Dogfish Head brewery is the brainchild of Sam Calagione, known among enthusiasts as an easy-going, Willy Wonka type, because (1) he really is easy going, and (2) every beer he makes has a story, at least one wacky ingredient and/or an unusual method of production. Take, for instance, Verdi Verdi Good, sold on draft in 2005. The damn thing was green. Green. Not from artificial coloring, but from spirulina, a blue-green algae worked into the brewing process.
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The wackiness — that’s the Dogfish Hallmark. “Off-centered ales for off-centered people”, they say. Though they weren’t the first to get into the modern craft-brew game (that distinction belongs to Anchor Brewing, which, in 1965, was the only craft brewery in the United States), they helped pave the way for the modern craft-brew revolution. Founded in 1995, the brewery quickly made a name for itself by exploring the entire culinary landscape to choose their ingredients — be they pickles, bacon, oyster or wort caramelized over hot rocks. Their raison d’etre (both the French phrase and the Dogfish beer of the same name) is a slap in the face to the Bavarian Reinheitsgebot, a purity law from 1516 that says that beer can only contain water, barley and hops.
Though Dogfish Head currently produces 33 beers, 65 percent of their sales come from their five “continuously hopped” IPAs — and it’s reasonable to estimate that a large portion of that comes from two of the five, the 60 Minute and the 90 Minute.
There’s only one way to drink a line of anything, and that’s one after the other, in small quantities; then, once you finish the business, you come back to the favorites and get properly pissed.
If you live in — ready? — AZ, CA, CO, CT, DC, DE, FL, GA, IL, KY, MA, MD, ME, MI, NC, NH, NJ, NV, NY, OH, OR, PA, SC, TX, VA, VT, or WA, you’ve probably seen Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA chilling out on the shelves of at least one local liquor store or gas station. It currently holds a “world class” rating of 95 on Beeradvocate.com; Esquire called it “perhaps the best IPA in America”. Sam first brewed it in 2001, when, as the story goes, he was watching a cooking show where the chef talked about the benefits of adding tiny pinches of pepper to a recipe throughout the entire simmering process instead of dumping it all in at once. What if I do that with hops? he thought. So he went to the Salvation Army (“where I buy my flannel shirts”), bought a vibrating football game, drilled a hole in a plastic bucket, and used two-by-fours to set the whole thing up over a kettle. As the game vibrated, the hops dropped through the hole in the bucket and into the kettle. And so the continuous hopping process was born.
Although it didn’t catch on overnight (distributors in Connecticut and Virginia sent it back), the 90 Minute IPA was popular enough for Sam to try a variation. Instead of adding the hops over a 90-minute period (hence the name), Sam tried adding them over 60 minutes. The experiment gave rise to the 60 Minute IPA. Interestingly enough, in addition to being named for their hopping process, the 60 contains 6.0 percent ABV and 60 IBUs (International Bitterness Units), while the 90 contains 9.0 percent ABV and 90 IBUs.
