean we did the Strokes play our stage, Deltron 3030, Guided by Voices.
This is when you were just a small brew pub.
Mhm. Yeah. And so we went after it and spent a good amount of money to get some great artists, Jonathan Richman, to play our stage and then soon started collaborating with these musicians as part of our work as a brewery. So music's as big of a passion for us as food and beer.
Nice. And you like... you are a great public speaker. Were you getting in front of your customers like all the time and talking about it? Like has that always been a part of your business plan and you kind of get in front of everything?
Yeah, I got to give my wife a lot of credit here. I mean, if I'm probably the analog face and voice for Dogfish, although singing last night, I lost my voice, but... and whereas my wife's sort of the digital voice of our company. She was really smart in '95 when we, you know, got dogfish.com as a domain name. And as soon as... and she started really fueling getting our content out into the early version of the internet, which quickly, you know, got amplified by the growth of social media platforms, particularly those, you know, as I was growing up, I'm younger than you guys, but like a RateBeer or a BeerAdvocate were really important to us. Like I remember mowing the lawn and Mariah come out in the arm and be like, 'Our 90 Minute is the number one beer on BeerAdvocate.' I'm like, 'What's BeerAdvocate?' It's like, 'Oh, two brothers started a place where they talk about rating beers.' I'm like, 'That's so cool. I didn't think that would ever exist.' I'd love to chat with them and started, you know, engaging with them. That was in the era when we were only like three states distributing and we would find these pockets across America that people mostly because of those websites would be asking for our beer and own a big beer store in Madison, Wisconsin or Chicago or Austin and that's how we decided where we would distribute just by whoever was asking for our beer in the cities across the country.
Yeah. Not very strategic. What like what was the beginning of distribution like? I mean you guys started off as a brew pub. How quickly did you guys jump into I guess starting in Delaware and then expanding that and what was the first expansion like?
Yeah, so we started in coastal Delaware. We were in 1995 and we opened literally the smallest commercial brewery in America. So for context for your listeners, in the era we opened there were 600-ish breweries in America and now there's about 10,000. So it's exploded.
12 gallons I could yield.
How like how did you do that? Were you like having to sell other people's beer? Was it just like you got everyone has to go home like at 8:00 p.m.?
Stop drinking. Don't drink so much. No. We would... I would two to three times a day, five-ish days a week. So I'd have three 12-gallon fermenters going most days. And then waddle them into the cold room and transfer them into a Sanke keg and put them on tap behind our bar. So we were really busy until we built a five-barrel brewery the after one year open out of used canning equipment, direct fire, just MacGyvered to a five-barrel system, you know. And that got us a little bit into more normal scale brewing system, right. And then we started, you know, making money because we were not... we were pissing in the wind at 12 gallons per batch, you know.
Yeah, it's pretty tough. And your book was really... it was cool, it was speaking my language where it was talking about like sales strategy and like the mindset you have to have as like an entrepreneur but there wasn't much in the book is like production but you guys were one of the fastest growing breweries in the country for multiple decades like how was that process like because you are so out there and sales focused and like recipe development and kind of creating the brand but like building that beast of a brewery must have been like a whole, you know, career unto itself. Like, what was that like? Were you more involved with that? Did you have people come in early on that were like kind of production focused?
Yeah. I mean, as I said earlier, when you're an entrepreneur like we all three are, you have to wear a lot of hats when you start up because you don't have the resources to pay the right amount of people that the actual work deserves. But I think there was that scale. It's a choice whether if they want to scale. The ones that I've seen, entrepreneurs regardless of their industry that are successful. One of the key traits I think they share is they have the humility to understand which of the seven hats they're wearing fit them well and they're good at wearing it and which ones are uncomfortable and they suck at it. And they find people with complementary talents to theirs to give the hats that would fit better on those other people. So, in the case of Mariah and I, you know, Mariah is really good at digital and social media, and better than me at the finance. She did the books to start with, but we both sucked at HR. We sucked at legal, we sucked at, you know, scaling production. So, you know, finding really talented brewers, distillers, engineers to help us grow who had different skill sets. Mariah and I and incented them properly to go on this journey with us over a long time.
It's not like like today you can go out and you find brewers with brewing experience. Like I'm sure back then it was like a lot of people like no brewing experience. You got to train everybody up from the ground up.
Yeah. And we've been lucky that we've had like a good mix of both academic trained brewers that might have gone through UC Davis or Siebel program and those that like me just started as home brewers. And I've always intentionally, one thing I have kind of stayed on with production, like I can't make beer on any of our systems bigger than the seven-barrel. We have a five, a seven, a half-barrel, a one-barrel, a 100-barrel, and a 200-barrel brew house. I don't know how to brew on the big ones. Way beyond my skills. But I still stay involved in the mix of our brewers so that there's some that are academic and some that came up through home brewing. So that neither side of the brain wins because we try to do a lot of things that have not been done in beer before and I found that if you had too many of those academic people they'd be like, 'Show me where in a brewing book this has ever been done successfully.' And whereas the home brewers are like, 'Screw it, let's try it, I don't care.' So having that mix of the academic, sciency, smart has very much served us well with the awesome people that Mariah and I were able to entice to become our co-workers on the journey.
Cool. And then your distribution at that point, I know in the... like Eddie Freeland was the distributor.
He was out last night. I hugged it out with Eddie Freeland last night. He still looks the same.
His name comes up like every three episodes.
Yeah. He's amazing. I think weed's keeping that guy young. It's not just the beer. He's an amazing touchstone for the Philly beer community for sure.
Yeah. Was Philadelphia the first real expansion that you had?
Yeah. I mean, you know, you mentioned we started with a 12-gallon system. In year two, we built a five-barrel and that's when I built a two-head bottling line. This is before cans were cool.
And we were just hand capping with a homebrew capper with two fills for like wine bottle fillers. I had a more like a pimped out Blichmann because it was counter-pressure fill. And then I just had a bench capper on this side, but full 22s and then I would hand cap. And then it would take us 10 hours to do 100 cases and then we put them in my pickup truck. I was the only sales guy and I would drive to DC, Baltimore, Philly to Freelands, etc. And to start our journey. So DC, Baltimore, Philly were really first and we're so lucky. I mean, people are like, 'How the fuck did you build a multi-hundred-thousand barrel brewery in rural coastal Delaware? You're nowhere near a city.' And that's true. I get to live at the beach and it's about as dressed up as I get. But where I am in Rehoboth is a two-hour drive almost exactly from downtown DC, Baltimore, Philly, and three and a half from Manhattan. So, it's actually a really nice radius to hit all these big cities in.
Yeah. Well, and what were like at that point? Were you going directly into bottle shops and beer distributors and selling it, or was it really you had to go into the bars first? Because this was so early on, you were having to convince people what craft beer even really was.
Yeah. And while I wasn't alone, I want to give props to like Carol Stoudt and Tommy at Yards started right when I started. Bill at Victory started and so that we had a nice group there that kind of were the class of '95 through '97. The Troegs brothers part of that too. So we were all kind of on the streets together talking about local craft beer. And as you guys know, this city just like was an anomaly. Just outpunched its weight in beer passion, particularly compared to DC, Baltimore and even New York City, I think, for a while.
So I was really lucky that we were embraced as a local brewery because we were an hour and a half down the road. And that really helped Dogfish get established.
We've heard... what's his name from... Ken Brewfest.
Jeff. Ken Brewfest. Yeah. He told us like back in the days it was like you know Tom from... Tom Kehoe, like Bill and Ron were like literally at the fest and he's like behind our booths.
Yeah. He's just like if you were able to like look back at like what that was it was like kind of very special moment of like getting everybody out there.
