Daydream Playbook Entry #10

I think one of the reasons we've been successful going into our 4th decade here at Dogfish is because we relish failure. I realize that sounds counter-intuitive, but if you're not swinging for the fences and occasionally striking out, you're not trying hard enough. This is why we celebrate our failures and communicate them broadly across all our departments, so that we all have the opportunity to learn from them for future successes. I'd like to share some of our greatest hits in terms of failures, both in my words and those of my fellow coworkers … here we go! 🙂 

“Au Courant”
Sam Calagione, Brewer & Founder

I thought it’d be fun to have a beer named after the French saying “Au Courant” and make it with a shit ton of black currants. We made 200 barrels of it before I even tried it, and the beer sucked. We forced every co‑worker to take that beer as their payday case every other week, so for months people were showing up at house parties and beach parties around coastal Delaware with their payday cases of Au Courant, and everyone at the parties would point at them and scream, “Oh C’MON,” because everyone was so sick of drinking that beer. Now, we do at least three 5‑ to 7‑barrel batches of every beer we commercialize and serve them under a different name in our tasting rooms to tweak the recipe and get consumer feedback before we go big.

The distillery hat debacle
Jason King, Social Impact Programs Manager

One of our funnier missteps in the early distillery program actually happened on the marketing side, when we tried to create a new point-of-sale (POS) item on our own, a branded distillery hat on a penny budget. In theory, it was supposed to be an outdoorsy, Dogfish Head-inspired piece of merch. In reality, it turned out to be objectively the worst hat ever made – a shape that didn’t fit any human head with a closure that wouldn’t stay closed even if you used an entire roll of duct tape. We tried giving them away at a festival and people walked away from us when they saw it.
From that fashionable disaster, we learned the importance of prototyping merch with real people before committing to a production run, even if it’s just for a giveaway. Also, we learned the importance of getting other coworkers’ eyes on anything that consumers might actually wear before bringing the items to life. We applied those learnings by building a more collaborative review process for distillery POS items, and the very next hat launch came out clean, sharp, and actually wearable (well it was a dad hat and some people are into that).

Beer To Drink Music To 3 
Mark Safarik, Technical Director of Product Quality R&D

Who can forget Beer To Drink Music To 3 (Salted Peach IPA)? We made this hazy IPA with loads of peach puree. It tasted and looked great when we packaged it, but after 30 days in the trade it started to chunk out like a snow globe. We recovered and destroyed what we shipped, but it was one of four beers in a variety pack – meaning four times the loss (ouch!).  From this, we learned the importance of doing forced-abuse testing to ensure formulas were physically stable before we released them to production.
It looked like this…

The OG (Glass Version) of “Randall the Enamel Animal, Jr.”
Janelle Mazur, Brand Manager

A wildly successful launch … until they started exploding in the refrigerators (and hands) of our drinkers. Our phones and emails were never busier trying to (quite literally) stop the bleeding and frustrations of those who had purchased them. Lucky for us, we have really great fans who were more than happy to receive a refund and/or T-shirt to make up for the snafu.
What we learned? Not everything is built for beer. While we were repurposing an existing item, we learned to test the sh!t out of it WITH beer before releasing it to the wild. The next round of Randall, Jr.’s were made of plastic, which went much smoother.

Dogfish x Dickie’s Collab
Janelle Mazur, Brand Manager

We love a collab and this one made total sense. The only problem … we announced it on social in their voice, not ours. Our social followers immediately called us on the caption that clearly wasn’t written by us and put us in check. Our comments were full of, “Glad to know what Sam wears,” and “Thanks for the Dickie’s commercial, Dogfish, that’s great.”
The learning? Authentic collaborations work well for the brand and our fans love ‘em, but we have to make sure they’re presented from our lens and in our own narrative.
https://www.instagram.com/dogfishhead/p/BGaIWAsJGai/

Stay tuned for part two of this entry, in which more of our co-workers are going to share their thoughts on our most epic, collective fails!