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[iski]

Gasparine eventually found some Paraguayans willing to fill the order. On one trip, they took him to the forest where the palo santo grew, a twelve-hour bus ride from Asunción followed by a half day’s drive into the wilderness. Three rough-looking millworkers had agreed to accompany him, led by a bullet-headed giant named Carlos. At one point, a herd of wild boars crossed the road, but Carlos didn’t slow down. He plowed straight over a boar and kept on going.

When they finally arrived, one of the millworkers pulled out a large cooking knife. “He said he was going to prove to me that these were palo-santo trees,” Gasparine remembers. “ ‘We’ll cut away the bark and you can smell it!’ Then he starts hacking away for five or ten minutes. Nothing. Can’t get through the sapwood. So the monster Carlos goes at it. The blade looks like a butter knife in his hand. Nothing.” After a while, Carlos turned to one of his sidekicks and sent him back to the truck. When he returned, he was holding a .38-calibre pistol. “Now I’m a little more than freaked out,” Gasparine says. Carlos took the pistol, swivelled it toward the tree, and fired a single shot from five feet away. The bullet struck with a dull thud, then fell harmlessly to the ground.

[iski]

The barrel that Dogfish built is now housed at its main brewery, in Milton, Delaware. It’s fifteen feet high and ten feet in diameter, and holds nine thousand gallons. When Calagione took me to see it in August, a pallet of leftover palo santo was stacked nearby. The staves, streaked with a greenish-brown grain, felt disproportionately heavy, as if subject to a stronger gravity—one part wood, one part white dwarf star. The barrel was built by a father-and-son firm in Buffalo, Calagione said, and cost about a hundred and forty thousand dollars—three times the price of the oak barrel beside it. “If Dogfish were a publicly traded company, I’d have been fired for building this,” he said.

Calagione is thirty-nine. That day, as on most days, he was wearing flip-flops, cargo pants, and a threadbare T-shirt, and looked about as concerned with liquidity as the customers bellied up at the brewery’s bar, drinking free samples. When tour groups visit Dogfish, they’re greeted by a quote on the wall from Emerson’s essay on self-reliance: “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist,” it begins. “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” Calagione doesn’t seem, at first, to fit this cantankerous creed. His nonconformity is of an agreeable sort: brewing beer, keeping his own hours, living by the shore with his high-school sweetheart and their two children. For a while after college, he did some modelling, and he still looks as if he belonged in, well, a Budweiser commercial. He has a surfer’s loose, long-muscled frame and perpetual tan. His chiselled features are set in a squarish head and topped by a thick black ruff. When he talks, his lips twist slightly to the side and his voice comes out low and woolly, like a crooner’s at a speakeasy. “Just get a whiff of that wood,” he said.

[Talon]

The Tao of the Bierbitzch zen.......

Nice wood Iski!  

[iski]

I leaned forward and put my nose to the grain. The barrel was more than a year old, but the wood smelled freshly milled. A sharp, spicy, resinous scent came off it, like incense and mulled wine. To stand up to its aroma, Calagione said, he had filled the barrel with a strong brown beer. It was made with three kinds of hops, five kinds of wheat and barley, a dose of unrefined cane sugar, and a sturdy Scottish ale yeast. It had a creamy head when poured, like a Guinness stout, and contained about twelve per cent alcohol—two and a half times as much as a Budweiser. Calagione called it Palo Santo Marron. It was an extreme beer, he said, but to most people it wouldn’t have tasted like beer at all. There were hints of tobacco and molasses in it, black cherries and dark chocolate, all interlaced with the wood’s spicy resin. It tasted like some ancient elixir that the Inca might have made.

America used to be full of odd beers. In 1873, the country had some four thousand breweries, working in dozens of regional and ethnic styles. Brooklyn alone had nearly fifty. Beer was not only refreshing but nutritious, it was said—a “valuable substitute for vegetables,” as a member of the United States Sanitary Commission put it during the Civil War. The lagers brewed by Adolphus Busch and Frederick Pabst were among the best. In 1878, Maureen Ogle notes in her recent book “Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer,” Busch’s St. Louis Lager took on more than a hundred European beers at a competition in Paris. The lager came home with the gold, causing an “immense sensation,” in the words of a reporter from the Times.

[iski]

Nice wood Iski!  

Thanks Craig!  It's a red oak board, very similar to the one I used for a shelf in the TV home entertainment center.  AM wood is better than the PM variety, especially when matching a stain.   

[iski]

Then came Prohibition, followed hard by industrialization. Beer went from barrel to bottle and from saloon to home refrigerator, and only the largest companies could afford to manufacture and distribute it. A generation raised on Coca-Cola had a hard time readjusting to beer’s bitterness, and brewers diluted their recipes accordingly. In 1953, Miller High Life was dismissed by one competitor as a beer for “women and beginners.” Within a decade, most other beers were just as flavorless.

Beer has lagged well behind wine and organic produce in the ongoing reinvention of American cuisine. Yet the change over the past twenty years has been startling. In 1965, the United States had a single craft brewery: Anchor Brewing, in San Francisco. Today, there are nearly fifteen hundred. In liquor stores and upscale supermarkets, pumpkin ales and chocolate stouts compete for cooler space with wit beers, weiss beers, and imperial Pilsners. 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 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.

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“We are trying to explore the outer edges of what beer can be,” Calagione says. But the idea makes even some craft brewers nervous. “I find the term ‘extreme beer’ irredeemably pejorative,” Garrett Oliver, the brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery, told me recently. “When a brewer says, ‘This has more hops in it than anything you’ve had in your life—are you man enough to drink it?,’ it’s sort of like a chef saying, ‘This stew has more salt in it than anything you’ve ever had—are you man enough to eat it?’ ”

Dogfish makes some very fine beers, Oliver says. But its reputation has been built on ales like its 120 Minute I.P.A., one of the strongest beers of its kind in the world. I.P.A. stands for India pale ale, an especially hoppy British style first made in the eighteenth century for the long sea voyage to the subcontinent. (Hops are a natural preservative as well as a flavoring.) A typical I.P.A. has six per cent alcohol and forty I.B.U.s—brewers’ parlance for international bittering units. Calagione’s version has eighteen per cent alcohol and a hundred and twenty I.B.U.s. It’s brewed for two hours, with continuous infusions of hops, then fermented with still more hops. “I don’t find it pleasant to drink,” Oliver says. “I find it unbalanced and shrieking.”

Others find it thrilling. “When you’re trying to create new brewing techniques and beer styles, you have to have a certain recklessness,” Jim Koch, whose Boston Beer Company brews Samuel Adams, and who coined the term “extreme beer,” told me. “Sam has that. He’s fearless, but he’s also got a good palate. He doesn’t put stuff into beer that doesn’t deserve to be there.”

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The debate goes back, in one form or another, nearly five hundred years. According to the Bavarian Reinheitsgebot, or Purity Law, of 1516, beer can be made with only three ingredients: water, hops, and barley. (Yeast was left off the list because brewers didn’t know it existed; beer was naturally fermented, like sourdough bread.) German brewers still observe a version of the Reinheitsgebot, but Belgian brewers, just across the border, have cheerfully renounced it. Their krieks, wits, lambics, and gueuzes are among the world’s most remarkable beers, yet they’re often made with fruits or spices, or fortified with sugar, to become as potent as wine.

In America, brewers have long followed the German model: our major industrial breweries were all founded by German-Americans. But Calagione and others have lately wandered over to the Belgian side—and kept on going. “I’d probably be arrested, tarred and feathered, if I stepped off a plane in Berlin,” Calagione told me. Extreme brewers have helped turn American brewing into the most influential in the world. But they’ve also raised a basic question: When does beer cease to be beer?

On my first night in Delaware, I found a manila folder waiting for me at my hotel. It was filled with printouts of an e-mail exchange from earlier that year, between Calagione and a brewer in Finland named Juha Ikonen. Calagione was trying to find ingredients for a rustic juniper-flavored beer known as sahti, which Finnish farmers began making as early as the ninth century. He had tried to get Ikonen to send him whole juniper branches with needles intact, so that he could lay them in the bottom of his brewing vessel. But Ikonen thought the branches might get moldy on the flight over. In the end, they’d settled on juniper berries, hand-picked in Finland two weeks earlier. “Welcome Burk,” Calagione had scrawled on the folder. “Tomorrow we are so brewing Sahtea (our version of Sahti). . . . See ya in the Inn Foyer @ 8:30. *Beers in the fridge.”

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The next morning, Calagione pulled up at the hotel in an old Dodge pickup truck. It looked like something out of “Paper Moon”: bulbous fenders, pop-eyed headlamps, red paint weathered nearly to pink. On the tailgate, Calagione had stencilled a line adapted from William Carlos Williams: “So much depends on a red wheelbarrow.” He had bought the truck from some firefighters in Rochester, he told me, and used it mostly as a family car. (Later that week, it would make an appearance at a “Touch the Truck!” event for toddlers.) But it was also handy for hauling supplies. In the back were a pitchfork, a large bag of Indian spices, and about twenty gray river rocks, collected by the brewery’s maintenance man. What the rocks were for, I’d soon find out.

“Sam is a wonderful showman,” Garrett Oliver told me. “He almost conceives the beer around the story. He’ll think, Wouldn’t it be cool if we carried the beer down the street and everyone put something new into it!” This is partly a matter of clever marketing and partly of a genuine creative temperament. Calagione has written or co-written three books on beer. He designs many of Dogfish’s labels and cites Andy Warhol and Coco Chanel as inspirations—“that fusion of commercialism and art.” The Emerson quote at the brewery’s entrance is both an eloquent mission statement and a reminder, as Calagione told some Dogfish fans when I was there, to “keep on drinking the good chit!

[iski]

Like most craft brewers, Calagione came to beer from something else. He grew up in Greenfield, Massachusetts, the middle child of an oral surgeon and the heir to a long line of winemakers. His father and his uncle used to drive to Worcester to meet the trains that brought grapes from California. When they got home, and the juice had been stomped out in the basement, Sam would help bottle it. The process seems to have stripped him of any reverence toward the product. His forefathers worked hard making wine, he recently wrote, “so that I might have the opportunity to produce a superior beverage.”

Calagione was a bright student and a scrappy athlete (to keep his weight up for the football team, his father made him eat a cheesesteak every night at ten-thirty). But by the spring of his senior year, at Northfield Mount Hermon prep, he had so many demerits that he was expelled. His offenses were of the usual Animal House variety: flipping a truck on campus; breaking into the skating rink and playing naked hockey; “surfing” on the roof of a Winnebago, going sixty miles per hour down I-91. As a junior, Calagione sometimes waited outside a local liquor store and got customers to buy him a case of beer. Back at school, he hid the bottles in his hockey bag and sold them to other students at a profit. “I remember when I got busted,” he told me. “The dean said, ‘You think you can make a living doing this?’ I didn’t have the foresight to say, ‘Yeah, maybe someday.’ ”

[iski]

He never did graduate from high school, though he went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in English, at Muhlenberg College, in Pennsylvania. In 1992, he moved to Manhattan, to take writing classes at Columbia and work toward a Master of Fine Arts. It was there, while waiting tables at Nacho Mama’s Burritos in Morningside Heights, that he had his first taste of craft beer. Emboldened by the home-brewing movement, and the success of beers like New Albion, Sierra Nevada, and Samuel Adams, more than two hundred craft breweries had opened in the previous decade, as well as swarms of microbreweries and brewpubs. (A craft brewery, according to the Brewers Association, is one that produces less than two million barrels a year; a microbrewery produces less than fifteen thousand; and a brewpub serves at least a quarter of its beer in house.) Before long, Calagione was brewing beer in his apartment—his first was a sour-cherry ale—and spending his afternoons at the New York Public Library, researching the beer industry.

“I looked around and saw three breweries basically ruling the United States,” he told me. All but one per cent of the beer sold in the U.S. was still made by Miller, Coors, and Anheuser-Busch, along with mid-sized and foreign breweries such as Pabst and Heineken. And while craft breweries made wonderful beer, they were mostly focussed on classic German and British styles, such as pale ale and Pilsner. Calagione had something else in mind. “I’d read a copy of Michael Jackson’s ‘World Guide to Beer,’ and I thought, Holy chit! There are people out there making beer with fruit! There are Scottish ales made with heather flowers! Maybe I can make a living making beer that isn’t like anything else.” It was an opportunity to play David to the beer industry’s Goliaths, he says. “It was the same kind of thing that got me kicked out of prep school.”

[iski]

ogfish Head Brewings and Eats, the pub that Calagione opened in 1995, sits on the main drag of Rehoboth Beach, on Delaware’s southern shore. The pub’s name comes from a peninsula in Maine where Calagione spent summers as a boy; its location was inspired by his wife, Mariah, who grew up nearby. (She’s now co-owner of the brewery and its marketing director.) The property is only four blocks from the ocean, but was long considered snakebit. “Everyone said it was too far from the boardwalk,” Calagione says. “This isn’t Manhattan. People don’t like to walk.” Still, he liked the large parking lot and the shambling, open-raftered dining room. And he knew something the locals didn’t: Delaware was one of the last eight states in the country without a brewery. Publicity alone, he thought, ought to keep the place afloat for a while. Or at least until he learned to make beer.

As it turned out, there was a reason that Delaware had no breweries like Calagione’s. Prohibition had been over for sixty years, but it was still illegal for a pub to bottle and distribute its own beer. Calagione found this out not long after he’d signed the lease. Luckily, Delaware was also very small and very friendly to business. “I literally drove to Dover, asked which one is the House and which is the Senate, and started knocking on doors,” he remembers. “They said, ‘You want to do what, son? Well, write up a bill!’ ” Six months later, the governor signed the bill into law. The only hitch had come when Calagione was applying for his liquor license, and one of the commissioners brought up his recent arrest for driving under the influence of alcohol. Calagione admitted to the incident—a few weeks earlier, on his way home from a restaurant, he’d run into a parked car and dislocated his shoulder—but added a small correction. The actual infraction was a P.U.I., he said: pedalling under the influence. “Commissioner, I was on a bicycle.”

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The tavern was a success from the day it opened. The beer took a little longer. Calagione had brewed fewer than ten batches before coming to Delaware, and he rarely used the same recipe twice. “I’d just grab herbs and spices and fruits from the kitchen and throw them in,” he says. “I used to think, Oh, it’s cool that every batch tastes different. It’s like snowflakes!” The pub’s brewing equipment consisted of three fifteen-gallon kegs on propane burners, and a rack of modified kegs for fermenting the beer. To keep up with demand, Calagione had to brew two or three times a day, every day; between shifts he slept on a mattress in the cellar. When the beer was ready, he and two employees would don ski goggles and green garbage bags and bottle the beer by hand, with a siphon and mechanical capper. In ten hours they could fill a hundred cases.

“It was a hot ghetto mess,” Bryan Selders, Dogfish’s lead brewer, remembers. By the time Selders arrived, in 2002, Calagione had jury-rigged some larger kettles out of stainless-steel tanks from a yogurt factory. To reach the cooked barley, or mash, Selders had to climb onto a metal grate twelve feet high and straddle the edge of the boiling kettle—one foot on the grate, the other on the kettle’s lid. Once, during a morning production meeting, Selders fell in. “The lid just gave way,” he says. The mash in the kettle was hot—around a hundred and fifty degrees—but came only to the tops of his boots. “I went home, took a shower, watched a little Sally Jessy, and came back.”

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Dogfish was on the verge of bankruptcy for many of those years. More than seven hundred craft breweries opened in the United States between 1995 and 2000, yet their combined market share increased by less than a quarter. Some brewers were too inexperienced to make good beer—a 1996 issue of Consumer Reports found a number of the most expensive brands “flawed and stale-tasting”—others too cynical. Companies like Bad Frog simply contracted other breweries to make beer for them, then slapped on a silly label—in this case, a frog flipping off customers. The industrial breweries, meanwhile, were busy acquiring and buying shares in smaller companies (Celis, Shipyard, Red Hook, Widmer) or creating fake craft beers of their own: Blue Moon, Red Wolf, Eisbock, Elk Mountain. When most of those beers failed, their owners settled for squeezing craft brewers from the other side: paying bar owners and distributors to carry only their products. “It was economic Darwinism,” Calagione says. “Supply finally overtook demand.”

Dogfish’s ragged beginnings were its saving grace, he says. “If we’d bought a turnkey brewhouse for three hundred thousand dollars, I have no doubt in my mind that we would have gone bust.” The restaurant paid for the brewery at first, then the brewery grew as the beer improved. By working in small batches, Calagione became an experimental brewer a decade before it was fashionable. He made a medieval gruit with yarrow root and grains of paradise. He made an African tej with bitter gesho bark and raw honey. He made a stout with roasted chicory and St.-John’s-wort (“The world’s only antidepressant depressant,” he called it). While other brewers were dyeing their beer green for St. Patrick’s Day, Calagione brewed his with blue-green algae. “It tasted like appetizing pond scum,” he says. “The first sip, you were like, ‘Wow, that tasted like pond scum. But you know what? I kind of want a second sip.’ ”

[iski]

His customers were forgiving, if not always enthusiastic. When Calagione bottled his first twelve-ounce beers for sale in New Jersey, he decided to celebrate with a publicity stunt. He would build a wooden boat and row the beer across Delaware Bay—a distance of eighteen nautical miles. “The idea was handmade beer from a handmade boat,” he says. “But I forgot to get press releases out.” When he arrived, there were four fans to greet him.

The turning point came in 1999, when Calagione was watching a cooking show on television. The chef, who was making a soup, was saying that several grindings of pepper, added to the pot at different points, would give the dish more flavor than a single dose added at the beginning. Not long afterward, at a Salvation Army store, Calagione came across an old electric football set—the kind with a playing field that vibrates to send miniature players skittering across it. Back at home, he found a five-gallon bucket and drilled some holes in the bottom. He laid a pair of wooden blocks on the football set, put the bucket on the blocks, and strapped the whole thing together with duct tape. (“Pretty high-tech M.I.T. stuff,” he says.) Later, when his kettle was boiling, he put hops in the bucket, perched his contraption at a slant above the kettle, and set the game vibrating. Soon, a steady stream of hops was falling through the bucket onto the playing field and sliding into the kettle.