Tips for the Aspiring Homebrewer from Master Brewer Sam Calagione, Founder
of the Dogfish Head Craft Brewery
By Steven John
Homebrewing beer is a great hobby for myriad reasons. It’s fun, it’s interesting (there’s science, history, and culture involved here), it can lead to top-quality beer at affordable prices, and, let’s be honest, when you make a great homebrew beer, the bragging rights are hard to beat.
Homebrew kits also make great gifts, or great gifts to self. If you are a true beer lover, you owe it to yourself to try your hand at the hobby and see if it just might grow into a passion.
You can start the hobby off with a basic one-gallon brewing kit and be making your own batch of beer in no time for less than $50. Or you can get a more standard five-gallon homebrew kit and make a couple of cases of beer in your first try at it. Sure, the first batch might not be objectively great no matter what volume of beer you make – not to mention what type – but it will taste pretty excellent just the same as you will know you made it yourself.
To help with a few pointers on how to make that beer you make yourself as good as it can be, we sat down (well, remotely, but we were both sitting) with Sam Calagione, the founder of the Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, one of the most celebrated breweries in America. And when you try their 90 Minute IPA, SeaQuench Ale, or Hazy-O!, you’ll know why.
Calagione started off as a homebrewer, and even several decades into his career as a pro, he still has fond memories of those early batches. The first he ever made was akin to the Punkin Ale Dogfish Head still offers; of that beer, Sam said: “Since day one back in ‘94, as a home brewer, and speaking to a fellow home brewer here, I always took the time needed. We crushed real allspice, shredded our own cinnamon on cheese boards, I remember nutmeg the same, and we used real brown sugar, we used real pumpkin meat.”
That devotion to excellence in homebrew helps explain Dogfish Head’s commercial success. We wondered at some tips Sam Calagione had for homebrew success, asking first: “what are some of the most important tips you have for the novice home brewer?”
“So, I would say, even though I've written a couple books on home brewing, and everyone should please check out my books – but honestly, everyone should start with the timeless book from Charlie Papazian, which is ‘The Joy of Home Brewing,’” Calagione said. “ It's really the Bible from sort of the Woody Guthrie of our movement, you know, the father of the American home brewing movement, Charlie Papazian. And it's a book that, I think, has been so timeless because it walks a great line of describing and explaining the science, but in a way that's not overwhelming or scary.”
“In fact, his credo in the book is to be relaxed. Don't worry, have a home brew, because you're dealing with real science, real time, in your kitchen and on a micro level, with single cell yeast, but you got to just stay chill and trust the creative process, as much as the scientific phenomena that's happening with fermentation. So I would say starting with, ‘The Joy of Home Brewing,’ and then, I'd say, the next thing is to note there've been massive improvements in dry yeast, as a format for brewing. So Papazian, he spends a lot of time talking about finding liquid yeast cultures and how important that is, because back then there was really just bread yeast and not much available. Now, the commercial science has caught up with the format of dry yeast and there's some awesome dry yeast, which makes it really easy to brew a lot of different styles of beer, at home, without worrying about the temperature of a slurry of yeast that you're waiting for in the mail.”
“What are the easiest styles of beer for the new home brewer to make?”
“So I would say ales,” Sam replied, “because as a class of beers, they tend to ferment more at room temperature, whereas with lagers you might need a refrigerator to put your carboy and your fermenting beer in, as they ferment a cooler temperature. So it's a lot easier I think to home brew ales. And then across that spectrum, I think it's really aim for starting out with that four to eight or nine-percent ABV sweet spot. Don’t go right out of the gates and brew something over 10%, where you really have to think about the oxygen content, the pitching rate of yeast, potentially even needing to add additional sugars post fermentation to bump a beer up over eight or 10 ABV. So, I would say starting at that four to eight ABV, a sweet spot, and stick to ales out of the gates instead of lagers.
“What are some of the common mistakes that new brewer new home brewer makes?”
“I would say under pitching yeast, in general, would probably be number one. And I would say not upgrading out of the gates when you buy a home brew kit to having a glass carboy; for primary fermentation, a lot of home brew kits just come with a plastic buckets, which is okay, if you're a hyper careful with sanitation. But to me the glass carboys have a gently rounded base to them, whereas the five gallon bucket have a creased corner in that bottom circle and it's just more susceptible, if you're not super duper clean, to bacteria, to wild yeast sitting in there. So the first upgrade I would do would be a glass carboy, and then over- pitching the yeast versus what might be shown in a home brew recipe.”
“What are some ways for the home brewer to take their brewing up to the next level once they've gotten beyond that amateur level?”
“So, I would say a next level definition means bringing in culinary ingredients, herb, spices, fruits in and that's just one niche within brewing. But generally, I'd say the biggest investment, the smartest investment, any brewer could make would be to become a member of the American Home Brewers Association. It's the sister organization of the Brewer’s Association, which is essentially the home of the 9,000 American craft breweries. So, all the knowledge our industry has gleaned, both professionally and the hobby world is congealed in this one online universe, that includes publications like ‘American Brewer.’ So, if you're a member of the American Home Brewing Association, you can search online, read all these articles, whatever you're interested in, and you can get really technical and you can go really, really deep. So I say becoming a member of the AHA is the smartest thing you can do to improve your home brewing game.”
Photo c/o Dogfish Head