Microbrewed Adventures (10 page)

I've known Dan and Deb Carey for many years. Dan, a German brewing university graduate, first found brewery work in the early 1980s at one of America's first microbreweries, the Montana Beverage Company, a revival of Montana's old Kessler brewery. In a rustic setting and with limited access to modern equipment and technology, Dan was able to brew the most exquisite German-style bock, pale and Oktoberfest lagers. There were no other breweries in America, large or micro, that were making lager beer of this quality. But the reality of the situation emerged by the late 1980s. Most Montanans were disinterested in quality and diversity in their beers. There were no other
microbreweries within hundreds of miles. Helena was briefly an oasis in the high plains, eventually going dry for lack of local beer enthusiasm. Sadly, I never had the opportunity to visit Helena in its microbrewery heyday.

Dan worked awhile with Anheuser-Busch and eventually managed to start a family-owned brewery with wife, Deb. I tasted their award-winning beers at the Great American Beer Festival and assured myself I was not going to let my beer life slip by without a visit to Dan and Deb Carey's New Glarus Brewing Company.

It was blustery and snowing lightly when Sandra and I arrived in April 2002. I felt as though I had made a pilgrimage to a brewery destined to become a model of success—a microbrewery whose success was solidly founded on the quality and diversity of its ales and lagers.

Though Dan has a German brewmaster's education, this doesn't limit
him to traditional German beer styles. In fact, besides very traditional German beers such as Uff Da Bock and Edel Pils, at New Glarus you'll find beers like Belgian-inspired Raspberry Tart and Wisconsin Belgian Red (cherry).

Deb and Dan Carey, New Glarus Brewing Company

The small countryside brewery takes care to use local ingredients whenever they can; local cherries, barley malt, wheat, corn and honey are but a few ingredients used to make their expertly brewed ales and lagers. Speaking of ales, cask-conditioned Spotted Cow Ale and playfully inspired Fat Squirrel Nut Brown Ale are but a couple.

“Drink indigenous” is a theme of New Glarus Brewing Company. Fat Squirrel is explained on their website:

I could make New Glarus's pils, bock or spotted cow a regular habit, but while I was at the brewery I wanted to ask about the beers that I would make a special habit. In particular I have always flipped out over Wisconsin Belgian Red, Raspberry Tart and an apple beer no longer brewed. They are all refreshingly fruity and tart, and the intensity of the cherries, raspberry or apple is as true as fresh fruit. How did they do it?

I've made lots of fruit lagers and ales in my day. I've tried hundreds of
fruit beers made by homebrewers and microbrewers, but none were as fresh and vibrant as New Glarus.

Their secrets are not shared. (Otherwise they wouldn't be secrets.) However, applying some basic brewing principles, homebrewers can begin to approach what Dan has accomplished. It took Dan several years of experimentation. Each time he tried, he came closer to the perfection that has won him several beer competition medals throughout the world. So get brewing!

Changing How People Think
About Beer, One Minute at a Time
Dogfish Head Brewery

F
OR SAM CALAGIONE
,
president of one of America's most “explosive” craft breweries, it all began in a small New York City apartment. It was 1992 and Sam, attending Columbia University, dwelled on a future MBA degree. But then he fell in love. Romancing the specialty and microbrewed beers offered at Nacho Mamas, his local Manhattan beer bar, Sam was caught up in the intrigue of such beers as Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, Brooklyn Lager and other cosmically insightful microbrews.

“It took up half the space in my apartment,” admits Sam of his pursuit of homebrew. Inspired by the unique character of microbrewed beers, he immediately pursued the fringes of craft brewing. His first beer was cherry pale ale. He never looked back.

Connecting with area beer aficionados such as Richie Link in New Jersey, Sam soon switched his educational track, finding himself shoveling grain at various breweries along America's eastern seaboard and pursuing course work with such teachers as Shipyard Brewing Company (Portland, Maine) brewmaster Alan Pugsley.

Sam and I are enjoying his 90-minute India Pale Ales at Denver's 2004 Great American Beer Festival as he reminisces, “I was 25 years old and nobody was in much of a hurry to invest in my ideas.” He made do with whatever resources he had, essentially setting up a glorified 12-gallon homebrew system and opening up his Dogfish Head Brewpub in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, in 1995. “I brewed 390 batches of beer the first year,” he recalls. “Before that I had only brewed 70 batches of homebrew. Brewing so often really sucked, but I learned a lot about brewing and about what my customers
really liked. Some beers really took off in popularity. It did really suck to have to brew so often but experimenting with so many small batches really provided the foundation for our beer philosophy at Dogfish Head Brewery.

“We were really small and Rehoboth Beach isn't exactly the brewery capital of the country, but we are located just two hours from Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Manhattan was only three and a half hours away. People
who had visited the brewpub were calling and wanting our beers in their area, remembering the flavors of our really eccentric beers. Our Chicory Stout is made with roasted chicory, organic coffee, licorice root and St. John's wort. Our Immort Ale was very popular with our customers, brewed with maple syrup, vanilla beans, peat-smoked malt and juniper berries. People thought we were really crazy when we offered our first pale ale at a price of $12.99 for a six-pack.”

Sam Calagione, Dogfish Head Brewery, Milton, Delaware
Sam Calagione, photo by Bruce Weber.

Sam's journey toward providing beer drinkers access to his special beers was wrought with challenging times. He does not for a minute think his was an overnight success. The restaurant barely kept the venture afloat in the beginning. First there were six people that were his regular customers and over time there were 12, then 14, and slowly his following grew to a sustainable base. It was five years later that Sam considered his brewing business to be profitable and sustainable.

After having tried Dogfish Head's Raison d' Etre, an extraordinary complex ale made with friendly “help,” malt, hops, Belgian yeast, beet sugar and green raisins, I asked Sam what beer he likes to drink and contemplate with. His “default” beer always seems to be his 60-minute India Pale Ale, but he admits, “Whenever everyone is asleep in our household and I can't sleep, I'll turn to one or two servings of our (18-plus percent alcohol) Worldwide Stout. This beer is really a symbolic beer for me because we would often ask ourselves, ‘What's stopping us from brewing the biggest beer in the world?' When I'm feeling a warm buzz, I feel a great deal of pride and at the same time remember how scary it was in the late 1990s when we were really on the edge as a company and how difficult it was. I remember well how the passion of the people who really cared came through during difficult times to get us to where we are today. Being able to enjoy Worldwide Stout makes it all worthwhile. For me it is a reflection of celebrating the pride and journey of the Dogfish Head Brewery and all the other small breweries who have also gone through a lot of tough times to get to their own points of success.”

Dogfish Head's beers are big and eccentric, but perhaps their very popular 60-, 90-and 120-minute India Pale Ales reflect a lot of the passion and microbrewing craft that is the foundation of this particular brewery. Sam re
calls, “Our first 60-minute IPA was brewed in 2000. I took one of those vibrating football games, you know the ones you used to play with as a kid where the players would move as the playing field vibrated. Well, we set a five-gallon bucket full of hop pellets, made a hole at the bottom and set it on the vibrating playing field. As the game field vibrated, the hops would slowly emerge from the bucket and drift down the field and drop into our five-barrel kettle. So the hops are constantly being added to the kettle during a 60-minute period. We called the first batch Sir Hops-a-lot.”

Their twelve-plus regularly offered beers join special editions of 15 percent barley wine brewed with dates and figs; Liquor de Malt with red, white and blue corn; Pangea with Australian crystallized ginger, African moscavado sugar and Asian basmati rice; Festina Lente with peaches, aged with oak; and other evolving experiments sure to enliven the palate. They've moved from 12-gallon batches to 5-barrel, to 30-barrel, and now to 50-barrel batch sizes in their packaging brewery, established in 2002.

“We're the antithesis of industrial homogeneity,” Sam says. “Microbrewing/craft brewing/homebrewing is all about education, knowledge and creating a community. It begins at the table in everyone's home. Events like the Great American Beer Festival are a culmination of craft brewing where we can all ‘break bread' together. Brewers, distributors, retailers and beer drinkers. Knowledge and education has brought us to this place.”

Sam Calagione with his Randall—draft beer dispensed through a bed of fresh hops

If you have the pleasure of meeting Sam, be prepared to meet him on the run. He doesn't slow down for anyone.
Energetic
is a word that does not do justice to Sam's spirit. Just when you think you “get it” and perhaps have had the opportunity to taste his bewildering array of beers, he's off on new tangents, a dozen ideas at once, concocting the next generation of ales on the frontier of American brewing on the edge of a continent.

Purposefully Local
Flying Fish Brewing Company