Interviews

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3/7/04: Sam Calagione, Dogfish Head: 

What do you say about Sam Calagione? Genius? Showman? Innovator? Menace? I say the man's done one hell of a lot for beer in the east with his constant pushing of the boundaries, and his relentless and successful search for press for both Dogfish Head and the industry. Not to mention he's just a lot of fun to be around. I interviewed Sam for a piece I did for Ale Street News on making the hoppiest beer possible. I talked to a brewing chemist to get the technical dope on how things worked, but I wanted to get the subjective, artistic viewpoint on scaling the highest heights of hops. Sam seemed like the right man to talk to; he is not afraid of barriers or utmosts.  

Lew: I wanted to get you on this because you’re the hop guy on the East Coast.

Sam: Okay. Well, as you know, we do the 60, 90 and 120 Minute IPAs. The 90 we started selling it in the big corked bottles in 1999. I’m pretty sure it was the first bottled Imperial IPA (IIPA); I know Vinnie (Cilurzo) on the west coast claimed the first IIPA, but I’m pretty sure that was draft only. I don’t really know, but we were certainly the first IIPA east of the Mississippi. The continual hopping process was certainly something that worked out well for us. It started out with that vibrating football game...I’ll bet your technical guy didn’t mention that.

We used that on all of the IPAs.

No. We started with that vibrating football game, then we developed and designed our own pneumatic machine. What I really wanted to do was to drop one hop cone into the kettle continuously, like drop drop drop drop drop drop drop drop drop, but that was physically impossible, I would have had to stand there and do that, so I tried to rig up a machine that would do that. Now we have a machine called Sir Hops A Lot, with a little 3x3 tray that pneumatically doses the hops in every three to five seconds. It’s almost continual.

What we were shooting for, what finally ended up working, was doing away with the whole idea of bittering hops and aroma hops. What if you just hopped it with tiny doses continually? You’d end up with equivalent IBUs, but it allows you to make a beer with higher IBUs that we find has more hoppiness but less bitterness. It makes for a beer that’s really really hoppy without being overly bitter.

Everything’s sort of proportionate with those beers, they’re the exact same recipe, just kind of, 90 Minute is condensed 60 Minute, and 120 Minute is double-condensed, NASA-grade 90 Minute. It’s IPA concentrate.

Objective? The IBUs are really the only benchmark we use. Mostly we’re more concerned with the subjective side of it, because as you’re pointed out, some of our bigger beers are perceived to be less hoppy because there are more residual sugars. So as you go up the scale in alcohol and minutes, 60-90-120, the beers actually become less bitter, even though the IBUs are higher.

I would say so, but it wouldn’t taste good. You could just overhop the shit out of it and it would just be gross. We could have made the 90 more bitter, certainly, either with bittering hops in the kettle or even by adding oils post-fermentation, which some IPAs are done with – but that would be more for perceived bitterness and aroma, vs. adding it in the kettles for pure IBUs – but that was not the balance that beer needed. That beer tastes best with a bit more maltiness to it. The 120 is the biggest challenge, because there are so many more residual sugars in it to strike that balance. As you go up the scale, the sugar scale and the IBU scale, striking the balance becomes a more exact process.

It’s what we consider the most gigantic representation of the IPA style. What we were trying to do was to hit every facet of that style. Same thing with World Wide Stout, where we wanted to be just huge huge huge, but when you closed your eyes and taste it, you still know it’s some bastard child of the stout family. We wanted the same thing with the 120. As opposed to when you try the Sam Adams-over-20% beers, you close your eyes and you’re thinking "liquor" before you think "beer." You’re definitely thinking this is impressive, it’s really well made, but I don’t think beer comes to your mind unless you’re told that. We’re trying to make a magnified version of existing styles.

That’s why we tried really hard to have some level of carbonation in those beers. They’re so viscous that it’s very hard to keep carbonation in those beers, so we had to experiment with that as well. We feel that it’s a necessary and positive component.

That’s subjective, and I think people’s tastes are evolving to be more receptive to higher hopping levels. We didn’t think 7 years ago, when our core brands were Shelter Pale Ale and Raison d’Etre…if you’d told me that a 60 IBU and a 90 IBU IPA would be our biggest-selling beer and our fastest-growing brand, respectively, I don’t think I would have believed it. But that seems to be, as this community of beer lovers evolves and grows in America, I think that hoppy beers have become a more central and shared passion of this group. The Belgian and Belgian-style beer contingent are pretty vocal, to say the least, but other than that, the hopheads are the most militant, passionate, and vocal components of the hardcore beer community.

Yeah. And that’s something that’s been talked about in more technical papers. I think if you were to contact someone like Tomme Arthur (Pizza Port) and Tom Nickel (Oggi) that they could probably talk more about that technical side than I could. Again, at the end of the day, that technical stuff is really useful to the brewers to have some kind of track record, but it really comes down to what does it taste like in the glass, not what did they hit for IBUs. It’s great to have that scale to refer back to as brewers, but I don’t think it’s the kind of thing we want to emphasize with the consumer. I think it’s just too techno-jargon, too exclusive a terminology. We’d rather just talk about what hops do for the beers: citrusy, bitterness, complexity, and not get into throwing numbers around when you already have to throw alcohol numbers around. Another number can just complicate things for the less beer-savvy people that we want to try the beer.

6' 8", blue eyes... Randall evolved out of the whole Lupulin Slam thing in DC. I have great respect for Adam Avery, Tomme and Tom, and I knew they’d be bringing some big guns – they’re big brewers – so we wanted to have something special to represent the East Coast. I had an old mash filter that we actually found in the same scrapyard where we found our still. Some people call it a scrapyard, we call it the R&D lab. We went in there two years ago and found this thing. We don’t even know what industry used it, it was just a long stainless steel cylinder with another cylinder inside it, perforated, pressure-rated, gaskets, the whole nine yards, and we were able to use it to pick up any grain husks that got out of the mash tun on the way to the kettle. I took that thing, and thought about it.

That one was about three feet long and had about a seven inch, six-inch diameter, I guess. It was already set up with sanitary brewer’s fittings, industry standard fittings, so it was perfect for filtering the husks out. I thought about it, and drew something up. You know how a lot of English breweries use hopbacks? After the kettle on the way to the fermenter, your beer’s going through a filter of hops. We use dry-hopping in our primary fermentation, we use them in the kettle, we use hops all the way through to the conditioning tank. So the final frontier was kind of like, what do you do after the keg?

That’s how the whole philosophy of Randall came up. It serves two purposes. How it works: beer leaves the keg, and goes through what we call the Aromatic Hydrocarbon Dispersion Matrix. (mad cannabinoid giggling) That’s basically the filter inside of this thing. It works really well with high alcohol beers, so the 90 or the 120 work a lot better than the 60, because the alcohol in the beer is what’s stripping the oils off of the hop leaves on the way through Randall. So you get more effect with a bigger beer. The beer goes through the cylinder and picks up these oils. It’s not changing IBUs, it’s kind of too late for that, but it’s definitely giving a huge, pungent, fresh hop aroma to the beer. And it also just enhances the perceived bitterness – no, not really; the actual bitterness.

So we didn’t know what the hell, we’d never even used it, we just went down there (to RFD in Washington). We didn’t even test it, but we had faith that it would work, so we packed it the day before and then we hooked it up.

Yeah, so it was sitting there and the oils were seeping into the beer before we even hooked it up. Then you run it through it.

Yeah, that was super-intense. But then even after that first half-gallon that was already in it came through, it’s still picking up, the beer’s still picking up oils. We’ve found that it works best with a sixtel, a five gallon keg. The Randalls that we now are making are sized correctly so that one load of hops in the Randall works well for a five gallon keg; after that, you start losing the effect a bit.

At any rate, it worked great. Tom Nickel was kind of amazed at this machine. All those west coast guys are friends of mine and we were sitting around later and he said, "I’ll order one!" and Dave Alexander (of RFD) on the spot ordered two. Since then we’ve installed them in – I just got back from Chicago, I installed two there, the Blind Tiger’s installing one, O’Brien’s, Tom Nickel's place is installing one.

My idea was to use these – the Randall we developed after this prototype is actually a clear plastic model. The main parts are water filter parts, and there are only two or three custom parts in it that we’ve designed, that have the right sort of calibration of slots in them for the holes (on the tapline connectors), but everything else you can pretty much get easy.

Two great things there: it becomes very affordable for bars or breweries to buy these. We can make them for like 70 bucks now. The other great thing is the teacher factor. Randall’s a great tool for the consumer, because it shows people the effects of hops. A, it shows them the hop leaf right there at the point where they’re getting the pint, and B, they see the beer run through this Randall and come out the other side, and you can bypass the Randall and show them the difference.

We see this as an awesome opportunity to educate the consumer on what hops does for beer. When we did this, and these other breweries said they were interested, I said, you know, karmically, I don’t want to make any money off this thing. I’d rather do this at cost, and whoever wants to buy these things can buy them. I think it’s really good for the industry. So we’ve already made about 8 Randalls for different guys that want them. We both know it’s never going to be "Friday night’s Randall Night at T.G.I. Friday’s!" It’s going to be for hard-core beer bars and hard-core brewpubs. But I think almost any hard-core beer bar and hard-core brewpub in America could benefit from using one, solely for the reason of how quickly it makes people understand hops. It demystifies the whole hopping idea at the brewery, it’s a great thing for that.

We’re doing the Linux model, where we don’t want to make any money, but what we do want to do is set up a little chat room on our website where the guys who get these things can say, okay, here’s how we used it, here’s an improvement we would suggest design-wise, this is a Randall promotion we used that worked really well. Like, Tom Nickel had a great idea; his clientele is so beer-savvy that he’s going to have every Friday at 5 be Randall Night, right, and leading up the night before, his regulars can submit a piece of paper saying, okay, this is the whole leaf hop we want it loaded with, and this is the beer we want it on. So...Sierra Nevada Brown Ale, Cascade. And next week it could be Stone Arrogant Bastard loaded with Tomahawk. You totally allow bar customers to customize the beer and the hopping, it’s a unique thing to do. That was Tom’s idea and I think it’s a great one.

Yeah! I think that would be great, that would show how even a little hop would bring a beer like that out of balance. I could see somebody having fun with that.

It’ll be fun, but it’s not going to be everywhere. The New York Times Dining section’s doing a story on it, so that’s going to happen. I imagine we’ll have 30 or 40 Randalls over time, a little army of Randalls across America, out there spreading the word about hops.

It’s an Organoleptic Hops Transducer Module. That’s what Randall is, that’s what we’re saying. Randall the Enamel Animal, that’s his whole name.

It sends it through? Yeah. Randall the Enamel Animal, because you know how when you drink a nice huge hoppy beer it feels like it’s ripping the outer layer of enamel off your teeth? That’s how it got that name. It gets pretty quiet in the off-season here in Delaware, you’d be amazed the shit we think up. Last year it was the Pain Relievaz project, this year it was Randall. We’re keeping things interesting.