Sam Calagione

And even with the many directions in which Calagione gets pulled, for him the pull of the outdoors is always a strong one, and he finds time to spend an hour exercising outside each day (actually, 55 minutes – we’ll get to that). And busy as he is, Calagione always makes time for family, too.

Not surprising that he was someone perfect for a DGR chat, right? 

When I spoke to Sam Calagione, I was eager to talk about outdoor adventure, the best beers for camping, favorite hiking, biking, or paddling spots, and so forth, but first I wanted to hear from Sam himself the unique origin story of the Dogfish Head Craft Brewery. 

Sure, it’s the stuff of legend in the American brewing and beer-loving community, how Sam and Mariah committed to making wild new beers or trying out long dormant styles, how they created brewing techniques and machinery that had never been seen before, and how they genuinely changed the American beer scene over the course of a few short years around the turn of the last century. But when you’ve got the man – the legend himself – there on your computer screen for a chat, first you talk beer. I asked him to talk about how it all started.

“So at Dogfish Head, when I wrote the business plan,” Calagione said, “the first page I wrote – and this is in 1993 when I was writing it, when there were maybe only 400 breweries in America, we opened in '95 – and the first page said: ‘We will be the first commercial brewer in America committed to brewing the majority of our beers outside the reinheitsgebot using ingredients from the culinary world, not just traditional water, yeast, hops, and barley.’ And it doesn't sound crazy today when there's 9,000 breweries and every local brewery has fruited sours and pastry stouts. But back then, there was no real first generation brewery, craft brewery that was embracing untraditional fruits, herbs, spices, different fermentable sugar sources other than in barley.” 

“So when we started as the smallest commercial brewers in America, the first generation craft brew beer drinkers thought we were idiots, or assholes, or crazy for brewing with all these exotic ingredients. But you can see how far the world has come and that's a beautiful thing, because we've embraced it from our earliest days.”

And they have, of course, come to be embraced and lauded by beer drinkers far and wide now. After chatting a bit more about brewery history and how the American beer scene has changed (and continues to evolve), we moved to talking more about the far and wide, meaning the outdoor world. Sam is a known outdoorsman and, of course, a peerless beer expert, so I asked him: “On beer and the outdoors, which are a good match, in my opinion, what is your favorite beer to drink while outside? Be it by the fire, on the water, or during a break from a day trip – both specifically speaking of Dogfish Head or about beer styles generally – what is your favorite outside beer?”

Calagione nodded knowingly, clearly trying to think how to fit an answer that could run for a half hour – with stories aplenty – into a few minutes. 

“So I'll answer for Dogfish and then styles in general, because as you said, being out on the water and outdoors, that's my favorite thing to do – I’m looking out my window at the canal here in coastal Delaware, and I can almost see the four blocks down to our waterfront hotel where the Dogfish Inn on the Harbor at Lewes has a big sign I painted over the mantle that says, ‘Welcome to Lewes. Mother Nature, let's do this.’ And there's nothing more awesome than getting out in the bounty of Mother Nature to just take in the beauty, get a workout, earn your beer calories, but also with Dogfish because all of our recipes are built around these culinary greens that grow on our protected natural lands, that's important to us.” 

“And water specifically, obviously we're a nautical brand with a shark as our logo and the world's mostly water, the human body's mostly water, beer's mostly water – I don't think that's a coincidence. So when I'm out on the water, I most often drink our SeaQuench Ale, which is brewed with sea salt from the mouth of the Chesapeake and from off the coast of Maine, and black lime. So it's really citrusy, light, and refreshing. And that's probably my favorite beer specific to Dogfish. Style wise, I also just love being outdoors and drinking light crisp pilsners. We know that volumetrically, the fastest growing style is still IPAs, and hazy IPAs get a lot of love, but pilsners are just super crisp, poundable, sessionable, outdoorsy beers in my mind.”

And he’s not wrong about pilsners, a style that was too long demoted in the minds of many as juggernaut commercial brewing flooded the American market with inferior takes on the style. But sometimes you don’t want crisp and refreshing, you want big and bold. Those times are chilly evenings by crackling fires. So I next asked: “What do you think is the best beer to drink next to the campfire on a cold night?”

“Well, we do a beer called Campfire Amplifier, so it's kind of a loaded question for us,” Calagione replied with a wry smile. Then he told me how that fine brew came about.

“We were sitting with some beer lovers at the fire pit at our hotel drinking a World Wide Stout, which is the strongest stout that Dogfish brews, and we were having s'mores while we were drinking it, and I said: ‘Wouldn't it be cool to just, like, what if we put the s'mores in the beer?’ So Camp Amp for us is a beer that's brewed with dehydrated marshmallow powder, cocoa nibs, and crunched up graham crackers as well.”

Next we talked about the best beer and food pairings, especially for outdoor cooking. For pairing beer to barbecue, Calagione recommends IPAs, saying: “Think big malty, not as sweet as the hazy styles – those for me have that nice hot bitterness bite that cuts through the fattiness of a barbecue chicken or a barbecue pork, and just kind of sits in a really happy place for intense outdoor meat dishes.” And then, much to my pleasure, we moved to talk about outdoor family fun. I asked Sam about some of the Calagione family’s favorite outdoor activities.

“So we're pretty obsessed with being on the water, all four of us,” he replied. “Dogfish is named after a jut of land where I grew up near Boothbay Harbor Maine. A lot of people heard of Hilton Head, and to them our name just sounds like a goofy collection of animal words, but it is a place to us, Dogfish Head, Maine, and we do now have a family cabin up there with a little one barrel personal Calagione family home brewery, right on the rocks of Maine. My son's a Maine registered fishing guide and boat captain. My daughter goes to U Miami and every chance she has she's out on the beach or on boats down there. And my wife Mariah grew up here in coastal Delaware. So when sitting on the beach, reading a book, going for a paddle board in the ocean, like I was lucky enough to do this morning, or being out catching stripers off of Dogfish Head point in Maine, those are the kinds of things my family loves to do.”

“And if you're not on the water, what are some other favorite outdoor activities?”

“Well, Dogfish helped to underwrite a whole network of bike trails here through coastal Delaware. Some of which go inland and into the beautiful sort of agricultural farming lands. So two of our three towns that Dogfish's business are in are on coastal Delaware, on the water. Three out of four, if you count our Dogfish’s Miami location, Miami is an ocean facing city, but then our Milton brewery is our production brewery, that's a little inland in the agricultural base of Sussex County Delaware, but Dogfish has helped underwrite with some other public and private partners, a series of bike trails through Cape Henlopen State Park and just through some beautiful ag land. So being out on a bike is awesome and is just another great way to earn your beer calories and then you're also not contributing to carbon emissions by being in a car and you’re being a little bit more careful if you've had a couple pints – you wait a bit and get on your bike, you're in better shape.”

Along the path, and that to mean the metaphorical path of growth over the years, not a bike path, Calagione and Dogfish Head have also had the chance to partner with some amazing like-minded brands, including a few that we here at Dad Gear Review happen to love (coincidence, but no surprise), so I asked Sam to talk about some of the partnerships he, Mariah, and the Dogfish team have forged.

“We've been fortunate to collaborate with bands and brands and artists that we love from Pearl Jam, to Grateful Dead, to New Balance, to Merrell. Our newest one that we just announced at the beginning of Earth month, last April, is with Dogfish and Patagonia Provisions, which is the culinary arm of Patagonia, the clothing company. And Dogfish has been fortunate enough to do a bunch of designing of different clothes items through the year between our company and Patagonia. My wife Mariah's gone out to Ventura, California, met with the Chouinard family that started Patagonia. I'm going out to meet with their family and Birgit and Patrick who run Patagonia Provisions next week. And we decided to build a beer coast-to-coast launch around this amazing grain called kernza.”

“Kerna is a deep root sort of wheat grass that disproportionately helps fight soil erosion and also sequesters carbon to an amazing degree. So the rallying cry of this Kernza Pils Dogfish and Patagonia brew together is ‘Drink Up to Draw Down’ where it literally puts every beer lover, every nature lover in the driver's seat on how you can help address the climate crisis one pint or one six pack at a time. Because the more you drink of Kernza Pils, the more acreage we can plant of kernza and the better for the environment that will be. It's a nice light crisp pilsner but the kernza gives it this beautiful, almost black peppery undertone, it’s a very low, nuanced note. And we use this beautiful organic Contessa hop that gives sort of herbal green tea and pear notes to the beer. So if people go to dogfish.com, we have a little component, a portal there called “Fish Finder,” and you can enter your zip code and just enter Kernza Pils and you can find the closest store to you that recently bought it. Right now it's mostly up and down the east and west coast and hopefully we'll be filling in the rest of the country here in the coming months.”

From beer to gear, we moved to speaking about some of the physical stuff that makes enjoying nature that much more fun, safe, and successful. I asked Sam: “Whether it's a paddle board, a pair of Merrell shoes, whatever it is, are there any specific pieces of gear and apparel that you swear by?”

“Let's see. So, I'd say the thing that I wear the most, and I'm not just saying it, is a puffy Patagonia jacket that's not super heavy, but it's water repellent. And like I said, every morning I go for – I'm kind of anal – a 55 minute exact either paddle board or bike ride, and three out of the four seasons I'm wearing that jacket because no matter if it rains a little or whatever, it keeps me warm and keeps me dry. And then other than that, I would also say underrated is a little company called Birdwell Beach Britches. And they make the best shorts handmade from California, not stupid expensive, but last a lifetime. They're made out of this thick sail material, like a nylon sail material. So Birdwell Beach Britches are awesome for the warmer weather.”

“The Patagonia, it's probably the Nano Puff I think you're talking about,” I said, adding: “I have two of them, had them forever. They’re amazing.”

“Right?” Calagione said. “Water resistant, awesome for packing tight.”

“Yeah,”I added. “I have literally folded one up and put it in the pocket in my pair of jeans. It's that packable.”

“Yeah, so small!”

But you know what’s not small? The problems facing our planet. I know, a delightful segue, but as Sam Calagione and I were soon speaking about matters of the environment and conservation, I figured I’d get us there quickly. Because while Sam may thoroughly enjoy outdoor play and adventure, he is serious about protecting nature. I asked him: “​​How and when did conservation and caring for nature become so important to you? Was it always part of your life or is it something you came to as your business started to grow and thrive and you saw your impact?”

“Well, I think it was kind of implicit in our business model to focus on bringing unexpected culinary ingredients into the brewing process, because of course we had to source those ingredients from natural lands around the world where agriculture is still vibrant,” Calagione replied. “And then when we opened in '95, Mariah and I, kind of almost fought off bankruptcy for three or four years while we were trying to tell people our off-center definition of beer recipes was worth pursuing, and in time we gained traction. And once we did around '99, we became profitable and Mariah really deserves the credit for having the foresight to say: ‘Hey, now that we're profitable, we need to give back to the communities that have given Dogfish its sustenance.’ And we chose, curated very carefully with her leadership, which nonprofit partners made the most sense, because you can't give to everyone.”

“So really The Nature Conservancy, Surfrider Foundation, The Land Institute, which helps to commercialize really impactful perennial grains and crops. Those are some that come to mind, and we've probably raised over a million dollars, Dogfish Head, just to the Delaware and Pennsylvania chapter of The Nature Conservancy.”

See, I wasn’t kidding when I noted at the top that Calagione is a guy who keeps himself busy. As we wrapped things up, I asked generally, what's next for Dogfish Head.

“So, the craft revolution really happened when we were coming up in terms of volume,” Sam said. “We're standing on the shoulders of giants at Dogfish. When we opened in the mid-nineties, already a decade before us, the pioneering breweries like Sam Adams and Sierra Nevada and Anchor were open, but Dogfish truly was a first generation craft distillery. I think we were the first distillery to have the word ‘craft’ in front of the term distillery when we submitted our paperwork to the federal government. And we used that same sort of culinary creative lens for coming up with spirit and cocktail recipes as we do for beer. And as fate would have it, this moment that we're in now in 2022, beer overall has slowed down a lot in growth and the fastest growing alcohol beverage category now is spirits-based canned cocktails, ready to drink cocktails.”

“And so Dogfish has been distilling for over two decades and almost no other craft distillery can say that. And so we've been honing these recipes with culinary ingredients for over two decades, and now we're finally getting them into cans and distributed – it’s drinks like a Blueberry Shrub Vodka Soda that's made with real balsamic vinegar or a Lemon & Lime Gin Crush made with real basil. So they have these unexpected notes, but then tons of beautiful citrusy flavor. There's two full shots in every can. They’re 7% ABV and they drink like real culinary crafted cocktails. So that's what we're really focused on right now, is giving those the ample runway to grow in this moment when there's so much excitement around that category.”

If you’re looking for a great place to try those canned cocktails or a Dogfish beer, why not visit the inn with that fire pit where the idea for a s’mores beer was born? Speaking of the Dogfish Inn, Sam said: “It’s this beautiful little 17-room hotel overlooking the harbor in coastal Delaware, and we partnered with Priority Bikes and we custom made these bikes that people can take on those trails that I mentioned, or you can go across the street, rent a paddleboard or a kayak, get out in Mother Nature. And then we intentionally didn't put our beer on the property. We just put growlers and gifted them to everyone when they stay in the room and we say: ‘Hey, take a bike, take a hike, take a kayak, and go to one of our locations, our Dogfish locations, or another local brew pub, or restaurant, and have a blast doing that and get out in Mother Nature and earn your beer calories and bring your booty back in your growler and join your other inn guests around the fireplace and get to know each other.’”

“And those are my favorite meetings, what we call fireside chats, where I'll informally just go to the hotel with a few of my own beers and just sit around the fireplace and talk. And the only one rule is we talk about the beverage world for an hour. Could be commercial facing, it could be home brewing, it could be ingredients, and that's my favorite meeting that I do on the weeks that I'm home, is the fireside chat at our Dogfish hotel.”

If only all meetings were thus.