Travels with Barley (15 page)

Calagione was certainly doing his best to push the beer envelope. Of the dozen beers he made, only one, Shelter Pale Ale, at 5 percent ABV, could be considered a “session beer”—beer-speak for a beer like Bud, Miller, or Coors that you'd consider adopting as your everyday beer and could reasonably drink a lot of. His best-selling brew was Raison D'Etre, his audacious 8 percent ABV raisin ale. And what was to be made of his Immort Ale, an 11 percent ABV beer that undergoes a secondary fermentation with champagne yeast and whose ingredients include organic juniper berries, vanilla, and maple syrup?

This clearly wasn't a guy who had much interest in converting diehard Bud drinkers. “Nah,” he said in an early interview, “I'm not really so much about trying to sell ‘better beer' to beer drinkers as I am about trying to win over the cognac and wine crowd.”

Other brewers were crowding into the Extreme Beer niche. I'd sampled a beer made by a New Jersey beer maker, Heavyweight Brewing Co., that was a knockoff only in the sense that Extreme Brewers could envision a knockoff: it was called Two Druids' Gruit Ale and was described as “an assertive pale ale brewed with yarrow, sweet gale and wild rosemary [in lieu of hops] in this unique interpretation” of a medieval beer style called gruit ales. Heavyweight noted that original gruits were thought to have psychotropic properties. (LSD Beer, anyone?)

I attended a beer tasting at D.B.A., one of Manhattan's top craft beer bars, and had a beer called “Train Wreck O' Flavors.” I admired it so much that I tracked down the brewmaster, Todd Ashman, at a small brewery and brewpub outside Chicago called Flossmoor Station. (Ashman has since relocated.) He told me the beer was made by actually blending beer styles (in this case Flossmoor Station Barley Wine and a beer called TOMBA, short for Toasted Oats Molasses Brown Ale). Ashman had even upped the blending ante by putting out another brew called Born Cross-Eyed, which combined the barley wine (so called because it is beer made with an alcohol strength close to wine), TOMBA, and a beer style called imperial stout. This isn't dissimilar to the way scotch makers blend several whiskies to make, for example, Dewar's or Chivas Regal.

And forget about the mass market lager mantra that the only good beer is a fresh beer. Ashman was also making a lot of barrel-aged beers—strong, dark beers such as stouts and porters that he was “putting to sleep” for up to three years in used Jack Daniel's whiskey barrels before bottling. This was beer, he insisted, that would age well and was “made to be drunk in a brandy snifter and enjoyed with a good cigar.”

I'd heard about a brewery in Vermont called Magic Hat that was also making outrageously strong and esoteric stouts called the Humdinger Series of Magical Elixirs that also were meant to be aged and, in another measure of the Extreme Beer movement, were selling for $20-plus a bottle. Alan Newman, the brewery's co-founder, described his brewing philosophy as essentially guerrilla war against mass market lager. “We work hard to expel the American myth that all beer is corn lager and that all beer should be $1 a bottle,” he said when I talked to him by phone. “Beer is liquid food” and, in his opinion, Extreme Beer was merely the gourmet end of it.

Newman insisted that after he toted up his costs for packaging (for which craft brewers, not having economies of scale, pay a premium) and the vast amount of malt and other ingredients that went into make his huge beers, “Honest, I don't know if we make any money at $20 a bottle.”

Whatever the case, all this was a far cry from even $6.99 per six-pack craft ales, and light-years away from six-packs of Bud, Miller, or Coors on sale for $3.99 at the local supermarket. I'd found at least a half-dozen other breweries, Washington State's Fish Brewing Co. and New York State's Brewery Ommegang among them, plus a number of beer makers in Belgium, the European heart of Extreme Beer, that were making beers that retailed in the $20-to-$35-a-bottle range. When I wrote a feature about Extreme Beer for the
Wall Street Journal
and arranged a tasting of the stuff at Manhattan's Blind Tiger, a third of the seventeen beers we sampled retailed for $20 or more. Collectors had even driven up Koch's Millennium offerings to as much as $300 a bottle on eBay.

One way of looking at this is to see Extreme Beer as part of a broader American trend over the past two decades to take simple and beloved commodities—coffee and blue jeans, for example—and move them to a more sophisticated plane. Hence, the $5 cup of Starbucks with a twelve-syllable name and the $100 pair of Calvin Kleins. Why not beer?

You can add to that the restless experimentation that the craft brewers (most of whom, like Calagione, started out as restlessly experimental homebrewers) have brought to beer—a creativeness that, in the long Lager Wars, the major beer companies decided was best spent on marketing. Thus, everywhere I went among the craft beer makers, people were working on beers or brewing techniques that were worthy of Jim Koch's efforts at developing Triple Bock and Utopias.

Of course, none were quite making a claim as extreme as did Koch when he put out his MMM Millennium stout in celebration of the real millennium. He stuck it in a bottle whose color, chemistry, and space-aged sealing mechanism are designed to last, he says, to the year 3000.

I arrived at Calagione's Dogfish Head brewery on a day when things were a mess. He had just a few weeks before moving out of a cramped 5,000-square-foot space nearby and into a cavernous 27,000-square-foot building that had once been the refrigerator for a huge cannery that had closed down in the 1960s, taking a big chunk of Milton's economy with it. This quaint southern Delaware town of about 1,700, on an inland waterway leading to the coast, had first come to prominence as a nineteenth-century shipbuilding power, a legacy still apparent in the oddly canted Victorian houses crafted from lumber scraps from the shipyards. The cannery, Sam said, had “basically been a boil on the ass of Milton for the past decade” when a real estate syndicate that included his father-in-law bought the building and a big parcel around it in the year 2000. Plans were afoot to eventually turn the plot into a mixed residential-commercial hub that would include 530 condos and houses and could double the town's population. Calagione was offered a long-term lease on the cannery space under what he said were “extremely favorable” terms and jumped at it. At the moment, he was surrounded by fallow land scraped up by bulldozers and backhoes as they carved out streets and put in utilities. The brewery though, which he'd fitted-out with barely used equipment bought at 20 cents on the dollar from a failed Philadelphia microbrewer, was up and running and capable “of making 100 barrels every time we fire it up,” he told me. That's still small—as of this writing Dogfish Head's output was about 14,000 barrels a year. But that was double the 2002 production and phenomenal considering that when Calagione opened the brewpub just seven years before, its output—for the entire year—was 380 barrels.

And if others could only see rubble in the jumbled parking lot out the front door, Calagione looked out and saw the green lawns of a boccie ball court he planned to install, busy streets and sidewalks, and the brewery, with a forty-eight-seat restaurant and bar sprouting in its lobby, as the hub of it all. Construction on the nautically themed bar and restaurant had just begun but Sam, a literature major prone to dragging Emerson and Thoreau into beer discussions, had managed to get the Dogfish Head credo (by his hero, Emerson) up on the lobby walls:

We went into the brewery office, a glassed-off fishbowl with a half-dozen Dilbert-like cubicles holding cluttered desks topped with PCs, where Calagione began to lay out the basics of his and Dogfish Head's history. He and Mariah had gone to high school together in Massachusetts—they met when he was seventeen and she was fifteen. Interest blossomed, though the relationship suffered a temporary hiatus when Sam got bounced out of school a couple of months before graduation. He cited “accumulated mischief” though the final straw was when he was caught skating naked at night in the school's ice hockey arena. Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, looked past nude hockey escapades to see a promising student and Sam steeped himself in literature and writing while admitting that he didn't totally abandon some of his wilder high school impulses, and often stayed in the dock with the behavior police.

Mariah finished high school and enrolled in Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, majoring in public policy. Sam, after graduating from Muhlenberg, went off to tend bar in New York, where he discovered a love and talent for homebrewing. Despite the distances over those years, they saw each other pretty much every weekend and summered together, renting a house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, very close to where the brewpub is now. Sam's beer tastes were definitely a work in progress—Mariah recalls him getting a bartending job during one of their Rehoboth college summers and dressing up as Bud Man, in a big blowup Bud outfit, as part of a promotion.

By the time Mariah finished Brown, Sam had put his lit degree to work by doing some serious writing—a business plan. They had toyed with the notion of opening a brewpub in Providence but decided on the Delaware beach region because they knew the lay of the land. And, at the time, Delaware was one of only a handful of states that didn't have either a brewpub or a microbrewery and, Sam said, “we wanted to be the first.” It wasn't quite as simple as raising the capital and hiring a cook, however; Sam and Mariah also had to write enabling legislation to change a Prohibition-era Delaware law that prevented beer from being sold where it was brewed.

The brewery got its name, Calagione told me, not from some local landmark but for a promontory off the Maine coast near Boothbay Harbor, where his parents have a rustic summer cottage. He described the early going: “When we first opened I was a twenty-five-year-old English major with no business experience and no money. You can imagine how receptive the banks were to my situation. So we had the dubious distinction of being the smallest commercial brewery in the country. I'm pretty sure our brewing system was the only one ever delivered by a UPS truck. We ripped the tops off of three kegs, slapped propane burners beneath them, and went to work brewing ten gallons at a time. While it truly sucked from a labor perspective, since I was brewing two or three times a day, five days a week, it was great from an experimental perspective. I brewed so often that I would get bored brewing the same recipes. So I would wander into the kitchen of our brewpub and grab some raisins, or maple syrup or apricots. I would change one variable each time I brewed and follow the changes through to see how it affected people's opinions of the beers once they were on tap out at our bar. Our tiny stature proved to be a huge advantage in the long run. We took risks with nontraditional ingredients and the worst-case scenario was ten gallons of horrible beer. Thankfully this didn't happen too often.”

While Sam is the beermeister and handles the “look and feel” of the brewery and brewpub, the operation is very much a joint venture, with Mariah, thirty-three, handling back office chores, advertising and marketing, and a more esoteric job that she described as “keeping us out of trouble.” She offered one common scenario in which they collaborate: Sam will come up with an idea for a new beer. “I'll say to Sam, I wonder if we do more brands, will we undercut our existing brands? And Sam will, say, well, you've got to be innovative to move ahead. We'll go round and round like this for a while and out of it will come something like Punkin' Ale. It's my job to drive him crazy—in a good way.”

Calagione had to interrupt our initial interview to take care of a few pressing matters, so we met later at his brewpub near the beach where I sampled his one “normal” beer, Shelter Pale Ale. I liked it (and I would like all of his IPAs even better). I realized what a relentlessly experimental mind Sam had when I quipped of Shelter, “So this is the closest you come to plain vanilla lager, right?”

He looked at me, serious for just a moment, and mused, “Hmm, plain vanilla lager. Now that's an idea.” (He hasn't made it yet.)

I would end up visiting Dogfish Head and the brewpub several times and I caught Sam on a number of beer occasions in Manhattan, often in the company of his employees. One of the things that struck me about his operation was how it could seem relaxed and casual and utterly determined, all at the same time; if you didn't see the brew kettles you could easily mistake it for one of those blue-jeans-mandatory PC start-ups in the early Silicon Valley, where everyone had a very good time while they fomented the digital revolution. At Dogfish, the fun seemed clearly tied to the notion that they were all gonzo fighters in the name of Extreme Beer and the only thing you were allowed to take seriously was the beer itself.

Calagione runs the place with a management style that his workers describe as a mix of the absentminded professor, mad genius, great delegator, and prankster. His most consistent traits, besides reliably inventing ever-more-adventurous beers, are to be notoriously late for meetings and fond of dropping whatever he's doing to have a beer with his employees. He also seems to have the knack of surrounding himself with able people and trusting them to carry out the work. “Sam will present us with a beer idea,” says lead brewer Bryan Selders, “and then let us have at it. He values our experience and abilities and doesn't squelch that with any sort of visions of self-grandeur.”