Sam Calagione - Extreme Brewing: An Enthusiasts Guide to Brewing Craft Beer at Home

AN ENTHUSIASTS GUIDE TO

BREWING CRAFT BEER
AT HOME

SAM CALAGIONE

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED to all of the amazing brewers Im fortunate to work with at Dogfish Head, especially Andy Tveekrem, Bryan Selders, and Mike Gerhart. Your dedication and passion for the craft of brewing inspires me every day.

by Ken Wells

I FIRST STUMBLED UPON Sam Calagiones name a little more than three years ago when I began to do nascent research for the book that would become Travels with Barley: A Journey through Beer Culture in America. At that point, all I knew was that I had a publisher willing to send me cross-country to drink beer on an expense account and write about it. I wasnt a beer geek; I was an enthusiastic amateur about to set out on the pilgrimage of a lifetime. My job was to illuminate beer culture in America and fill in the 300 or so pages expected of me in some clever fashion. A guy wouldnt want to blow such a great assignment, and I was suddenly desperate to hook up with clever brewers who could help me plot my route down Americas river of beer.

I hadnt yet encountered the term extreme beer, but as soon as I heard of Sam and his brewing philosophy, he didnt strike me as your everyday brewer. Id learned of the Midas Touch project, in which Sam had teamed up with a biochemical-archaeologist from the University of Pennsylvania Museum to re-create a beer whose recipe had been reverse-engineered from dregs found in drinking vessels at the bottom of a 2,700-year-old royal tomb in Turkey. (Some think the gold-laden tomb forms the basis of the King Midas legend, hence the beer was named in homage of the monarch who turned everything he touched to gold.) It started as a one-off project, the beer to be served at a celebration of the mythical kings birthday, but Sam crafted the brew with such verve that it soon became a commercial success.

MY FIRST THOUGHT was that brewers who painstakingly re-created these historical beers might form a chapter in my book. But after talking to Sam on the phone, I got an inkling that making beers from recipes gleaned from the tombs of dead kings was but a subset of a far more interesting phenomenon. Sam, being the gregarious soul that he is, immediately invited me down to his Dogfish Head Craft Brewery to talk about Midas Touch and other projects he was brewing up.

Sam was a lucky call, as he turned out to be one of the cannier and more inventive practitioners of extreme beer, a commitment by the gonzo element of the craft brew crowd to take beer where its never been before. (Well, OK, those monks in Belgium have taken beer to some pretty curious places over the ages, but bear with me.) The relevant point is that extreme beer is equal parts theater and cutting-edge brewing, but its also about bringing energy, excitement, and edge back to one of mans oldest organized endeavors. Meanwhile, for the experimentally minded beer consumer (and I am now avidly one of those) it has brought a raft of deliriously interesting and tasty beers to the market. And for the experimentally inclined homebrewer, well, extreme beer is the mountain you must climb. And this books for you.

A short time after our first meeting, Sam took me on a tour of the Dogfish Head skunk works. He had in his brew tanks at the time an experimental batch that he knew I, as a recent self-declared hopshead, would be intrigued by: a seriously huge India Pale Ale (IPA) with an International Bittering Unit (IBU) rating way off the charts and an alcohol by volume (ABV) level of about 19 percentand the beer wasnt yet done fermenting! He called it 120 Minute IPA because, though brewers traditionally add their hops at the beginning and end of the boil, Sam had come up with a process by which he continuously hopped the beer for a 120 minutes using a proprietary robotic-pneumatic gizmo hed invented called Sir Hops Alot. The first robo-hopper, in fact, was one of those goofy, circa-1978 electrified vibrating football games, canted at an angle and rigged up with a five-gallon bucket of pelletized hops over the boil kettle. The contraption kept shorting out, so Sam had to design a Sir Hops Alot as a more permanent fix. Of course, it turned out there was good brewing intuition to this madness: the continuous hopping infuses the beer with delicious hoppy flavors while tempering its bitterness.

We sampled the 120 Minute right out of the tanks and I realized this was not a beer to to sip while watching a baseball game (Drink more than one, and youll be asleep by the fourth inning). But it was a wildly interesting IPA (and, in fact, the strongest of its style in the world) and it would make for great small talk in my next assemblage of beer geeks. (Heck, even the Bud Light minions I interviewed for my book would declare are you serious? when Id tell them about 120 Minute being finally bottled at 18 percent ABV, more than four times stronger than their, uh, under-achieving favorite beer.) I recall pressing Sam to explain to me how he and other like-minded brewers were achieving these astonishing alcohol levels in beer when for centuries, brewers had found it impossible, outside of distilling it, to get brews much up above 15 percent ABV. Sam coyly demurred, saying only that hed used several pitches of proprietary yeast strains. And though he wouldnt say what the strains were, he quipped: If you looked at the yeast under a microscope, youd see lots of leather skirts, whips, and chains. Somehow, Ive never been able to think of beer yeast in the same way after that quote.

SAM, OF COURSE, wasnt quite done experimenting with hops on the extreme beer frontier. I later caught up with him at the Blind Tiger, a well-known Manhattan craft brew bar, where he debuted what appeared to me to be the worlds first commercialhops bonga contraption stuffed with fresh leaf hops that took hopping to another level by infusing hops between the tap and the pint glass.

Sam, being Sam, had his own name for this device: an Organoleptic Hops Transducer, aka Randall the Enamel Animal. To date, about 300 Randalls have been pressed into service around the country in the name of sublime hoppiness. I didnt think Sam could one-up Randall that night but he actually did, taking the stage with his two-person hip-hop (or would that be hop-hip?) group the Pain Relievaz and, powered by some Randall-infused 90 Minute, started rapping about beer. (If youre ever around Sam, you have to get him to do I Got Busy with an A-B Salesgirl.)

Now, as for this book, Extreme Brewing: An Enthusiasts Guide to Brewing Craft Beer at Home, theres nothing particularly dangerous about it if you use it according to Sams instructions. Just dont try to drink what you make in one night. My sense is that this is as much a book for beginning brewers as it is for those whove already brewed a few (or many) batches and would like to move on from making the same old amber ales. Sams not joking about the title. In this book are recipes (and step-by-step brewing instructions) for beers with names like Dark Star Licorice Stout, Spirulager, and Blood Orange Hefeweizen. As a bonus, Sam also throws in some recipes for beers from his brewery including his 60-Minute IPA (which in my humble personal opinion is one of, if not the, best-balanced IPAs on the planet). Oh, and by the way, Sam (a man with far too many talents) also turns out to be an extremely able writer and the book is filled with helpful helpings of beer history, lore, and inside dope on the extreme beer movement.