Rue adds, “We try to be subtle in our approach, we tell people what’s in our beers, we try not to make ourselves out to be an extreme brewery. I sort of hate that term.”
Arthur sums up what might be the credo of the aspiring, third-wave brewer: “The attitude is Why can’t we? Why shouldn’t we? I suppose, in a very American Manifest Destiny kind of way. Who’s telling me I shouldn’t do that? My accountant? No, nobody is, and that’s a pretty big deal.”
Inspirational Brewers
Sam Calagione
Dogfish Head Craft Brewery
Milton, DE
Joe Short
Short’s Brewing Co.
Bellaire, MI
Three years ago, Joe Short and his fiancé drove from northern Michigan to Delaware on a mission to meet Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery. The couple was two years into running his brewpub, Short’s Brewing Co., coping with a remote location, long hours and tight cash flow.
“I’d get up in the morning and make soup for the deli,” Short recalls, “then I’d get the till set for the pub, go downstairs and mash in my first brew, then between running downstairs to hit the pump, I’d be upstairs on the computer trying to balance QuickBooks―it took us two years to get that straight.”
“Leah and I were running the pub like madness, nearly killing ourselves,” he says. “I’d heard that our story was sort of parallel to Sam’s. We had to know, was it always going to be that way, was it going to get better? I wanted some confirmation from someone who had been down that road.”
They drove to the Dogfish plant in Milton and Short walked in with a case of his beer. “I said to the lady ‘I drove all the way from Michigan, and I’d like to talk to Sam, please.’”
The three sat down in the Dogfish conference room to open a couple of beers and talk about life as a brewery owner. Calagione was reassuring. “I thought, it sounds like this guy’s a lot further along than he thinks he is,” he recalls. “I saw his stuff on line and then he brought his beers and shared them with us. I saw a lot of similarities: particularly I saw someone who takes beer seriously and the creative opportunity to express yourself artistically through beer, without taking himself too seriously.”
There are certainly parallels in the “not too seriously” department. Calagione has toured with his brewmaster as the Pain Relievaz, “the world’s first (and probably only) beer-geek hip-hop ensemble,” and conducted beer tastings in the persona of Woody Guthrie. Short celebrated the release of his bottled Huma Lupa Licious IPA in 2007 by filming his nephews as dressed Huma Lupas, in an homage to Willy Wonka’s Oompa Loompas.
