Dogfish Head co-founder Sam Calagione discusses drafting his 1990s business plan, committing the craft brewery to culinary ingredients rather than traditional German Reinheitsgebot standards.
Assertion Not checkable as stated
A major beer conglomerate pressured Discovery to cancel Dogfish Head's show
“And then, like, within two weeks, the executives at the network are saying, oh, a major beer brand is pulling their advertising, unless we stop running your show, and to Anthony Bourdain's credit, he jumped on his own social, and Let people know.”
Insight
Continual hopping adds strong hop aroma without intense lingering bitterness
“By doing this little tiny continual hopping method, it made our beers really intensely, aromatically, beautifully hoppy without being crushingly bitter. Like if we added that same volume of hops all at once, the beers would have an unpalatable lingering bitter…”
Insight
The smaller entity in a merger always absorbs more public backlash
“The smaller of the entities that merges is always going to take, you know, more of the arrows for the bigger.”
Assertion Supported
Dogfish Head once brewed a chicha beer using human saliva
“Well, we've used human saliva, guy. You gotta come back the next time we do our chicha beer, and we chewed the corn, and that was a good one.”
Opinion
Calagione: 1990s American beer market was dominated by generic light lagers
“There's all these super cool, very unique, very vibrant different beers around the world, but you can't really find them in America, and America's dominated by these samey, you know, monolithic, generic, frankly, in my view, light lagers made by giant companie…”
Assertion Supported
Sam Calagione drafted the bill to legalize commercial brewing in Delaware
“Massage the language, and literally a guy, within a month, we were on the floor getting a bill that we wrote, brought forward, and then Governor Carper, who's now, you know, signed that bill, and it actually turned into this just kismet moment, because all of …”