Dogfish Head Brewery Pilgimage

A little while back we headed out to Delaware to visit one of our favorite breweries, Dogfish Head. They were recently profiled in an excellent article about the founder Sam Calagione in New Yorker Magazine.

Their slogan is "Off Centered Beers for Off Centered People. As you can imagine, the Dogfish beers are odd, potent, unique and often delicious. They use more hops per barrel than any other brewery in the world. And they often use unorthodox ingredients in their beers such as saffron, cocoa nibs, a variety of grapes, annatto (fragrant tree seeds), chrysanthemum flowers, figs...

One of Beth's favorites DFH concoction is Heaven & Hell. It's an insane black & tan you make yourself with 18+% World Wide Stout and 20% 120 Minute IPA. It packs a punch in many different ways...yum....





A piece of brewing history!

Sir Hops Alot is the quirky brainchild of Sam Calagione.

"Typically, brewers only add hops during two points of the brewing process - once in the beginning to impart flavor and bitterness and then again at the end for aroma. Once upon a time, Sam was watching a cooking show and the chef was preparing soup. The chef on the show emphasized the importance of slowly and continuously adding the pepper throughout the cooking process. He said that continuously peppering the soup would yield better flavor than just adding it all at once.

And then a light bulb went off in Sam’s head … instead of adding the hops all at once, why not try to continuously hop the beer over a set period of time? This is how the 60 minute ale was born. The first time Sam brewed 60 Minute IPA he used an old vibrating tabletop football game that he found at a garage sale. He put the game over the brew kettle and covered the surface with hops. The little plastic football players shook and spun their way down the field, continuously distributing hops into the kettle over a 60 minute time period.

The old plastic game from the 80’s didn't last very long for the continuous hopping process. So Sam decided to build his own apparatus to do the job. The first model was SIR HOPS A LOT."

When they moved from a 50-bbl brewhouse to a 100-bbl brewhouse, Sir Hops Alot was retired and was replaced by the bigger and badder Sofa King Hoppy.

Dem nutty DogFish peeps built a monster wood tank from a crazy bullet proof Panamanian wood.

"Now nestled in the High-Gravity Cellars at our Milton, Delaware brewery are three great, big wooden tanks. Two of the 300-bbl tanks are made with White American Oak, the third is made from Palo Santo wood (that's the one in the foreground of the photo).

All three of the tanks were build on-site by our friends at Arrow Tank in Buffalo, NY. Each one holds 300-barrels of beer (that's 600 kegs or 9300 gallons). The Palo tank is for conditioning Palo Santo Marron. The oak tanks will be conditioning Immort Ale, Burton Baton, Red & White, 120 Minute IPA, World Wide Stout, Fort, and Olde School Barleywine.

Sound cool? We put together a short movie about the Palo wood tank project, click here to watch."

thirsty yet?