“They who drink beer will think beer.” – Washington Irving
That Washington Irving, man, he was one smart motherfucker. The more beer I drink, the more I think about beer. I can’t get my mind off of the Dogfish Head 75 Minute IPA I picked up during my lunch break, and it’s not helping me get any work done.
I think Irving’s principle could also be applied to chicken wings—he who eats chicken wings thinks chicken wings—because I had some buffalo wings last Sunday, and I’ve been fantasizing about those spicy bastards ever since.
Bottles of beer aging at the Cantillon brewery in Brussels, Belgium
Last summer, Dogfish Head Craft Brewery posted an informative story with five tips on how to age beer. At the time, I glanced over it quickly, but I honestly wasn’t really thinking too much about aging brews at that point. Since then, I’ve built up my beer “cellar,” which is really just a big-ass cabinet built into the wall in my apartment, and I’ve spend quite a bit of time identifying and amassing beers that should age well.
Here’s a quick breakdown of Dogfish Head’s tips on how to age beer:
A little experimentation goes a long way
Don’t underestimate fresh
High-alcohol beers tend to age better
Storage matters
Beer won’t spoil
After doing a lot of experimenting of my own, the first two steps really stand out to me. I’ve learned that the best way to really see and taste the difference between aged beer and “young” beer is to collect different “vintages” of each of them, and then do side-by-side taste tests. For example, I have bottles of this year’s Dogfish Worldwide Stout and 120 Minute IPA, both of which have very high ABVs, and both of which are particularly well suited for aging. I don’t plan on drinking either of them until I can get 2013 versions of each beer, at least, and probably not until I collect 2014 bottles, too. I’ve had Worldwide Stout and 120 Minute IPA numerous times in the past, but never along with different vintages, and it’s hard to remember their complex subtleties.
I’ve also learned that as a general rule of thumb, hoppy beers and beers made with fruit tend to taste better fresh and probably don’t make the best candidates for aging. There are some exceptions, of course—120 Minute IPA is intensely hoppy and some Belgian beers made with cherries or other berries can age well over a number of years. Many people think IPAs age well, because they were originally sent by the British Army to soldiers in India and were thought to age better than normal pale ales. But that was due to the increase in ABV, and I’d bet those IPAs didn’t exactly taste fresh after their long voyages.
Dogfish Head on Friday announced via Twitter that the latest beer in its Ancient Ales series, called Etrusca, is currently being bottled, and it will hit beer-store shelves in December.
The idea behind Dogfish’s Ancient Ales is to recreate lost styles of beer from ancient times, using recipes and ingredients that are close as possible to those originally used by their brewers.
Dr. Pat McGovern and Sam Calagione Discuss Etrusca
Here’s a description of the new, 8.5% ABV brew, from Dogfish:
“This Ancient Ale proves that beside the wine on every Italian’s dinner table, there should also be a place for beer.
“To develop the recipe for Birra Etrusca Bronze, Dogfish Head’s Sam Calagione traveled to Rome with molecular archaeologist Dr. Pat McGovern. With the help of Birreria Brother Brewers Leo DeVencenzo of Birra del Borgo and Teo Musso of Baladin, they analyzed drinking vessels found in 2,800-year-old Etruscan tombs.
“The backbone of Birra Etrusca comes from two-row malted barley and an heirloom Italian wheat. Specialty ingredients include hazelnut flour, pomegranates, Italian chestnut honey, Delaware wildflower honey and clover honey. A handful of whole-flower hops are added, but the bulk of the bitterness comes from gentian root and the sarsaparilla-like Ethiopian myrrh resin.
“Birra del Borgo and Baladin also will brew a version of Birra Etrusca, and to add complexity and variety, each brewery will ferment its batches with different traditional materials. Dogfish will use bronze, Baladin will use wood, and Birra del Borgo will use terra cotta.”
I just took a shower and cleansed my filthy form with both beer soap and shampoo from Dogfish Head Craft Brewery. And I smell damn nice, if I don’t say so myself.
The Dogfish Beer Soap is made with the brewery’s “90 Minute Imperial IPA, saponified oils of palm, coconut, rice bran, olive, ground hops, barley, essential oils of lavender, rosemary and fir.” The Dogfish Beer Shampoo is made with “Dogfish Head Shelter Pale Ale, saponified oils of palm, coconut, rice bran, castor, essential oils of cedar, pine, spruce, rosemary and fir.” (The front of both labels say the products are made with 60 Minute IPA, but the ingredient lists on the backs says different.)
I feel comfortable reviewing beers on this blog, because I know my shit when it comes to craft beer. However, I’m no soap/shampoo expert, so I won’t even try to evaluate these Dogfish products. They sure do smell good, though, and I feel quite clean.
The soap and shampoo come in 3.5-ounce bars, and they cost $5 each. (The Dogfish Beer Shampoo is also apparently quite popular in the professional dog-grooming world, at least according to Dogfish Founder Sam Calagione’s book about the launch of his brewery.)
Dogfish isn’t the only beer company that makes beer soap, either. Brooklyn Brewery sells tins of beer soap for $10, and they contain three bars of soap made with different varieties of Brooklyn brews. Stone Brewing Co. sells a handful of different $6 soaps that use Stone beers as ingredients. And The Beer Soap Co. offers a ton of different soaps made with beer ranging from Budweiser to Delirium Tremens.
The good folks at Dogfish Head just posted this amusing, if slightly corny, Zombie-themed Halloween video that appears to have been filmed at its Milton, Delaware brewery. The message of the video—besides, Happy Halloween—is that Dogfish’s bottle conditioned beers (Namaste, My Antonia and 75 Minute IPA) are “alive,” meaning they’re each bottled with live yeast, and they evolve and change over time in the bottles.
Yesterday, Delaware-based Dogfish Head Craft Brewery announced a new collaboration between it and The Grateful Dead, the 60s jam band that just won’t quit. (I didn’t even know that any of those dudes were still alive until Phil Lesh and Bob Weir sang the national anthem at the Cardinals/Giants MLB NCLS game on Monday.)
“Working in that happy place between creative ideas and like-minded people, the off-centered brewery and free-spirited band have been trading ideas for a beer they’re calling ‘American Beauty.’ They’ve settled on a strong pale ale with all-American hops and barley, and now they’re asking their loyal fans to suggest a special ingredient – and the Dead-inspired story behind it.”
The idea is for Deadheads to suggest ingredients that have some sort of Grateful-Dead-related sentimental value to them that would work well in a strong pale ale.
More from Dogfish:
“Did you trade a bushel of fresh clementines for tickets to a two-night-stand at Long Beach Arena? Or maybe your dad first laid eyes on your mom sipping a cup of green tea in the parking lot of the legendary Cornell ‘77 show? Jog your memory, tell the story, and suggest the ingredient at the heart of that story. You could help bring this counterculture collaboration to life.”
I’m not a Dead fan, and the only two Dead songs I can think of are Scarlet Begonias and Casey Jones. I guess the begonias could work as a beer ingredient, but I’m guessing Dogfish won’t want to use cocaine. Deadheads interested in offering up legitimate suggestions should check the Dogfish website in the future for additional details. The American Beauty beer is expected to be available on tap and in bottles in October 2013.
Dogfish Head and its Founder Sam Calagione have participated in quite a few collaborations recently, including Liquid Breadfruit, which it made along with Maui Brewing Co., and Rhizing Bines, which it’s in the process of making with Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. The brewery has worked with other brewers on limited release beers for years, but it seems like Dogfish is ramping up its collaboration efforts.
In addition to being a boundary-breaking craft brewer and entrepreneur, Calagione recorded a hip hop album in 2003. (Seriously, he and Dogfish Head brewer Bryan Selders form The Pain Relievaz. See the video clip below. Note: I never said it was a good hip hop album.) Calagione has a college degree in English, though he was kicked out of high school in Western Massachusetts and never received a high school degree. He was a Levi’s model. He literally changed the laws in Delaware in order to open the original Dogfish Head brewhouse, which was the first brewery in the nation’s first state. You get the point.
I know these things because I just finished reading Calagione’s small-business oriented book, Brewing Up a Business: Adventures in Beer from the Founder of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery. Calagione’s book is really about how to prepare to launch a small business and then make it successful, so it’s not for all craft beer aficionados. You’ll probably need some degree of interest in small business or entrepreneurship to get the most out it. But I’m no business owner or entrepreneur, and I really enjoyed the book because I’m a huge Dogfish Head fan, and it’s full of little-known facts and anecdotes about Dogfish and Calagione.
Here’s a quick list of five of the more notable things I learned from Brewing Up a Business. I don’t want to spoil the book, so I’ve only listed a handful of facts, but it’s packed with many more details that are sure to be appreciated by fans of Dogfish Head and Calagione:
1) Calagione was on the Ricki Lake show, and Lake tasted the first beer he ever brewed. That first beer was a pale ale made with cherries. And Ricki Lake attended the party he held to taste it shortly after he appeared on Lake’s show.
2) Dogfish made a malt liquor called Liquor de Malt, to prove it could make a better in that style than the established 40-ounce makers. Liquor de Malt was packaged in a 40-ounce bottle that came with a hand-stamped, Dogfish brown bag.
3) Dogfish fans visiting coastal Delaware who want the ultimate brewery and brewpub tour can participant in the Dogfish Head 360 Degree Experience, which includes a hotel room at a local inn that’s customized with Dogfish memorabilia, meals at the brew pub and a boat ride to the Dogfish brewery, where they’ll receive tours and tastings.
4) Dogfish’s second most popular beer behind its 60 Minute IPA, Dogfish 90 Minute IPA, was originally packaged in a bomber bottle that was graced with an image of a circus freak jamming a nail up his nose. Shortly after 90 Minute IPA was released, the photographer who took the image contacted Calagione to complain about unfair use. He wasn’t pleased until Dogfish sent him a bunch of beer and promised never to use the image again.
5) A 50-barrel brewery system Dogfish outgrew and sold in 2008 is now used by one of my favorite brewers, Northern California’s Russian River Brewing Co., makers of the elusive Pliny the Elder IPA.
The first edition of Calagione’s book was published in 2005, but it was revised and updated in 2010. Surf on over to Amazon.com, where the paperback and digital Kindle editions both cost less than $11.00.
I plan to write up a review after I finish the book, but a passage that contains Calagione’s take on “beer geeks” versus “beer snobs” really caught my attention.
From the book:
“At Dogfish Head we are beer geeks, not beer snobs. This means we love and respect all good beer and realize that appreciating beer is subjective….Beer snobs are the people who want to prove how much they know about beer by bashing a brewery.”
There’s definitely a difference between beer geeks and beer snobs. Beer snobs are more concerned with convincing people that they’re knowledgeable about beer than they are with just enjoying drinking beer. And they’re often aggressive and condescending. Just visit any beer forum or website, and you’ll see just what I mean.
Beer geeks are passionate, and they like to talk beer with other passionate drinkers, but they’re less concerned with what those other folks think about them or their opinions on brewing.
I’m not a beer geek or a beer snob. I’m a “beer nerd.”
So where do beer nerds fit into the equation? I think we fall somewhere in the middle. I’m not aggressive when it comes to beer or beer knowledge, but I admit I kind of look down on the guy who walks into a beer bar that offers tons of great beers and orders a bottle of Bud Light. I also admit to harboring some degree of resentment for breweries like Anheuser Busch and MillerCoors, for the same reason that I resent companies such as Wal-Mart and Target—they purposefully try to eliminate competition, and they value quantity over quality.
That said, I honestly believe people should drink whatever they like. So if you like Bud Light, I say cheers—but I also say Bud Light sucks.
In 2009, Dogfish Head Craft Brewery and Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. collaborated for the first time to create an American-style strong ale called only “Life & Limb.” Today, Dogfish announced the next Life & Limb collaboration brew from it and Sierra Nevada, “Rhizing Bines,” which will be an 8% ABV Imperial IPA. Rhizing Bines is expected to be released in February 2013.
On the hot side, Rhizing Bines will go through Dogfish’s signature continual-hopping process with floral and citrusy Bravo hops. On the cold side, it will be dry-hopped with an experimental varietal so new it doesn’t yet have a name, just a number: Hop 644. A component of Sierra Nevada’s aroma-boosting Torpedo system will make a pit-stop in Delaware for dry-hopping duty before it heads to Sierra’s new North Carolina brewery.
To celebrate Sierra Nevada planting East Coast roots, Dogfish Head tracked down a Carolina heirloom wheat grown and milled at Anson Mills. The soft red winter wheat contributes subtle sweet and nutty notes to this hop-forward ale.
The first Life & Limb strong ale was brewed at Sierra Nevada’s Chico, Calif., brewery, and Rhizing Bines will be brewed at Dogfish’s Milton, Delaware brewery.
I had the first Life & Limb brew a couple of times last year, and it was decent. American strong ale is not one of my favorite beer styles, but I love me some IPAs. Dogfish makes fantastic IPAs, and Sierra makes some quality hoppy brews—namely its Northern and Southern Hemisphere Harvest Ales—so I’m anxious to get my hands on this new collaboration. February 2013 can’t get here soon enough.
I love pickles almost as much as I love a good IPA. So when I first heard about Brooklyn Brine Co.’s new Hop-Pickles made with Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA, I knew I had to find a jar as soon as possible.
It took me a couple of weeks to track them down, and the Hop-Pickles sure weren’t cheap. But they were worth every penny.
The pickles don’t really taste like IPA. They’re very sweet at first, and when you bite into one—they’re pickle slices, not spears—you immediately taste apple-cider vinegar and some sweet maple-syrup flavor. Then, very briefly, you taste the hops before a spicy habanero flavor takes over and combines very nicely with the vinegar.
Dogfish Head’s Sam Calagione and Brooklyn Brine’s Shamus Jones
These Hop-Pickles are delectable and unique. They’re a perfect snack food, and they go great with a frosty IPA. As mentioned above, they’re fairly expensive—I paid $12.95 plus shipping for a 16-ounce jar from Amazon.com, but they’re also supposedly available in some specialty food stores. If I found them in a store and didn’t have to pay for shipping, I’d definitely buy them again.
Read more about Brooklyn Brine and its Hop-Pickles made with Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA on the company’s blog.
Urban Beer Nerd 