As we march towards Father’s Day, I've been reminiscing about how much my dad and Mariah's dad have been huge mentors for us as we have grown Dogfish alongside our co-workers over the last 3+ decades. This Father’s Day, I will get to treat my mom and my dad, Sam Calagione Jr., to dinner at the farm-to-table restaurant where my son, Sam Calagione IV, is the Sous Chef. I guess you could say for that dinner we will be having a Sam-Sandwich. While it was my dad who informed my entrepreneurial direction in life, it was definitely my mom who fueled my passion for storytelling and reading.
I was born in Queens, NYC, in 1969. When my parents wanted to move out of the city, I fought it kicking and screaming the whole way to our new hometown in Western Massachusetts — not because I was consciously mad at them, but because I was one and a half years old, and that's what kids that age do: kick and scream.
It was there in Greenfield, Massachusetts, that I started school and learned how to read. My mother, Mary, was a Special Education teacher and she loved reading to me as our bedtime ritual throughout my pre-school and early grade school years. Before I was old enough to ride my bike on my own, my mom was also the person who would walk me down to meet the school bus at the center of our little town when I was really young. The bus to school picked me up outside a little newsstand called the Inkwell in our town. My mom always supported my love of reading. She wouldn't buy me the stupid shit I asked for, like a kung fu grip G.I. Joe toy or functional rocket building kits, but she would buy me any magazine, book, or comic book that I desired to fuel my love of reading and adventurous storytelling.
From a very early age, I fell in love with music and music magazines. I remember the earliest copies of Creem and Rolling Stone magazine that I would buy at the Inkwell Newsstand and read the stories of the bands that were on the rise before I could even afford the actual records these bands were putting out. It's this love of storytelling and creative expression that fueled my desire to open Dogfish Head and gave me the courage to write the business plan for our off-centered company that has fueled our off-centered adventure for more than 31 years now.
And now, in addition to my work with Dogfish and our other beverage brands, I get to write for the two music magazines that meant so much to me in my formative years. Check out a story I got to write for the summer issue of Rolling Stone HERE. I also write a quarterly series for Creem, where I get to interview some of my favorite artists. So far, I've done stories for this series with Hall-of-Famer Joan Jett, Wayne Coyne of the Flamming Lips, and Craig Wedren of Shutter to Think, who will be playing our Dogfish Head Brewpub in Rehoboth with The Middle Aged Dad band this July. Next on the horizon, I get to interview Questlove, one of my heroes, whose great new documentary on Earth, Wind, and Fire just hit streaming services.
This music writing opportunity has truly been a dream come true.
Another one of my earliest memories that I bore witness to was our bicentennial in ’76. I remember the smoky smells of fireworks and Pavlovian bells of ice cream trucks seeping through the verdant valleys and listening to the local festivities on my new Panasonic boombox. Over the next decade, that radio and everything I learned through it would be a catalyst for connecting my life's passion, music, with my life’s work, beer.
For years, late at night, after everyone was asleep, I'd spend hours twisting the FM dial, and that's how I found my way back to New York City. We couldn't get Boston's big commercial-rock radio stations way out in the boonies. Instead, we had a countercultural hotbed of campus-based stations. I eavesdropped on radio shows within a 40-mile radius of my bedroom boombox antenna — the University of Massachusetts, Hampshire College, Amherst College, Smith College. By the late 70s, in a single late-night session, I could listen to two UMass undergrads spin early hip-hop records for a couple hours, then nudge the dial to the right and pick up a punk rock show. I fell in love with these two genres gradually, simultaneously, because they came into pop culture gradually and simultaneously, and they came from the same place I did — New York City.
These two American art forms being incubated and amplified in the same place and time was no coincidence. In that era in NYC, you had economic depression and social neglect. You also had the industrialized same-ification of consumer goods, including popular music. So, these fringe cultural movements began to germinate and cross-pollinate.
During the 1980s, they moved from localized phenomena into independent, regional scenes. Punk split into faster subgenres, proliferated through cassettes and small clubs. In hip-hop, labels like Def Jam brought the sounds of Brooklyn and the Bronx to farther-flung audiences. And at the same time, Sierra Nevada redefined American beer by reintroducing flavors that had been abandoned by mainstream brands, utilizing ingredients like Cascade hops to create a new, aggressive American IPA. These three movements were now thriving on an underground economy, building dedicated fandoms.
The day after graduating from college with an English and creative writing degree in 1992, I moved to NYC with a dream of being a poet or a playwright or an English professor. I took courses at Columbia while bartending and going to as many live shows as I could at venues like CBGB and the Wetlands and Sin-E. One bartending job was at a burrito joint that happened to have a beer menu that was epically diverse for the time — wheat beers, stouts, lagers, and fruited beers from countries and states far and wide. My lucky timing was perfect — the first wave of American micro-brewed beers was becoming widely available. I began homebrewing beer in my Chelsea apartment while blasting albums by the Replacements, De La Soul, and Guided by Voices. I had an epiphany to combine my love of creative expression through homebrewing with my passion for rebellion, the kind I learned about through hip-hop and punk rock. I would open the first commercial craft brewery focused on making “beers to drink music to.”
By that time, all three movements had achieved significant maturity. The 1990s pop-punk explosion, led by bands like Nirvana and Green Day, took the energy of 70s punk to the mainstream. Hip-hop followed a similar trajectory, with artists like Wu-Tang Clan and Notorious B.I.G. bringing gritty storytelling to the top of the charts. Meanwhile the number of small breweries was skyrocketing and consumers began to demand IPAs and porters over light lagers. By the late 1990s, there were hundreds of new breweries opening every year across all 50 states.
Punk rock, hip-hop, and craft brewing are not just accidental neighbors on a timeline; they are manifestations of the same rebellion against the corporate-led homogenization of the 1970s. Whether it was the raw, fast chords of the Ramones, the turntable breaks of hip-hop pioneers, or the intense, aromatic hops bombs launched by slightly mighty craft breweries, all three movements thrived on raw energy and a desire for authentic expression.
American craft brewers from the late 1970s onward took the staid, esoteric English beer style known as India Pale Ale and turned it on its head. We punk-rocked it and amplified it into Imperial, Double, and Triple IPAs. And we hip-hopped it: We turned it into hazy, fruited sub-genres of IPAs. We scienced the shit out of it. We handcrafted the shit out of it. And now the average American lives within walking distance of a brewery with at least a couple awesome and very different IPAs on tap. Magnanimous maximalism — that’s the American way.
-Sam