The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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 …”
Brewing 12-gallon batches allowed Dogfish Head to live-test with customers
“The fact that we couldn't afford a full-scale, you know, commercial brewing system, and Had to start with tiny little pots and pans, you know, making 12 gallons of beer in the corner of our restaurant. It was actually a blessing in disguise, because I would br…”
Dogfish Head differentiated its brand by strictly banning cover bands
“The Holy Trinity was original beer, original food, original music. We also refused to have any cover artists, which, you know, 93% of the bands that played back then were Jimmy Buffett cover bands. So we were, like, finding all these indie rock bands from acro…”
Dogfish Head drove early press via impromptu newsroom happy hours
“I would drop off two pallets at a distributor in New York or Philly, but then take a bucket of beers to Art Forum Magazine, or Interview, or Food & Wine, or, and, you know, usually people would let us in their door for, say, hey, we want to throw a, we want to…”
Canned cocktails are now Dogfish Head's fastest-growing business segment
“Our canned cocktails as well, which is now, you know, the fastest growing category and the fastest growing part of Dogfish Head's business.”
Dogfish Head launched with $220,000 in personal loans to retain equity
“Yep, yep, it cost 220,000, yeah. And it was really, I did it, I structured it as personal loans out of the gate, so it wasn't that initially that, you know, they had equity in the company, so that also helped Mariah and I Keep control of the company as we're g…”