Friday night was a special night for beer lovers in Asheville. Sam Calagione, the founder of Dogfish Head brewers in Delaware and one of the biggest rock stars in the craft brewing world, came to visit for the weekend. Bruisin’ Ales, the best beer store in town, brought Calagione to town and both deserve a big thank you.
To have Calagione come for a weekend and show love for Asheville’s amazing beer scene says just that – Asheville has an amazing microbrewing and homebrewing community. It’s an affirmation. To have a local beer store that would go after bringing someone of Calagione’s reputation to town is just great, imho.
Calagione signed autographs, posed for pix like the one above shot by Julie of Bruisin’ Ales (that’s Jason of Pisgah Brewing at left, with Sam), and chatted about beer. He shook everyone’s hand, remembered everyone’s name, and said he was impressed by what Asheville’s got going on.
If you want to know more about Calagione, and about the history of beer in general, read this amazing New Yorker magazine profile. Here’s just a little taste:
Calagione is thirty-nine. That day, as on most days, he was wearing flip-flops, cargo pants, and a threadbare T-shirt, and looked about as concerned with liquidity as the customers bellied up at the brewery’s bar, drinking free samples. When tour groups visit Dogfish, they’re greeted by a quote on the wall from Emerson’s essay on self-reliance: “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist,” it begins. “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” Calagione doesn’t seem, at first, to fit this cantankerous creed. His nonconformity is of an agreeable sort: brewing beer, keeping his own hours, living by the shore with his high-school sweetheart and their two children. For a while after college, he did some modelling, and he still looks as if he belonged in, well, a Budweiser commercial. He has a surfer’s loose, long-muscled frame and perpetual tan. His chiselled features are set in a squarish head and topped by a thick black ruff. When he talks, his lips twist slightly to the side and his voice comes out low and woolly, like a crooner’s at a speakeasy.
Dogfish is something of a mascot for this unruly movement. In the thirteen years since Calagione founded the brewery, it has gone from being the smallest in the country to the thirty-eighth largest. Calagione makes more beer with at least ten per cent alcohol than any other brewer, and his odd ingredients are often drawn from ancient or obscure beer traditions. The typical Dogfish ale is made with about four times as much grain as an industrial beer (hence its high alcohol content) and about twenty times as much hops (hence its bitterness). It is to Budweiser what a bouillabaisse is to fish stock.
“We are trying to explore the outer edges of what beer can be,” Calagione says.