The Way I Work: Dogfish Head's Sam Calagione

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As the big breweries have tried to muscle their way into our market, our strategy has been to continue to have a dialogue with beer enthusiasts and, frankly, to out these big breweries -- to let consumers know that Blue Moon isn't two guys in a garage at the end of your block. It's Coors. I'm not knocking Blue Moon. It's great to have it out there, because it allows Coors drinkers to take baby steps outside of their light-lager comfort zones.

On my beer-evangelist days, I try to answer e-mails by iPhone. If I'm at a beer event, I take pictures to send to Mariah, and she puts them on Facebook.

I used to bring my kids, Sammy and Grier, with me on the road when they were really young -- they're in fourth and second grade next year. That stopped after a beer festival in Philly. My son, Sammy, who at the time was maybe 5 years old, was behind the booth with me, helping pour beer. I got to talking with someone, and I lost him for a second. When I found him, he was playing with a toy dinosaur in a puddle of beer. I could imagine him on a psychiatrist's couch at 21: "It all started when my dad abandoned me at a beer festival..."

Now they stay with Mariah. God bless her, she definitely does the majority of the parenting. But we have a deal that I don't do any trips in the summer that take me out of Delaware overnight. I sleep in my bed every night in July and August.

My favorite days are when I actually get to brew. The first year we were open, I brewed more than 300 batches of beer myself. Now, I do that about six or eight days a year, when we're coming up with new beers. Those almost always start at the old hand-valved, five-barrel system at our brewpub in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. I work with Bryan Selders, my lead brewer. Basically, I'll send him a paragraph that says something like, "This dude sent me samples of this exotic Paraguayan wood. The best base beer to use it in would be a dark-brown ale that's low in hops but relatively high in alcohol, so that the alcohol will act as a solvent and strip the oils off the wood." From that description, Bryan will source a bunch of hops and barley; we'll talk about the volumes and ratios, then we'll brew a test batch.

Out of respect for Bryan's greater technical skills, I gladly do the menial tasks, such as mashing in the barley and cleaning the tanks, while he directs temperature changes and hooks up the pumps. We serve the experimental batches at the restaurant. Instead of us paying for a focus group, our regulars pay us to buy a pint and say, "This sucks" or "It's good." Usually, we know if a beer is working within a month of putting it on tap. If it is, we'll take the five-barrel recipe we did at the pub and extrapolate it up to a hundred barrels for our production brewery.

Whether I'm brewing or at the office, at 5:15 or 5:30 each day -- no matter what I'm doing -- I just walk away from it and go home.

Six or seven years ago, I'd get a call from Mariah saying, "Are you coming home for dinner or not?" If the answer was not, that night might go until 9 or midnight -- it didn't really matter. Those days, if some dude didn't show up, I'd be on the bottling line or the guy running the labeler. But my wife knows there's no excuse for me not coming home for dinner anymore. She's like, "Don't tell me you have to work on the bottling line. There are eight people there who can do that better than you can. You'd better get your ass home, spend some time with the kids." I'm glad she does that.

We eat out for dinner more than your average family, because we try to visit the accounts that support our brewery. I try not to be an aggressive salesperson. Occasionally, if I see people drinking Dogfish Head, I offer to buy them their beer and thank them. But I also make sure I check in with the manager and say, "Hey, are you getting the seasonal beers? Are you getting good service from your distributor? Do you need anything from us? Coasters, pint glasses? Do you want to invite your staff out to our brewery? We'd love to show them how we make our beer and what makes it special."

Usually, we put the kids upstairs at 8. By the time I'm done reading to them, it's 8:30. I'll start my bath around then. Once in a while, I come down and watch Entourage or Flight of the Conchords with Mariah while she's typing away at her computer, posting updates on Facebook and Dogfish.com. But usually, after I take a bath, I read until 10:30 or 11. Sometimes, it's culinary or wine magazines. I have a little notebook next to my bed, and if something I'm reading inspires me, I'll jot down some notes. For the last half-hour, I'll read some fiction just to take my mind off of work. I just finished David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. It took two months out of my life, but in a good way.

I obsessively notch the pages, even when I'm reading fiction. If it's notched up and folded back, it means it's an actual idea that applies to Dogfish. If it's notched down, it's more about the feeling -- part of what's written reflects our off-centered philosophy. Every word that I read, I filter through this Dogfish prism. Every thought that I have in some way pertains to Dogfish. It's kind of sick in a way -- that Dogfish is that prevalent in my thought patterns. But after 5:30, I stop focusing on the nuts and bolts of the business and let my mind wander to the more fun and creative parts. I feel like that's pretty healthy.

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