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Jay R. Brooks on Beer

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Dogfish Head Bitches Brew Honors Miles Davis

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Dogfish Head Craft Brewery today announced the release of Bitches Brew to commemorate the original release of the milestone jazz album, Bitches Brew, by jazz legend Miles Davis.

The new beer by Dogfish Head is described as “a bold, dark beer that’s a fusion of three threads imperial stout and one thread honey beer with gesho root, a gustatory analog to Miles’ masterpiece.” It also features the “the album’s iconic artwork, created by the late Mati Klarwein, on its label, Dogfish Head’s Bitches Brew will be unveiled at Savor, An American Craft Beer & Food Experience tonight at the National Building Museum, Washington DC. The beer will be bottled in 750ml bottles and released through Dogfish’s distribution network in late August.

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From the press release:

The newly created ale is designed, according to Dogfish founder and president Sam Calagione, “as the ultimate partner for chili or spicy curry chicken” and best enjoyed “sipped cool, not cold, from a snifter or red wine glass while listening to the Bitches Brew album.”

Calagione was drawn to the alchemical spirits in Bitches Brew right out of college, acquiring a copy of the album “within months of the first time I brewed a batch of homebrew in my apartment in New York City.  I listened to it when I was writing my Dogfish business plan.  I wanted Dogfish Head to be a maniacally inventive and creative brewery, analog beer for the digital age.  You could say that my dream was to have Dogfish Head, in some small way, stand for the same thing in the beer world that Bitches Brew stands for in the jazz world.  You can imagine how excited we are to be doing this project 17 years after I wrote that business plan.”

“There’s a spirit of innovation, of creativity and individuality, that’s at the core of Miles’ music,” said Adam Block, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Legacy Recordings.  “Sam and Dogfish Head approach their art from the same place and consequently the marriage is an easy and cool one.”

Later this year, on August 31, an anniversary edition of the recording — two, actually: a Legacy Edition and a deluxe Collector’s Edition — will be released on CD.

Drinking Life & Limb

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You probably remember the big news back in August when Dogfish Head and Sierra Nevada announced they’d be doing not one, but two collaboration beers. The main one is called Life & Limb, while the second is Limb & Life, a small beer made from the second runnings of Life & Limb.

To launch the new collaboration, a beer dinner was held last Sunday at Ana Mandara in San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf. Both Sam Calagione, from Dogfish Head and Ken Grossman, from Sierra Nevada were on hand for the dinner.

Hosts Ken Grossman & Sam Calagione
Ken Grossman and Sam Calagione

Limb & Life, the draft-only “Imperial small beer,” was served with hors d’oeuvres while Ken and Sam talked about their collaboration together.

The five-course meal had two beers paired with each dish, one from each brewery. We started with Limb & Life and then Life & Limb was served as the last beer of the evening, with dessert. In addition, at the end of the night we finagled a bottle of Life & Limb to compare with the draft version. Personally, I preferred the bottle. Bottle-conditioning gave it a richer mouthfeel and added complexity.

I was fortunate to sit with Sam and Ken for the dinner, as they discussed the project. While Sam has done many collaborations with both domestic and foreign breweries over the years, this was Sierra Nevada’s first one. If you can find a copy of All About Beer magazine from around this time last year, you can read my feature story on collaboration beers. I love the growing trend of collaboration beers, especially when, like this one, some thought is put into it. This makes the results more meaningful, and not simply a marketing effort. Everything about it was well done, especially the artwork for the label, done by a children’s book illustrator.

Life & Limb label artwork

Below is a slideshow of the Life & Limb beer dinner. This Flickr gallery is best viewed in full screen. To view it that way, after clicking on the arrow in the center to start the slideshow, click on the button on the bottom right with the four arrows pointing outward on it, to see the photos in glorious full screen. Once in full screen slideshow mode, click on “Show Info” to identify each photo.

Sam Calagione Uncorked

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My “Uncorked” interview with Sam Calagione, from the Dogfish Head Brewery, is in today’s San Francisco Chronicle. I’m quite pleased with how it turned out. If you’re unfamiliar with the Uncorked series in the San Francisco Chronicle, they’ve been doing them for some time now, and it’s an interview that begins with some expository background information. They’re meant to be fun and a little thought provoking, with at least a few quirky, off-the-wall questions thrown in for good measure. I read a number of them in preparing my own questions, so I could get the tone right. So when I came up with my questions for Sam, I figured ask far more than I needed so that I could pick and choose the best ones. Sam, of course, is no stranger to public speaking and so made the process much easier. The hard part was choosing what to include and what to leave out. So here are a few more questions and answers from the original interview that I didn’t have the room to include in the Chronicle article.

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What’s your favorite style of beer for spring?

I would have to say, just IPA. In general, whether it’s a big imperial IPA or a regular one. Those grassy, fruity, estery characters of an IPA remind me of the greening of the trees and the greening of the grass and just nature coming back to life.

Why should everybody in America be drinking craft beer?

Because Americans are starting to trade up and appreciate the finer things and recognizing that instead of a soul-killing SUV or vacation house, that they can spend $10 and get the world’s best beer. The craft beer renaissance is truly an affordable connoisseurship and compared to wine, where the world’s best bottles are going to cost hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars, anybody in America can buy the world’s best beers. And because every American lives within ten miles of their local brewery, it’s not only an affordable connoisseurship but it’s an accessible world, too.

As an Italian-American, what do you think of the recent Italian beer renaissance?

It’s beautiful. It’s just indicative of a culture that embraces the finer things, whether it’s wine, beer or culinary. They got their priorities right over there. It’s about living well and spending time with loved ones and friends around a table full of great food and drink. I think it’s a wonderful sign of the craft brewing renaissance to watch it landing in other cultures that had traditionally been more associated with wine.

Why Did You Choose Delaware?

To be perfectly honest, by the time I got my shit together and raised the money I needed to start it, there were only eight states left in America that didn’t have a brewery. And I thought it would be great marketing cache to be the first brewery in a state and the first brewery in the first state sounded good. My wife, Mariah, who runs the company with me was born and raised in Delaware. So I’d go down and visit her in the summer, and living right on the Atlantic beach seemed pretty cool. I love it, we’re two hours from D.C., Baltimore and Philly, and it’s a great place to live and have a brewery.

What is a Randall?

A Randall is an organicalyptic hop-inducing module. Basically it was an invention we came up with for an east coast vs. west coast beer event, where Russian River Brewing, and some others, brought their beers and at the end of the day the east coast brewers beat the west coast brewers for the best hoppy beers in the country. We’ve now made 300 Randalls, and they’re being used in breweries all around the world. Basically, it’s a glorified, customized pool filter that we load with whole leaf hops and the beer acts as a solvent and strips the oils off the hop leaves and pour them in your glass. It’s just a great tool to educate the consumer on what hops does to beer. Not many consumers see hops changing their beer at the point where they’re actually drinking it, so it’s been a neat educational tool for us.

Do you take a certain pride when brewer’s say about their own beers, “No Randall Required?”

I actually do. Basically, to me, it sounds like insecurity, like maybe they should start thinking about using a Randall.

You’ve done a couple of Rap CDs, the Pain Relievez, with your head brewer Bryan Selders, and on a few songs you taunt West Coast brewers. Are you worried about any reprisals while you’re in town, on their turf, so to speak?

I hope they don’t Tupac my Biggie. It’s all done in good fun and we love those guys. But boy, I hope they bring out a response album, but I don’t think they have the guts or the rhythm.

What did you drink last night?

About 10-12 beers, to be perfectly honest. I was with my good friends that own breweries from around the country and we collectively brewed this gueuze-style beer called Isabelle Proximus. So we ended the night with that, but we enjoyed each others’ beers in all the courses that led up to that. That project is indicative of how altruistic and mutually supportive the craft brewing industry is. It’s an amazingly unique community where we teach each other what we know for the greater good and try and help each other, recognizing that collectively 1450 breweries in America have less than a 5 percent share and three giant ones have over an 80 percent share, but the craft beer [segment] is where the growth is at and it shows that the consumer now understands and appreciates what the small breweries in America are doing.
 
The rest of the interview can be read in today’s San Francisco Chronicle (page F-3) or online at SFGate.com.