Ep. 337 Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head

It's good to be back with you guys. I was bullshit when Amy Puller won that podcast award. I thought you two deserved it. [laughter]

Yeah, I mean we had a strong Q1. Both our beer sales, Dogfish beer sales were up low single digits and our Dogfish can cocktail sales were up high double digit. We can circle back on that a little later when we talk about spirits-based RTD and Sun Cruiser and other plays that we kind of have in that segment. But we've, as you know, the whole Northeast had a pretty shitty Memorial Day weekend, horrific weather. So, it kind of put a bump on the brakes a little bit post Q1. And we felt that a little bit here between the Mid-Atlantic coastal area and New England. But I'm proud to say that orders are coming in strong for July 4th weekend. And we only get that as a part of a portfolio company, Dogfish gets two focus months. And you're right, we used to call the summer July focus month Shark Attack, but as a brewery with a music problem and with us coming off of the April music month, we said, 'Let's just make all of our messaging about music and let's challenge ourselves to get creative on marketing programs that can create pull an awareness for the displays we plan to go out and get with our distributors in July that are also around the theme of music, whether it's on premise programs or off.'

Yeah, we did. And you know the velocity on our Grateful Dead juicy pale draft continues to be amazing. Like pods haven't gone up because we did such a good job launching it last year that we lost some pods and gained some but overall I think pods are pretty static but what's up huge is that our velocity per point of distribution per draft is up in the 20s something percent and you mentioned that touch tunes that's an example and back to social fitness like us working hard to try and get young beer drinkers or just drinkers out on premise to drink beer here. And so with Touchtunes, we identified 9,000 music-centric venues and on premise accounts and then worked with the Grateful Dead to curate [snorts] stuff for Touchtunes content where we can where it's legal buy folks the opportunity to be their own DJ for their pals at a big old table and hopefully argue about music instead of politics.

Sexy and Sexy and 17 [laughter] by Cats.

But no, it is Touch Tunes bars are typically the funnest bars is my point.

It looks like Harry. You're doing whatever the kids are doing now. Clavicle or whatever these power maxing kids. It looks like you do your podcast now inside of a Scandinavian steam room. Is that right?

Yeah. I can smell the eucalyptus coming through my phone.

It does look like a sauna. Actually, the only people who have said it looks like a sauna were the finished long drink guys.

That makes sense. So, do you have a cold plunge apparatus that's below just out of screen?

Yeah, me too. Me too. But, uh, yeah. So, staying on the and I'm really proud to be part of a working group that NBWA BIBA put together and we kind of meet quarterly in Chicago or virtually with leaders from big brewery small just to talk about that social fitness concept and getting people out to drink again. and some really encouraging work and just idea sharing is coming out of that for Dogfish beyond the touch tunes. We're also working with So Far Sound, actually down your neck of the woods. We're doing stuff with them in Austin, Boston, New York City, just sponsoring a bunch of tours of various scale bands. And then I guess another big news for us is we're launching a whiskey with our pals at Rolling Stone magazine. So that's

That's the newest news. So, we've been working on that for a whole year and that will launch in celebration of America's 250th. We're launching this whiskey that's built off of 12 tracks kind of the way you build a song. We took 12 different aged whiskeys and pulled and layered them together. Some aged on polyanto wood, some in rum barrels and wine barrels. So it's a beautiful big overproof 90 proof. And we're shipping it out kind of like Metro or New England down to Virginia is where it'll distribute and we're even co-partnering on a festival July 4th weekend on the Hudson called State Side. Dogfish and Sun Cruiser are the sponsors and Noah Kahan's going to be headlining that. It's already sold out. And we'll be doing whiskey and our whiskey cocktails and our beers at that event.

Yep. Not a can cocktail. It's 90 proof. But we commissioned this amazing artist, John Langford, who's in a punk band from the UK called the Mecons, which was a first generation punk [snorts] band from Leeds. He's also a great fine artist. And for Chesapeake and Maine, our James Beard nominated cocktail joint. He painted Patti Smith, Elvis, and Miles Davis as nautical seamen, if you will. And we named a whiskey cocktail after each of them, Inspire Beach, that we'll be serving at that festival as well.

Well, you're right that Mariah and I will get VIP tickets. [laughter]

For the Noah Kahan concert. And we were in Milan three days ago for a Pilsnerfest. I was in Minneapolis yesterday for the National Independent Venues Association, all the entrepreneurs that run music venues across the country and turning them on to the Grateful Dead stuff. So you're right that it's absolute maniacal focus on music, the overlap between music and our brand. I'm also proudly now writing I wrote for Rolling Stone magazine. I'm in the same issue as Obama for their summer issue writing about that moment in 76 when punk rock started, hip hop started. It's pretty cool that all three of those American art forms had kind of the same origin moment. So I wrote about that for Rolling Stone and I'm writing a quarterly column for Cream Magazine, the other OG sort of punk magazine. I got to interview Hall of Famer Joan Jett, Wayne Coyne, my buddy from Flaming Lips. I'm going to interview Questlove who's got a new documentary about Earth, Wind and Fire coming up. So, I'm living my rock and roll dreams.

Jen is too. Although she drinks more cocktails, I think.

It's an emotional basement.

I think it's like you find a niche and scratch it. If you look at our holy trinity from day one was original beer, original food, original music. We never wavered from that. We always had national bands play our stage and we did our Analog-A-Go-Go Fest. We've been the official brewery of Record Store Day for 11 years. But we decided, we don't have the scale of spend of other top 20 craft breweries because we are so social media oriented, not traditional marketing oriented. So, we're like, we got to just lean further into what we're good at. And it's storytelling around this intersection and this love of beer, canned cocktails and music. And so we did kind of extend that love into the canned cocktail space. We've had it all along for beer. But with what we're doing now with Rolling Stone magazine for this whiskey and then there'll be an announcement with an epic one of the highest selling fine artists in the world. Currently we'll be announcing something on the can cocktail front with them. So, we're going to keep doing stuff in that arts and music space because it just feels so right for our brand.

Zensky? What was his name?

They just revealed BY's. It's neither By nor the banana guy, but [laughter] you're close. I'll say that.

I would say in partnership with our BBC sales team and our distributors, if I had to name three, it'd be number one, getting 60-minute next to both Grateful Dead beers everywhere off-prem. As you know, we only launched the Citrus Daydream in cans, not in draft because we didn't want to screw with the momentum of the best minute series first quarter that we've had since 2022. So we said, 'Let's only do the second Dead beer in cans so that we can create a billboard off-prem, but only focusing on bringing that in on prem in cans.' We have a really fun program called Michelada Dead because that beer with the black limes, that lager is so good in Michelada. We discovered it at South by Southwest where I saw you in the airport. I tackled him in the airport [laughter] and a bartender down at the Yeti store down there on South Congress came up with this epic mix to make a Michelada out of that Dead beer and we're like, 'Holy shit.' And now we're testing it in markets with a special pint glass that describes the menu. So, we think that's a cool on-prem play for the can because we don't have draft for it. But back to your question, top three, getting those three beers everywhere. Number two, can cocktail displays, especially going after the markets where we have a strong Sun Cruiser momentum and even sinless momentum and really do you know BBC now having a spirits-based RTD that can fill up half of a coal box window shelf across those three brands is something that we see awesome latent opportunity with. On the can cocktail front. June 15th, we're launching our secret stash cooler, which you know how you bring your cooler to a barbecue or a picnic, but this is one that fits 24 beers but has a secret compartment for two slim cans so you can hide your favorite two drinks. [laughter]