Staff Blog
Dogfish Head gets New Yorker love
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| Dogfish Head’s Sam Calagione |
| Photo | Martin Schoeller |
Burkhard Bilger of The New Yorker wrote a lengthy profile of Milton, Delaware’s Dogfish Head, creators of the 60- and 90-Minute IPAs that Meal Ticket gets down with on the really regular.
The story, which starts off by unraveling the origins of the brewery’s Palo Santo Marron (Brian Howard told you about it here), focuses on how Dogfish became the poster fermenters for America’s oft-contrarian craft beer culture.
The King of Beers, once served in splendid isolation at many bars, is now surrounded by motley bottles with ridiculous names, like jesters at a Renaissance fair: SkullSplitter, Old Leghumper, Slam Dunkel, Troll Porter, Moose Drool, Power Tool, He’brew, and Ale Mary Full of Taste.
Dogfish is something of a mascot for this unruly movement. In the thirteen years since [Sam] Calagione founded the brewery, it has gone from being the smallest in the country to the thirty-eighth largest. Calagione makes more beer with at least ten per cent alcohol than any other brewer, and his odd ingredients are often drawn from ancient or obscure beer traditions. The typical Dogfish ale is made with about four times as much grain as an industrial beer (hence its high alcohol content) and about twenty times as much hops (hence its bitterness). It is to Budweiser what a bouillabaisse is to fish stock.
In true New Yorker style, there are plenty of odd tangential details tucked into the piece — for example, did you know that the tailors who craft crests for the British Royal Family also create Brooklyn Brewery-branded blazers for brewmaster Garrett Oliver?
Apparently, the author spent 9 months w/ the Dogfish crew. There was a great event last night sponsored by The East Village Tavern in NYC, and Dogfish Head and BeerMenus.com. The food and beer pairings were awesome. And Elizabeth from Dogfish brought a small piece of the bullet-proof wood used to make the cask referred to in the article.