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The beer born of that experiment, known as 60 Minute I.P.A., is still Calagione’s biggest seller. He calls it a beer geek’s idea of a “session beer”—mild enough to be consumed in quantity, but with an unexpected kick. It has the bright, citrusy bouquet of a much hoppier brew, without the bitterness. Wine Enthusiast tasted hints of rose petal, tangerine, orange zest, and nutmeg in it, and rated it a “classic.”

The extreme-beer era was under way.

The pub in Rehoboth is now a proper experimental brewery. Although most of Dogfish’s beer is made at its large modern facility in Milton, twenty minutes away, Calagione and his staff use the old equipment once a month to try out new recipes. “I need my brewers to be able to blow off steam,” he told me, as we were driving to the pub that morning to make the Finnish sahti. If he had to brew the same beer every day, he said, he knew how he’d feel. He cocked his forefinger and put it to his temple.

The experimental beers are served on tap in the pub, at festivals, and at beer dinners that Calagione hosts around the country. Dogfish still doesn’t advertise, aside from a few small notices in industry magazines, relying instead on word of mouth from “beer evangelists,” as Calagione calls them. Whenever a beer is released, he monitors the chatter on Internet forums like BeerAdvocate and RateBeer. If he has a hit, and it’s not too expensive to produce (the arctic-cloudberry ale averaged out to about nineteen dollars a snifter), he has Bryan Selders reformulate it for the larger brewery.

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Selders arrived about an hour after we did, driving a van filled with sacks of grain. He was wearing what looked like a gas-station attendant’s uniform, with his name stitched over one front pocket and the Dogfish logo over the other. His hair was gelled into a miniature Mohawk—more Tintin than Billy Idol—and his eyes, framed by thick black glasses, wore their usual look of ironic bewilderment. Selders, who is thirty-three, was a painter and ska guitarist before he became a brewer. When he and Calagione aren’t making beer, they sometimes perform together at the pub as a beer-themed hip-hop duo called the Pain Relievaz (sample lyrics: “You’re the barley virgin that my malt mill will deflour”). At work, they maintain an amiably fractious relationship, built on a role reversal of sorts. Selders plays the boss, the beleaguered perfectionist, searching for efficiencies and citing studies from brewing journals; Calagione plays the wayward talent, sloppy but charismatic and, occasionally, inspired. “I’m a little scared of this project, to be honest with you,” Selders told me, as he was lugging the grain into the brewhouse. “Sam’s ideas . . . the execution doesn’t always match the theory.”

Every beer is a brewer’s invention to some degree—a combination of ingredients that could never be found in nature. A barrel of crushed grapes, left to its own devices, can turn into a crude sort of Beaujolais nouveau. The winemaker’s job is mostly to prod the process along. That isn’t true of beer. For grain to turn into an ale or lager, it has to be malted, cooked, strained, cooked, strained, fermented in a barrel, and sometimes again in a bottle. “Mother Nature makes wine,” Calagione likes to say. “Brewers make beer.”

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Which isn’t to say that beer is any less natural, or less subject to nature’s vagaries. One year, a drought in the Dakotas may leave the barley with half its usual starch. The next, a hot summer in the Yakima Valley could turn the hops less bitter. The water in the mash may be hard or soft (Bavarian water is great for dark lagers, not so good for pale ales), the fermentation tanks sealed tight or exposed to the open air. And at the end of the process lies a notoriously finicky organism. All brewing yeasts eventually run out of sugar or self-destruct, poisoning themselves on their own alcohol. Only the hardiest strains—“freaks of nature,” Calagione calls them—can produce the most potent beers. Dogfish has its own yeast-propagation lab, but some strains give up too soon, causing what’s known as a stuck fermentation. “Our brewery is a hundred people relying on a few billion yeast cells,” Calagione says. “Sometimes they outvote us.”

There’s no reason, given all these variables, that a given beer should always taste the same. We expect a Merlot to change from year to year, crop to crop. Why not a Michelob? Beer has been an industrial commodity for so long that it no longer seems an organic substance. And brewing, in its complexity, allows just enough control to maintain the illusion. If winemakers are Dionysian, brewers have had to become Apollonian. Age will only improve a Bordeaux, winemakers say. Brewers tend to prefer their beer fresh, exactly as they made it. Their skill lies in compensating for nature as much as collaborating with it.

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Then again most brewers don’t make beer with rocks. When sahti was first brewed, in the Middle Ages, Calagione told me, Finnish farmers used wooden kettles. The wood couldn’t be set directly on a fire, so the brewers heated up rocks and threw them into the mash, caramelizing the barley and giving it a smoky flavor. Calagione wanted to use the same method, but he wasn’t sure that he had the right material. “I told my maintenance guy to get rocks without a lot of quartz in them,” he said. “Otherwise, when they get hot, they’ll explode in your face.”

The brewhouse was a cinder-block mudroom to the side of the building, with a trio of blackened kettles inside. When Selders had dumped the grain into the mash kettle—three hundred and fifty pounds of malted Pilsner barley and fifty-five pounds of rye—Calagione loaded the rocks from the truck into a wheelbarrow and rolled them into the kitchen. The pub’s menu was designed around a wood-fired grill, used to cook burgers, steaks, seafood, and beer-battered pizza. (The beef came from cows fed on the brewery’s spent grain.) Calagione strapped on a pair of safety glasses and peered into the oak and hickory embers. “If there are no second-degree burns, I’ll call this a success,” he said. Then he heaved in a rock, sending up a shower of sparks. “Let me know if they start to explode,” he told one of the cooks.

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The grain had been cooked to mash by now, and a thick, lacy foam had bubbled to the surface. It was here that A. E. Housman’s famous lines—“Malt does more than Milton can / To justify God’s ways to man”—were borne out. When grain is partially sprouted, it builds up enzymes that can break down starch and turn it into sugar. In a living seed, this sugar fuels the plant’s growth. In beer, it’s digested by yeast, producing alcohol. The foam on the mash was a sign that the enzymes were at work. After an hour or so, the malty liquid, known as wort, would be strained off and cooked again with hops and flavorings. (Malt and hops are the yin and yang of beer: the one sweet, the other bitter.) Once it cooled, the yeast would go in, and the beer would be left to ferment, producing an array of flavor compounds in addition to alcohol: peppery phenols, fruity esters, and so on. “Beer is all about what your yeast is doing,” Selders said.

The year before, Selders had taken some wort intended for 60 Minute I.P.A., divided it into four batches, and added a different yeast to each. “They turned into four completely different beers,” he said. His favorite was made with a German Kölsch strain, used in the delicate straw-colored ales of Cologne. For the sahti, Calagione had decided on a Hefeweizen strain instead. He had read that Finnish brewers used baker’s yeast to make a spicy but slightly chalky beer. The Hefeweizen yeast would provide similar hints of clove and banana, he hoped, “but without the weirdness.”

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When the mash had been cooking for a while, Selders climbed onto a stool and took a temperature reading: a hundred and fifty-five degrees. “We’re ready for the rocks,” he said. Calagione grabbed his pitchfork and hurried back to the kitchen. Inside the stove, the rocks were white-hot. A few had burst apart, though not loudly enough to alarm the cooks: the kitchen radio was turned up high, to Bob Dylan braying over a squall of Gypsy violin. Calagione stabbed his pitchfork into the flames and lifted out a rock balanced on the tines. “This is going to be an adventure,” he said, dumping it into the wheelbarrow with a clang.

Soon, he and the pub’s manager, Jason, were running back and forth between the brewhouse and the stove, carrying rocks in oven mitts or between metal plates. As the rocks plopped into the mash, they sent up jets of steam and glutinous bubbles, until the whole kettle was boiling. Calagione stripped off his mitts, now charred beyond use, and threw them to the ground. His face was bright red and sheened with sweat. “When we do this next year, at the big brewery, we’ll use the rocks outside in a small tank,” he said. “Then we’ll mix that mash in with the rest inside.”

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Selders rolled his eyes. “Yes . . . it is already done,” he said, wiggling his fingers as if casting a spell. Later, when I asked what he thought about Calagione’s plan, he shook his head. “Yeah. Not going to happen.” But Calagione overheard him. “They didn’t want to do continual hopping, either!” he said.

The last stage of the brewing process was the most unorthodox. Traditionally, sahti is flavored with juniper alone, but Calagione wanted something more unusual. After the hops and the juniper berries had been added to the wort, he took the bag of spices from his truck and steeped it in a bucket of hot water. The mixture contained cardamom, coriander, ginger, allspice, rampe leaves, lemongrass, curry powder, and black tea, custom blended for Calagione in India. It would be added at the last moment, he said, so that its volatile flavors wouldn’t boil off. The idea was to amplify the already spicy flavors of the juniper berries and the Hefeweizen yeast—to turn the sahti into Sahtea.

Selders walked over to the bucket and crouched down beside it. He took a wooden spoon and trailed it through the inky gunk. “You want to use all of this?” he said. “Because this is a lot of tea, dude.”

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Calagione nodded, a little sheepishly. “We’ll see. We might want to use all of it.”

Selders stared at the tea. He lifted a spoonful to his nose and took a cautious sniff. “So you went with curry, huh?”

“Nowhere near as much as I did with coriander and lemongrass.”

“My God.”

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estraint can have its advantages. A well-made German beer is both tasty and relatively wholesome: in Bavaria, it’s considered a foodstuff and included in soldiers’ rations. It’s unlikely to give you a headache, upset your stomach, or cause an allergic reaction, as the acids and biological amines in Belgian lambics may, and it can have a surprising range of flavors—from sweet Helles to dark Doppelbock to smoky Rauchbier. The strictures of the Reinheitsgebot have helped turn German brewers into the most resourceful and technically capable in the world. By mixing and matching strains of yeast, varieties of hops, and pale or roasted grains, they can produce almost any flavor found in fruit or spice. With three ingredients, they can give the illusion of a dozen.

The same discipline, if not creativity, has helped make Budweiser the most popular beer in the world. Its sheer consistency, across tens of billions of bottles and cans, is a technical marvel, and even the crankiest craft brewers harbor a secret admiration for it. When I was in Belgium recently, I visited the Trappist monastery at Orval, near the French Ardennes. Orval is home to one of the world’s great beers: a dry, earthy, multilayered concoction made with brewer’s yeast and a wild strain called Brettanomyces. The monastery is circled by sandstone walls like a medieval fortress (it was founded in the twelfth century and rebuilt in the nineteen-twenties), but its brewery is as high tech as any I’ve seen. From the grain bins in the attic to the onion-domed copper kettles on the middle floors to the fermentation tanks in the basement, the operation is largely gravity-driven and computer-controlled—an android in a monk’s robe.

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I asked the brewmaster, Jean-Marie Rock, which American beer he likes best. He thought for a moment, squinting down his bladelike nose, and narrowed his lips to a point. Then he raised a finger in the air. “Budweiser!” he said. “Tell them that the brewer at Orval likes Budweiser!” He smiled. “I know they detest it, but it is quite good.” Later, though, when he described the newest beers coming out of Belgium, they sounded a good deal closer to Calagione’s. “People would rather pay a little more and have a special product than to pay a lot for a Pilsner and have something banal,” he said. “I like Budweiser, but I wouldn’t pay two euros for a Budweiser.”

Even at Dogfish, the line between high end and low, industrial and craft, can get blurry. As Selders was piping the cooked wort into the fermentation tank that day, he turned to Calagione and me with a grin. “Is everyone excited about Budweiser American Ale?” he said. “It’s going to taste great!” Calagione gave him a flat, brooding look. He knew he was being baited. Anheuser-Busch had been advertising its newest product all summer, clearly targeting the craft-beer market. Like other ales, the new beer is brewed at a relatively high temperature with a top-fermenting yeast. It’s a little fruitier and more full-flavored than regular Budweiser, which, like all lagers, is brewed at a lower temperature with a bottom-fermenting yeast. In regular Budweiser, the bitterness of the hops is kept “at the threshold of perception,” in Garrett Oliver’s words. American Ale has more of a bite, thanks to a dose of whole Cascade hops—a craft-brewer favorite—that’s added to the beer during a second fermentation.

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“Those people know what they’re doing,” Selders said, goading Calagione. “What, you don’t think it’s true?”

“I think they can make a technically correct beer. But I don’t even want to try it.”

“As a brewer, you’re obligated to try it.”

“To give you some context for why it’s so distasteful to me,” Calagione said. “At the same time that they’re making this relatively hoppy wanna-be craft beer that exists only to confuse the consumer—so that they can be culture vultures—they are running ads that say that the darker a beer is the more impurities it has. It’s beer racism.”

“Beer racism!”

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“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 f$%*ing food. But if you ate banana cream pie every day you would hate it, too.”

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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.

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“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.”

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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.”