“Beer racism!”
“You don’t see the hypocrisy in that?”
“I see it. But if you are going to take that stance you shouldn’t shop at Food Lion, shouldn’t go to Borders, shouldn’t do any of that stuff.”
Calagione shrugged and grabbed a shovel, then climbed into the kettle and began scooping out the spent mash. He liked to frame his business as an epic battle between small, stouthearted brewers and their evil industrial overlords. But his loyalty to craft beer was more in the manner of a guy who has rooted for the underdog all his life. (His own football teams, in junior high and high school, had a combined record of 0–72–2). “Look,” he told me later. “I’m not afraid to pay compliments where compliments are due. Anheuser-Busch’s quality—if quality is consistency—is second to none. But I’m frustrated that that one beer has been hammered down people’s throats. I mean, banana cream pie may be your favorite fucking food. But if you ate banana cream pie every day you would hate it, too.”
Every year at the end of the summer, Calagione throws a bocce tournament in Milton, on the brewery’s two oyster-shell courts. “Bocce’s an Italian thing,” he says. “But it’s also a sport that you can play without putting down your beer.” The tournament culminates in the evening, when a large catapult is rolled out onto the lawn. The catapult was built by Frank Payton, the same maintenance man who found the river rocks for the sahti, and was designed to hurl pumpkins—a fall tradition in Delaware. In this case, it’s armed with thirty cans of industrial beer and fired, with a precision born of years of practice, into a gargantuan sculpture of a toilet a hundred yards away. “We tried to throw a keg once,” Calagione told me. “But it misfired and knocked down a street lamp.”
The event evokes earlier, wackier days, but its anti-establishment vibe can seem a little at odds with the rather large factory beside it. Dogfish now sells about twenty-five million bottles’ worth of beer a year. It has almost quadrupled in size since 2004, but still can’t meet demand: about a fifth of its orders go unfilled. Calagione’s salvaged kettles have been replaced by a state-of-the-art brewery, his ski goggles and garbage bags by an automated bottle-filling line and a three-person microbiology department. (Every beer is tested forty times per batch, including blind tastings in a sensory lab.) When the facility expanded last year, the roof had to be cut open so that a crane could drop in nine new three-story tanks. Well before that, the brewery’s wastewater had overwhelmed the town’s sewage system: the yeasts in it were outcompeting the bacteria used for waste treatment. The water is now trucked out several times a day and sprayed on local farms.
“Sam is the Adolphus Busch of his generation,” the beer historian Maureen Ogle told me. But he has plenty of rivals. Koch’s Boston Beer Company, for one, still makes twenty-five times more beer. The Darwinian beer wars of the past decade have tended to leave the best brewers standing. While sales of wine and spirits grew by between two and four per cent last year, craft-beer sales grew by twelve per cent. “Part of what we’re seeing is a return to normality,” Garrett Oliver told me. “It’s weird for a country of three hundred million to have one kind of beer. But we’re getting back to what we had before—and unless we go into a deep depression it’s never going back.”
Oliver, who is forty-six and black, with a trim beard and a resonant voice, has done his best to become the respectable face of craft brewing—its Orson Welles. While Calagione wears jeans and a rumpled shirt even on the “Today” show, Oliver attends almost every event in a jacket and tie. One blazer bears the Brooklyn Brewery logo, woven in steel by the same tailors who stitch crests for the British Royal Family, and his beers have some of the same suavity. “From what I’ve seen, a lot of people still think of us as kids playing with toys,” he told me. “So anything I can do to ennoble beer is worthwhile, whether dressing up the packaging or dressing up for a beer dinner.”
For all its success, craft beer has yet to reach the mainstream. Ninety-six per cent of the market—about sixty-seven billion bottles a year—still belongs to non-craft beers and imports. Oliver remembers talking to a brewer at Anheuser-Busch a few years ago, when sales of Michelob had fallen to about a third of a billion bottles a year. “He told me, ‘I wish that brand would just die.’ And that one beer was the size of the entire American craft-brewing industry.” The disparity is partly a function of poor marketing, Ogle argues—craft brewers are still preaching to the converted—and partly of cultural conditioning. Until more Americans wean themselves from ketchup, soda, and other sweet foods, they may never enjoy the taste of hops. “When I talk to people like Sam, I’m constantly amazed at how persuaded they are that everyone drinks craft beer,” she says. “If that’s true, why are they still sitting at four per cent?”
In a decade’s time, Oliver believes, breweries like his could claim a quarter of the market. (Paul Gatza, director of the Brewers Association, predicts something closer to ten per cent in twenty years.) But only if they don’t scare people off first. “The whole idea of extreme beer is bad for craft brewing,” Oliver says. “It doesn’t expand the tent—it shrinks it. If I want someone to taste a beer, and I make it sound outlandish and crazy, there is a certain kind of person who will say, ‘Oh, let me try it.’ But that is a small audience. It’s one that you can build a beer on, but not a movement.”
Late one morning, Calagione and I drove to Philadelphia to see an archeological chemist he knows named Patrick McGovern. Calagione looked washed out and a little crotchety—a rare thing—after one too many glasses of grappa the night before. When I mentioned Oliver’s misgivings to him, he smirked, as if hearing them for the hundredth time. “Garrett and I are good friends, but we definitely disagree on this,” he said. “It’s a purist versus populist position. If all of our palates are subjective, who am I and who is Garrett to decide whether there’s too much hops in a beer, or whether you should be putting lemongrass or rampe leaves in it? As long as it finds an audience, it’s valid.”
Extreme beer is a return to normality, too, Calagione believes. It’s just the normality of a thousand years ago, or several thousand, rather than a hundred. If the Reinheitsgebot is still the touchstone for most American brewers, Calagione’s is a bronze bowl from King Midas’ tomb.
The historical Midas was a Phrygian ruler in what is now central Turkey. When he or one of his close relatives was buried, around 730 B.C., the tomb was filled with more than a hundred and fifty drinking vessels—parting toasts to the dead king. By the time they were excavated, in 1957, the liquid inside them had evaporated. But Patrick McGovern, forty years later, was able to analyze some residue from a bowl and identify its chemical content. By matching the compounds to those found in the foods and spices of ancient Turkey, McGovern gradually pieced together the liquid’s main ingredients: honey, barley, and grapes, and a yellow substance that was probably saffron. It was a beer, but like none we’ve ever tasted.
“Beer is a much older concept than the Reinheitsgebot,” McGovern told us later, at the University of Pennsylvania. He was sitting at a chipped metal desk in his basement office at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, surrounded by sagging bookshelves and dusty lab equipment: a furnace, a microscale, a spectrometer, a liquid chromatograph. Here and there, chunks of pottery and other artifacts were wrapped in plastic or aluminum foil and stuffed in file drawers or ratty cardboard cases. “You’re taking nine thousand years of brewing history and just looking at the last five hundred years of it,” he said.
McGovern is a wizardly figure with a long white beard and large glasses that seem to draw his eyes together at the inner corners. He has a quiet but penetrating voice, a sharp wit, and a near total lack of pretension. (When brewing at Dogfish, he has been known to pour himself a chicory stout for breakfast.) He and Calagione first met eight years ago, at a dinner in honor of Michael Jackson, the great British beer writer. McGovern had recently published his findings on King Midas and was hoping to convince someone to make a modern-day replica of the beverage. (Anchor Brewing had done something similar a few years earlier, when it made a beer based on an ancient Sumerian hymn to the beer goddess, Ninkasi.) As it turned out, several brewers took up the challenge and sent beers to his house over the next few months. “Some were pretty good,” he says. “But Dogfish Head’s was the best.”
Midas Touch, as it was later called, has a brilliant rose-gold color—every batch contains about a thousand dollars’ worth of saffron—and a thick, honeyed, spicy flavor: a cross between beer, mead, and wine. It has become Dogfish’s most decorated drink, winning a gold medal at the Great American Beer festival, another gold at the International Mead Festival, and a silver at the World Beer Cup. “I look at beers like these as an opportunity to drink history,” Calagione said. “They’re liquid time capsules.”
Earlier that summer, he and McGovern had brewed their most recent project: Theobroma, or “food of the gods.” It was based on Mayan and Aztec ceremonial drinks, and on residues of the earliest known fermented cacao beverage, found in Honduran pots from between 1400 and 1100 B.C. It contained cocoa nibs, ancho chilies, honey, barley, and annatto seeds. “I kept complaining that it needs more chocolate,” McGovern said. “I wanted to make it more reddish, because it was equated with blood and human sacrifice.” Calagione laughed, saying, “And I told him, ‘O.K., I’ll get back to you on that.’ ”
Beer is less ancient than wine, McGovern went on to say, because it requires more technology: agriculture to grow the grain, fire and kettles to cook it. But, once invented, it quickly spread. “It wasn’t just in one part of the world,” he said. “It was all over.” If wine was rare and therefore aristocratic—it could be made only once a year, when fruit was ripe—beer trickled down to the working class. All you needed was a little malted grain and something bitter to balance its sweetness. Before barley became the grain of choice, brewers used millet and rice. Even after hops were domesticated, around 700 A.D., they threw in wormwood, henbane, cowslip, ivy, mugwort, bog myrtle, elderberry, oak leaf, laurel leaf, autumn crocus, or wild rosemary. Some plants were poisonous, most were not, and they gave the beer an endless variety of flavors.
The Reinheitsgebot, when Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria imposed it in 1516, had less to do with keeping peasants from poisoning themselves—never a great concern of the gentry—than with controlling the hops and barley crops. It made a virtue of trade restrictions. And beer, that great bouillabaisse of an invention, became nearly as predictable as wine.
Extreme brewers are doing their best to help it devolve. This past October, I joined Calagione at the Great American Beer Festival, in Denver, for the première of his Sahtea and Theobroma. The festival was founded in 1982 by a home brewer named Charlie Papazian, when its title still sounded like an oxymoron. “That’s a great idea, Charlie,” Michael Jackson told Papazian, in so many words. “Only what will you serve for beer?” Twenty-six years later, more than eighteen hundred beers were on tap at the Denver convention center. A vast hangar had been divided into booths for four hundred and thirty breweries, grouped by geographic region. Anheuser-Busch, Coors, and Miller had their usual elaborate stage sets, and most beers followed the classic German and English styles. Still, the night belonged to extreme beer.
Wandering through the hall in the hour before it opened, I saw signs for beers called Goat Toppler, Chicken Killer, and Old Headwrecker, Incinerator, Detonator, Skull Annihilator, and the Obamanator. Many were double I.P.A.s that seemed to be competing for the highest I.B.U. rating. But others were faithful re-creations of ancient recipes, or else beers invented from whole cloth. “When you’re making an extreme beer, it’s like pushing beyond the sound barrier,” Jim Koch told me. “All of a sudden, everything is silent. I remember when I first tasted my Triple Bock. It dawned on me that beer has been around for thousands of years, and I am tasting something that no brewer has ever tasted. It was inspiring, beautiful, almost reverential.” Even Garrett Oliver seemed to be bowing to the trend. His booth featured two wonderful bottle-fermented ales and a pale ale called BLAST!, with eight kinds of English and American hops. “No, this is NOT a double I.P.A.,” a sign beneath the tap read. “Even if you believe in those.”
The festival was sold out for the first time. Over the next few days, some twenty-eight thousand attendees would pay fifty dollars for a wristband and a small plastic glass for tasting samples. The outcome was predictable. When the doors were flung open at five-thirty, six thousand people barrelled in and began drinking immediately, in great quantity. They wandered around in Viking horns, jester bells, and hats shaped like foaming steins, their bellies jutting from beer-themed T-shirts. One shirt showed Jesus hoisting a frothy mug with the caption “King of the Brews.” To make sure that the noise stayed near the shattering point, a bagpipe ensemble roamed the hall, blasting fanfares at unexpected moments. Whenever there was a lull, some oaf would drop his glass on the concrete floor and the entire assembly—as per tradition—would erupt into an epic whoop.
“It’s amazing how well people behave, given how many are here and how much alcohol there is,” Bob Pease, the vice-president of the Brewers Association, told me. In his sixteen years at the event, he noted with some pride, no one had been killed or seriously injured. But, then, security was pervasive. Uniformed police, private security guards, and hundreds of volunteers prowled the booths, slicing the wristband off anyone who had overindulged. At one point, late in the evening, after I’d stumbled over a power line (or something), I went up to get a free sample. A guard hustled over to the server and muttered, “Go easy on the pour.”
Calagione, for his part, had no time to drink. Going to the Great American Beer Festival with him, a friend of his had told me, is like attending a Star Trek convention with Captain Kirk. Wherever he went, beer geeks and fellow-brewers clustered around, taking pictures, handing him books to sign, or taping his greetings on a handheld recorder. The Dogfish booth was mobbed. While most others had five or ten people in front of them, Calagione’s crowd spilled across the concrete till it engulfed the Blue Moon booth across the way. I helped him work the taps for the first half hour, then slipped off with samples of Theobroma and Sahtea.
Like many craft-beer drinkers, I’d started out liking Pilsners and pale ales, and found myself craving more and more hops. The Theobroma managed to satisfy that taste indirectly. It was a lovely amber-colored beer with a hint of bitter chocolate at the beginning and an afterburn of chilies. But despite its ten per cent alcohol, it seemed almost too fainthearted. It was the Sahtea that I loved. For all Selders’s concern, the tea and spices in it hovered politely in the background, leaving the yeast to run the show. Cloudy and golden, with a lush flowering of bananas and cloves, it tasted like something a trader might have sipped a century ago, standing in a colonial market in Ceylon, with open baskets of tea and spices all around. It wasn’t an extreme beer by any stretch, and it certainly didn’t taste Finnish. But it was a time capsule nonetheless.
When the session was over and the booth was packed up, when six thousand drunken revellers had descended on the streets of Denver, and the other Dogfish brewers had followed in search of more beer, Calagione and I walked back to our hotel. “Remember what Patrick was saying that day in his office, about how alcohol affects the brain?” he said. I nodded. McGovern had shown us a paper illustrated with scans of animals’ brains. Alcohol’s emotional effect is unusually complex, he had said. It starts out as a stimulant and only later, when you’ve had a lot, becomes a depressant. Calagione laughed. “Does it work that way for you?” he said. “Because it doesn’t for me. I never get around to the depressant part.”
Posts
