This Time, is a Great Time Inside the Dogfish Head Brewery success story By Eric Balinski
Here is a recipe for building a well-differentiated company: Mix one part hospitality, with two parts brewery and distillery, and two parts restaurants, stir continually with the inspiration of a highly spirited culinary and beverage alchemist. What would you get? If you are lucky and wholeheartedly committed to the outcome, you could end up writing an entrepreneurial success story similar to that of Dogfish Head. Dogfish Head is the company Sam Calagione, the Epicurean Edison of the Craft Beer industry, founded back in 1995 in coastal Delaware as a mere 10-gallon-batch beer maker within their original Rehoboth restaurant, Brewing & Eats. From that simple beginning, he and his co-workers have trail blazed styles and tastes, not only in beer, but in creating a unique culture that pioneers across a number of business endeavors. Any craft-made production endeavor takes dedication and focus to be successful. Blending some very different businesses seamlessly together seems almost a route to failure. From Calagione’s view though, they were inherently linked, feeding upon each other to make each endeavor a source of ideas, inspirations and new loyal fans. The reason their mixology of hospitality, brewing/distilling, and culinary works is they take each element very serious, but don’t take themselves serious, allowing for their hard work and dedication to be enjoyable even when some experiments don’t always come out exactly as planned. Craft Brand and Marketing Magazine had the chance to speak with Sam and his wife Mariah,
shortly after their merger with Boston Beer Co., which is run by Sam’s longtime friend Jim Koch, chairman and founder of Boston Beer Co. We explored the merger and Dogfish’s history and future.
Give us a snapshot of today’s craft brew market. Historically, brewers followed the Brewers Act of 1516, The Reinheitsgebot, the “German Beer Purity Law.” After more than 500 years, the Reinheitsgebot is considered the world’s oldest, still valid food safety and consumer protection legislation. For beer making that meant ingredients could only exist of the traditional beer foursome: barley malt, hops, water and yeast. Dogfish Head was the first craft brewery to completely challenge the ingredient list for making beer, by creating the first coffee stout beer. We feel we’ve helped inspire many craft brewers to become more creative with their offerings and have contributed to the explosions of craft beers across the U.S. Today, there are more than 7,000 craft breweries in America, with craft brewers having 14.5 percent share of the domestic beer market. A significant number of these brewers are hyper-local in scope, offering direct to consumer freshness and integrating themselves into the community. The top 50 Craft Brewers, while still part of their local communities, have 99 percent of their sales go through a three tier distribution system, the same as the global beer companies. Currently, more than 80 percent of the beer produced in America comes from only two international
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