Sam Calagione interview

Read the interview with Sam Calagione that ran in The NY Megaphone.

Sander Hicks and Kristen Felicetti meet with Sam Calagione, founder of the very delicious and unique Dogfish Head Craft Ales.

Megaphone: Is Dogfish Head your first business? You’ve gotten a lot of great media attention, and a book deal. You’re the founder of one of America’s great microbreweries. But what are the hard lessons, or even business failures, in your background, experiences that helped you learn?
Calagione: It is my first business. As a recovering English major I’m nearly unemployable. I started homebrewing while living in NYC in 93-94, and it was a hobby that spun out of control and took over my life—in a good way. Necessity is the mother of invention. Having barely enough money at every phase of our expansion has been an asset more than a hindrance in that we didn’t over-expand or go into crushing levels of debt to achieve our growth. We built our own breweries out of used dairy and canning equipment and put our money into high-quality, unique brewing ingredients like raisins, chicory, maple syrup, and orange peels, This allowed us to help establish the niche for extreme beers within the greater niche of craft brewing.

M: How has Dogfish Head grown throughout the years? I know it was a very small-batch operation at first. Now that you have a big brewery and a brew pub, what are some things that are still the same? And what are some things that you have outgrown?
C: We started as the smallest commercial brewery in the country brewing 10 gallons at a time. Today we brew an average of 2500 cases a day. But, if anything, as we get bigger we get more experimental and ambitious in recipe development and beer design. We will release 28 styles of beer this year alone. We have outgrown winging it from a QC [quality control] prospective though. We now have three full-time lab co-workers and every batch of beer goes through a 40-point QC program. We still fly our freakflag at full mast, only now we know the direction that the wind is blowing in.

M: Isn’t it interesting Sam Adams found a way to use the hobby-brewing tradition to turn it into a customer-interactive brewing contest with the “Longshot” brews and marketing campaign? Can you talk about the benefits of home-brewing to a micro or medium sized brewery?
C: The amateur and professional brewing communities work in harmony. A ton of professional brewers began as home brewers. A batch of beer is a batch of beer regardless of size—we have more bells and whistles then a homebrewed but at the end of the day an inspired recipe works in five or 500 gallon batches. The passion in both communities is completely aligned. To quote playwright Sam Sheppard out of context, “It’s the same love, it just got split in two.”

M: You did a really unique summer brew this past season, Festina Peche. Very dry, light, and delicate. Whose idea was Festina Peche?
C: It was our brewmaster Andy Tveekrem’s idea to do a lower-alcohol summer beer. The idea to do a tart, Berliner Weiss style and ferment it with peaches was mine. Mike Gerhart, our pub brewer, did a great test batch and Bryan Selders, the lead brewer of our Milton De. production brewery, oversaw the large batches. As usual, bringing a brew to market takes the work of a lot of skilled and passionate people.

M: Do you have advice for anyone who wants to start their own brewery? What does it take to run a business?
C: Devotion. Passion. Persistence. A great unique idea, just barely enough money, and a freakish work ethic. They say the best thing about being an entrepreneur is that you get to decide which 70 hours of the week you work! Thanks for the interview and keep drinking the good shit.