The beer industry has existed for thousands of years, and there are times when it's surging in growth and times when it's contracting. From a brewer's perspective, we're always focused on the next beer we believe people will love, regardless of the status of our industry. Dogfish Head as a brand is only 31 and a half years young in this long trajectory of beer drinking globally, but we've already thrived and survived through numerous peaks and troughs in the years that we've been open.
Dogfish Head is proudly a brewery with a music problem. Our original “Holy Trinity” was original beer, original food, original music. We're proud to be the official brewery of Record Store Day for over a decade. In fact, the biggest inspiration for maintaining the highest level of curiosity and creativity within the brewer's and distiller's art here at Dogfish Head certainly dovetails with our love of music and the inspiration I've personally taken from so many of the artists that not only inspired us, but that we've gotten to collaborate with as well. So, here's a few quotes to chew on alongside a pint of 60 Minute IPA that have inspired me on my creative journey at Dogfish Head.
"Life is strong and fragile. It's a paradox ... it's both things, like quantum physics: it's a particle and a wave at the same time. It all exists altogether." – Joan Jett
Joan Jett and the Black Hearts was the first concert I ever got to see as a youngster in Western Massachusetts, and she's been a touchstone for me my whole life. I proudly got to interview her recently for a quarterly column I write for the legendary Creem Magazine. This quote is sharpied onto the wall in my office in Dogfish Head, Maine. It's a reminder for me to take inspiration from both the successes and failures that we encountered at Dogfish Head as we shoot for the stars, throw shit at the wall, and go for it in all of our creative endeavors.
You never know when you can take learnings from a failed creative experiment and apply what you learn to a future success. For example, nearly 30 years ago, a local pizza chain asked me if Dogfish Head could brew a green beer for them to have on tap at all their locations on St Patrick's Day. At Dogfish Head, we only brew beers with natural ingredients, so I could not use green food coloring the way some big breweries do for the big holiday week. Instead, we brewed a nice crisp lager and infused it with blue-green algae. It did give the beer a beautiful, vibrant green color, but unfortunately the beer tasted like pond scum. It did not sell well, and we had to retrieve many of the kegs that we sent to the pizza chain locations, and grin and bear it as we stomached drinking the rest of those kegs ourselves alongside our coworkers at our weekly Beer:30 happy hours.
Flash forward to this year in Maine, and I'm proud to have brewed an aquaculture-centric beer with one of our bestest pal's breweries in Maine, Rising Tide Brewing Company, and a culinary influencer whom we've grown to have an awesome relationship with, Brad Leone. This beer, lovingly called Buckingham Red, features both oyster shells and phytoplankton, a very close marine relative of the blue-green algae we brewed with many years ago. Although, now we've taken those learnings and figured out a new way to add the phytoplankton earlier in the process to be a catalyst for yeast health and growth, instead of being a contributor to aromatics if we had added it later in the process as we did when we brewed the beer 30 years ago.
So, to paraphrase Joan in her quote here, both the successes and the failures exist on one continuum, and both can be equally nourishing to inform the next chapter of your creative journey. And who would have thought, when I first saw Joan in concert or when I scribbled her quote on my office wall all those years ago, that Dogfish Head would now be launching a collaboration with her to celebrate the 45th anniversaries of Joan Jett and the Blackhearts’ landmark albums, ‘Bad Reputation’ and ‘I Love Rock ‘N’ Roll’ – talk about a full-circle moment. Check out Jett Black Lager, here!
20 years ago, we got to brew a beer celebrating a huge anniversary for one of my favorite recording artists ever, Miles Davis. This beer called Bitches Brew was for the 40th anniversary of that eponymous album. I got to hang out with Miles' nephew at Electric Lady Studio in New York City, where Miles and his nephew and the rest of the band recorded that album. As I chatted over beers with Miles' nephew, he told me about the time in conversation with his uncle he asked: "Hey Miles, there's so many amazing jazz musicians in the world. How did you become such an icon, how did you become Miles Davis?" He shared back …
"Don't play what's there, play what's not there." – Miles Davis
This quote has inspired us at Dogfish throughout our entire journey. One of our rallying cries is that we collaborate and innovate as coworkers because the status quo sucks. We obviously need to know our competitive environment to understand what other beers are out in the marketplace from other commercial breweries, big and small. At Dogfish Head, we work really hard to not copy what other breweries are doing, but rather to go on our own exploration of goodness.
In the case of the Miles Davis Bitches Brew beer, we took the creative inspiration from the central fusion component of the album as an iconic blend of both rock and roll and jazz, with many references to African music and artistry, woven throughout the album. For our Bitches Brew recipe, as an homage, we added Tej, which is African honey, and black patent barley to represent the fusion of mead and beer expressed in the recipe. And we also added some beautiful brown sugar from the island of Mauritius off the coast of Africa. I don't believe this combination of ingredients was ever combined in a commercial recipe before, but it was a huge hit, and we believe that Miles was smiling down on us as brewers as we ideated on this recipe together back in the day.
Probably our most existentially rewarding and enduring collaborations with an external artist at Dogfish Head has been with the Grateful Dead. We first brewed a beer in collaboration with the band over a decade ago and now, two of the beers we brew year-round with the Grateful Dead are among our fastest growing and bestselling beers we've ever brewed, Dogfish Head’s Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale and Dogfish Head’s Grateful Dead Citrus Daydream Lager.
"The process of selecting the tone on the guitar is an aesthetic process like any other, so you try a lot of different things." – Jerry Garcia
This perspective is very similar to how we have defined and amplified the tone of the Dogfish Head brand over nearly 32 years. When Dogfish Head opened as the smallest brewery in the country, I wrote all the menus and recipes myself and wrote the print ads for the local papers and small beer magazines we could afford to advertise in back in those days. And my wife and co-founder Mariah established the Dogfish website and Dogfish Head’s social channels and grew our social following to over a million followers. If I represented the analog voice and face of Dogfish Head through all these years, Mariah certainly represented the digital voice of our brand.
A brand's voice is very much similar to finding a unique and ownable tone on a guitar the way Jerry Garcia so successfully had. If I had to summarize the tone of the Dogfish Head brand, it would be: creatively insatiable, fearless while simultaneously being careful about prioritizing what our customers want to see us produce and share with them, irreverent yet professional at the same time. We do see the brewer's art as a gorgeous blend of both alchemy and science. We take what we make as brewers and distillers at Dogfish Head very seriously, but we don't take ourselves too seriously, and we want the tone of our brand to reflect that balance.
-Sam