Daydream Playbook Entry #9

“Experimental Brewing” a selection (page 118) from Off-Centered Leadership: The Dogfish Head Guide to Motivation, Collaboration & Smart Growth, in which Sam talks about the importance of coworker culture and our competitive experimental small-batch brewing program.

“For any company, retaining your best coworkers needs to be a top priority. These are the folks you’re relying on to perpetuate the values of your culture. They are the ones at every level of the org chart who are pulling the culture forward side by side with the leadership team, not pushing against it. One of the most fun and on-culture ways we identify talent is with our experimental small-batch brewing program.

To bring more breadth and depth to the creative pool from which we draw innovation, we developed a program that allows anybody in the company, from dishwasher to accountant, to come up with an idea for a beer. If the person is able to involve three or four other coworkers, one of whom has home brewing experience so they’re not working entirely in the dark, Dogfish Head will provide all the ingredients they need to brew a 10-gallon batch that they share with their coworkers at our all-staff happy hour in the tasting room on Fridays at 4:30, which we refer to as Beer:Thirty.  We have created a form for all the coworkers to fill out as they judge a sampling of the beer. This feedback gives us each a richer experience of beer appreciation and provides a sensory analysis of the beer.  Afterward, the head of the small-batch brewing program tallies up the scores and analyzes the comments. Every quarter we pick a winning recipe and then that team gets to go to the pub in Rehoboth and brew a 120-gallon batch.  They get the pride of selling a beer they thought of and produced. The best of those four quarterly winners gets an expense-paid weekend trip to go sight-seeing and visit Birreria, the Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich brewpub project Dogfish Head is involved with in New York City.”