Sam Calagione, co-founder of Dogfish Head, discusses product portfolio diversification after merging with the Boston Beer Company.
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.”
Disclosure
Dogfish Head committed to brewing outside German purity laws
“The whole concept, like in the first page of the business plan, I wrote, Dogfish Head will be the first commercial brewing in America committed to brewing the majority of our beers outside the Reinheitsgebot.”
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…”