Two years after scaling back distribution from those states, Dogfish Head will begin hunting for distribution partners and regional sales managers in those four states. “We’re hoping to be back into those four states before the end of 2013,” founder Sam Calagione said in a video posted to the brewery’s YouTube channel.

We’re talking about breweries that have pushed the alcohol content of beer past 20 percent by volume, through the process of fermentation alone.

Just as enriching uranium 235 to build an atom bomb requires a considerable degree of technological prowess, so does coaxing yeast into frenzied acts of metabolism that nature never intended.

Both accomplishments carry a heightened degree of responsibility. Nuclear weapons could cause mayhem if they fell into the hands of terrorists. And super strong beers could also provoke mischief if unsuspecting drinkers downed them at the same rate they would a Bud or Miller. These leviathans of the malt beverage world have to be packaged, priced and marketed differently from normal beers. Drinkers have to be educated to enjoy them a few ounces at a time, the way they would an after-dinner shot of some fine brandy.

But there is one key difference: there are probably more nations with nuclear weapons than there are breweries that have surpassed the 20 percent ABV mark.

Alcohol is a byproduct of yeast’s digestion of sugar, and yeast can no more live in their own waste product than human beings could thrive in a room filled with carbon dioxide. The average brewer’s yeast cannot survive in a concentration of much more than 10 percent alcohol, states Neva Parker, lab manager for White Labs, a leading provider of yeast to craft brewers. At higher levels, reproduction halts, followed by failure of other metabolic functions. In the pre-scientific era, she doubts that even the most potent barley wines and doppelbocks measured more than 10-12 percent alcohol. Modern science, stresses Parker, can isolate and propagate strains that have a high tolerance for alcohol, and establish a brewing regimen to coax these yeasts into giving their all. But it’s a labor-intensive process requiring skill and patience.

Nowhere Beer

Boston Beer Co. has crossed the 20 percent threshold six times, once with Samuel Adams Millennium (a one-shot brand released in 2000) and four additional times with the 2002, 2003, 2005 and 2007 vintages of Samuel Adams Utopias. The 2007 release, measuring 25.6 percent ABV, earned a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records for the world’s strongest commercially available beer.

Any given cohort coming through the ranks together―learning the craft, launching a new business, testing the economy―has strong connections based on having faced similar challenges at the same time. But there are also strong ties established between craft brewers who enter the field at different times, as one generation speaks to another.

We invited three young but well-established brewers to sit down with three up-and-coming craft brewers and listened in on the three conversations: over lunch, over pizza, and―implausibly― over morning coffee. Here are brief glimpses of where craft brewing is now, and suggestions as to where it might be headed.

Brewing is Business and Passion

Tomme Arthur

Port Brewing Co./Lost Abbey
San Marcos, CA

Patrick Rue

The Bruery
Placentia, CA

Considering its propensity for setting trends, Southern California was surprisingly slow to embrace craft beer. Tomme Arthur was there at the beginning of the “overnight sensation,” beginning his brewing career with Pizza Port in Solana Beach in 1996.

“In the mid-nineties, it was a big turning point in San Diego,” he recalls, “because Ballast Point opened up, AleSmith opened up, Stone opened up, and we started to see in our environment, in San Diego, a real shift from lots of other people’s beer in our town to locally-produced beer in our town. And not only in town―in the case of Stone, when they started bottling their beer, and they became the first San Diego brewer to ship beer out of town, on a measurable basis.”

Fast forward to 2008. San Diego has a nationally-recognized beer culture, prominent enough to have hosted the annual conference of craft brewers twice in a four-year period. Craft brewing has a presence further north, in the greater Los Angeles area, where Patrick Rue is opening The Bruery. Like Port Brewing and the Lost Abbey in San Diego, where Arthur now brews, The Bruery focuses on the highest niche of the already high-end craft beer market. In the last six months, Rue’s bottled beer has found distribution in eight states.

This recent trend of collaboration beers represents the next logical step in building relationships that brewers began thirty years ago at the dawn of modern craft brewing. Since then, an unprecedented sharing of knowledge and resources has led to an industry mature beyond its years. This is arguably the reason that American craft beer has built its excellent reputation in such a short time, and also why collaboration beers feel like such a natural extension of that success.

Of course, since trade guilds began in the United States, shortly after the start of the Civil War, brewers have been sharing technical information and basic advancements in brewing techniques. But today’s craft brewers have gone further. The kind of assistance they gave one another—early on and continuing through the present day—was unequivocal and without reservation.

When all the small breweries combined brewed such a tiny fraction of the total beer sold, nobody worried about market share, competition or trade secrets. Brewers in the craft industry were simply very open with one another, freely offering each other help, and freely asking for it, too, in a way that earlier generations and larger businesses wouldn’t dream of doing.

As several brewers noted, many early brewers came from a homebrewing background, and took their hobby and “went pro” at a time when there were few books available and hardly any readily available body of knowledge. Most brewers learned their craft in the kitchen, not in a formal school setting. As a result, brewers were already used to turning to other homebrew club members or on forums to fill in gaps in their knowledge.

But a curious thing happened once the size and number of small brewers increased and their market share grew bigger, too. Those close relationships endured as did their willingness to share, as brewers eschewed conventional business thinking and continued to help each other as often as needed. You’d be hard-pressed to find another business where people don’t protect their most valuable trade secrets and operational knowledge. Most industries employ corporate espionage to find out their competitors’ secrets and the threat of lawsuits to keep their own employees from defecting and taking their institutional knowledge with them to a competing firm.

You might be tempted to think that so cavalier an attitude could doom such businesses to failure or, at the very least, to not staying ahead of their competition. By any measure, however, you’d be deeply wrong. It may be counter-intuitive, to say the least, but by and large the breweries that have been the most open and helpful have also been the most successful.

By contrast, in countries where the converse is true—England, Germany, New Zealand, for example—the number of breweries is in decline and innovation is often in short supply. In England and Germany, where some of the richest brewing traditions took flower, a lack of cooperation is helping to bring about a rash of brewery closings, mergers and stagnation. In New Zealand’s craft beer scene, which actually began around the same time as America’s, a lack of openness and community cooperation has led to quality control issues and difficulty winning over consumers. In such climates, sharing recipes and providing other personal assistance with one another is not something brewers are interested in doing, and in many cases even fear their business could suffer as a result.

But what’s missing are the context and analysis that would provide narrative structure. One problem is the research: Mittelman relied heavily on secondary materials. That’s evident in her brief look at colonial America, where she focused on alcohol in general rather than beer in particular: she surveys colonial drinking habits, the extraordinary popularity of rum and government policies that shaped the manufacture and consumption of drink. But readers interested in that period will learn more from the marvelous, lively research of Stanley Baron, Andrew Barr, John J. McCusker and Peter Thompson.

Even when Mittleman turns to primary sources, such as the pages of newspapers or trade journals like Modern Brewery Age, she focuses on the facts themselves rather than their meaning. As a result, the chapters never quite reach a substantive conclusion, and the connections are missing. For example, she mentions that Sam Calagione, founder of Dogfish Head Brewing, helped change Delaware’s laws about beer retailing—and then tells us that Delaware had been the first state to ratify the Constitution more than two centuries earlier. What’s the connection?

Often the facts are simply wrong: she tells us that Anheuser-Busch “named its trademark beer” after a Czech town. Not quite. The people at Anheuser-Busch didn’t name the beer because the company didn’t own the beer. Carl Conrad did, and he chose the name to honor a style of beer he drank during his trips to Europe. (Conrad owned the beer recipe, the name and the trademark; he hired his friend Adolphus Busch to brew the beer.)

But as every author knows, writing a book takes time, effort and money, so we should applaud and thank Mittelman for her achievement. And for those who enjoy facts, there are plenty here. Now about that cover image…there are plenty of American beer festivals. Couldn’t the publisher come up with something better than a photo taken at a German Oktoberfest?

Perception was reality. Wine went with fine cuisine—usually French. Beer went with hot dogs. End of story.

We’re still fighting those images: Beer is down-to-earth, the accessible drink of the common man. Wine is perceived as elite, a social yardstick for measuring success. Think Homer Simpson versus Frazier Crane.

But the facts are these: wine in the United States is extending itself into more casual settings, similar to the place it holds in European wine cultures. And beer, thanks to the craft beer movement and the greater availability of fine traditional imported brands, is reaching up—in culinary terms, flavor diversity and presentation.

What happens when these two venerable beverages meet today in the same venues, across the same table? Well, there’s some honest competition, and a little friction that wasn’t there before. And, hopefully, a recognition that the two beverages have more in common than either beer drinkers or wine lovers have cared to admit.

When it comes to choosing the right beverage for a fine meal, the choices are much wider than they were 25 years ago, and they include both beer and wine options. Both beverages have their passionate advocates—as you’ll read here—but there is also an expanding middle ground. Increasingly, restaurants that take their food and wine seriously can—should—be expected to take their beer offerings seriously, too, and that means richer selections and choices for you.

Welcome to the (cordial) beer-wine spat. People who are knowledgeable about both beverages are now arguing about flavor, complexity and complementarity. If you learn from them, you have the chance to make selections that will take your next fine meal to special heights.

The End. See you. Good-bye, thanks for coming. There’s the exit.

…are they gone? Okay, you guys who stuck around to see the credits…you want to hear the real history of craft beer? Not a history of breweries and who bought who, and what city has the biggest bragging rights, but a history about the beer. That’s what beer culture is about, and when it comes down to you and the glass, do you really care what month the brewery opened?

Open up the cooler of any worthwhile beer bar, and you’ll see pale ale, IPA and its big brother Double, hefeweizen, porter and stout—The Dark Twins, some solid craft lagers, some barrel-aged beers, Belgian clones and maybe some of the nifty new sour ales. Each one has a history. It’s not a story of places and water and the discovery of new machines, like the history of European beer. These are New World stories: they’re about the beer, the brewer who made it and the people who liked it. Dig into that cooler and get the real history of the new beers.

From a Small Beginning

What people drank in the 1970s, when all this got started, was mostly something like Budweiser. People were drinking light lager beer from a regional or national brewery—remember, Coors was still a regional brewery at this time—with a few exceptions like Yuengling Porter and Genesee Bock. The mainstream has, if anything, gone lighter yet, as light beer grew to over half the general beer market, while temporary fads cycled through the beer-consciousness: dry beer, ice beer, low-carb beer and the slowly fading malternatives.

But a different, tiny flow branched off from the mainstream when Fritz Maytag bought into the Anchor Brewery in 1968. He wanted to make his beer more like what he thought beer should be, so he went to England to see how they did it. He didn’t like what he saw: added syrups and sugars, not all-malt. Maytag rejected that idea, and fired a shot across the bow of English brewing with Liberty Ale, an all-malt beer with an American hop: Cascade.

One man’s decision started a landslide of craft beer tastes. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale would take the same idea—a smartly hopped, drinkable pale ale—and make a widely-emulated craft brewing flagship out of it. According to the brewery’s long-time head of sales, the late Steve Harrison, “We just made an ale we liked, and we liked the aromatic qualities of the Cascade.”

Maytag didn’t just pioneer hoppy pale ales, either. He started—or re-started—the idea of holiday beers, special seasonal one-offs brewed for the winter holidays, with a beer called Our Special Ale. “I liked the idea of an ale brewed for a festival,” he says. “I called it a gift to our customers, not to make a profit. It has become profitable, but it wasn’t for years.” Other brewers followed the same path, and now a mad profusion of holiday styles—spiced ales, rye porters, barleywines, “winter warmers,” doublebocks—make a colorful display every December.

Up in Portland, Rob and Kurt Widmer found a new direction for wheat beer when someone made a request they couldn’t figure out how to meet. “Carl Simpson at the Dublin Inn asked us to do a third beer,” Rob recalls. The brewers only had two fermenters, and were making altbier and a wheat beer with the altbier yeast.

“We figured if we just didn’t filter the Weizen it would make a third beer,” Rob says. That simple, impulsive business decision was the source of the immensely successful American unfiltered wheat ale, still one of the most popular kinds of craft beer. The Widmers would sell it in draft for as long as they could—laying the foundations of the craft beer bar scene in Portland, along with Kemper’s lagers and Portland Brewing’s ales—then finally go to bottle in the face of burgeoning demand, a demand that spelled success for brewers like Pyramid and Redhook, too.

The other side of Portland’s craft beer scene was, and is, brewpubs. Brewpubs started out a lot like the Widmers: a couple fresh beers, this is what you get. Then they went through a “color beer” phase: golden ale, amber ale, and Something Dark, either a porter or a stout. There’s still some of that around. Brewpubs really hit their stride when places like BridgePort and the McMenamin’s pubs, and Big Time up in Seattle, stepped completely outside that model with IPAs, imperial stouts and barleywines. Brewpubs became and largely remain the experimental edge of American brewing, a brewing laboratory where beers can change on a weekly basis.

The Dark Side

Porter was taking hold on the other side of the mountains. “Porter” may sound like a traditional beer, but it was a shot-in-the-dark re-creation: porter had died out in England. Deschutes brewed up some in Bend, and growing demand sucked them into the Portland market. Black Butte Porter did okay, and no one else was making many dark beers. Brewery president Gary Fish took “a contrarian approach. The dark beer pie was a smaller one, but we could own almost all of it. It worked.” When brewers think about making a porter, Black Butte is often the success they think of.

If you like IPA, the India pale ale that some brewers tried to make “more authentic” by adding oak chips to simulate a long journey by sea (don’t hear much about that bone-headed trend any more, do you?), bow down to the memory of Bert Grant. Grant left an increasingly sissified Canadian brewing industry, hunkered down in the middle of hops country in Yakima, WA, and started throwing hops in his beer. We liked it, and brewers saw how easy it was to step up and vary the flavor of beer by simply adding a wad of hops. More wads followed, and IPA became a staple.

Meanwhile, Jim Koch in Boston, and Steve Hindy and Tom Potter down in Brooklyn, trying to decide what to build their new brewery business on, took a look at what beers were already the most popular in the world: why not brew a lager, but with more body and flavor? Once Koch developed a recipe for Samuel Adams Boston Lager, and Hindy and Potter got a recipe for Brooklyn Lager, they had to figure out how to brew it. Again, they had the same idea: get someone else to do it, someone who already had the equipment, the experience, the connections with suppliers: a contract brewer.

It was an idea and a practice that set off fifteen years of argument over whether “contract beers” were really microbrewed. “It was never a real issue to begin with,” Koch says. “Big brewers like A-B used it to damage the craft brewing industry and distract us from our common ground: brewing great beer.” In the end, that’s what the people decided. While geeks were waving their arms, and brewers were talking mean about each other, bottles of Sam Adams and Brooklyn flew off the shelves. You won’t hear geeks talk much about them, but the results are conclusive: people like craft-brewed lagers.

What people didn’t like was too many of them. Contract-brewing was valid, but it was also an easy way to make a quick grab at a “microbrew” market that was growing around 50 percent annually. Labels were slapped on regional breweries’ output willy-nilly: Hope, Nathan Hale, Trupert, Naked Beer, Red Bell, Red Ass, Bad Frog, Wall Street Lager, Three Stooges. There were the “gay beers,” Black Sheep and Pink Triangle; there were beers that were going to launch national brands, like Brewski and Wanker Light; there were beers with causes, like Rhino Chasers, which pledged to donate money to save the wild rhinoceros (not just a dumb idea, but the fake rhino horn tap handles were so heavy they broke beer spigots).

Behind these brands were marketing geeks, not beer geeks. None of them realized that there has to be a significant difference in the bottle; they thought people were really buying cute labels and quickly crafted minimal backstories. None of them are still around. People shudder when they think about the microbrewery ‘shakeout’ that occurred in the late 1990s. We should look on that time as one of beneficial hardship, of the classic Nitzschean type which did not kill us, making us stronger.

Beer Appreciation & Style Guides

If there is a single book that has masterfully illuminated the beauty of all things beer in the minds of laymen and experts alike, it is Michael Jackson’s New World Guide to Beer—the undisputed best-selling beer guide of all time. The colorful, oversized volume takes you on a dizzying tour of global beer culture and heritage, leaving you not only with a superb education, but a renewed excitement for your love affair with beer. Information on all of Jackson’s books is available at his website, www.beerhunter.com.

Not the romantic type? Maybe you prefer a more systematic approach to your favorite indulgence. Roger Protz’s latest release, 300 Beers to Try Before You Die!, will help you ply your way through beer heaven. The beautifully-illustrated portfolio of brews gives expert tasting notes for each beer, as well as a little history, a little brewing info and space for the taster’s own notes. Michael Jackson’s Great Beer Guide: 500 Classic Brews delivers a similar experience. Simply put, it is the culmination of Jackson’s life-long globe trot in search of the world’s best beers.

Want to mount your own beer expeditions? For the beer trekker and pub crawler, handy guides have been published for virtually every beer-producing corner of the globe. In the U.S., Lew Bryson has launched a series of books (including Pennsylvania Breweries, New York Breweries and Virginia, Maryland & Delaware Breweries) that have set the standard for trekking handbooks. Paul Ruschmann and Maryanne Nasiatka have recently published Michigan Breweries in the same series. Across the pond, CAMRA (Campaign For Real Ale) annually publishes its Good Beer Guide—Britain’s granddaddy of pub guides edited by Roger Protz. The 2006 edition, as well as CAMRA’s long list of other books, is available at www.camra.co.uk. Taking a trip to Europe? Naturally, the German beer mecca, Munich, has its own guide. The Beer Drinker’s Guide to Munichis now its 5th edition and popular as ever.

Beer History

There are almost certainly more books on the history of the amber fluid than on any other facet of beerdom. Historians Gregg Smith and Carrie Getty give us one of the more whimsical and entertaining histories in The Beer Drinker’s Bible—Lore, Trivia & History: Chapter & Verse. For a more in-depth study of beer’s role in civilizations from Egypt to colonial America, have a look at Origin and History of Beer and Brewing—initially published in 1911 but reprinted in 2005 by BeerBooks.com. For a fantastic journey through German brewing history, get a copy of Horst Dornbusch’s Prost! The Story of German Beer. www.beertown.org.

For U.S. brewing history, Stanley Baron’s 1962 book Brewed In America: The History of Beer and Ale in the United States remains unmatched in breadth, depth and insight. You’ll have to hunt a little online to find a copy, but it’ll be well worth the effort. Conveniently, the book Beer Blast: The Inside Story of the Brewing Industry’s Bizarre Battles For Your Money picks up the story just about where Baron leaves off. Industry insider Philip Van Munching gives an incredible account of the big boys’ competitive battles of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Be sure, also, to look for Maureen Ogle’s opus, Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer, released last fall.

Hops, grapes and grains, with the occasional fruit, nut or spice thrown in for good measure. Brewers, winemakers and distillers—all doing their best to gain a greater share of the consumer’s stomach.

Sure, there were some giant multinational companies crossing the boundaries. But it was done in rigid corporate structures, with operating divisions and subsidiaries. It was not all that surprising when a liquor company like Seagram’s bought into wineries. Constellation Brands went from being just a wine producer to owning spirit brands, a brewery and the U.S. rights to a fast-growing imported beer by the name of Corona. Diageo, through acquisitions and mergers, amassed an empire that ranged from Guinness Stout to Captain Morgan Rum to Beaulieu Vineyards. And even America’s largest brewer, Anheuser-Busch, started playing in two fields by announcing last year that it was marketing spirits under the Jeckyll & Hyde label and importing Ku Soju, a 48-proof Korean spirit.

But now it appears we have entered the crossover era of craft producers crossing lines. Brewers are distilling. Vintners are brewing. Consumers are drinking.

Early craft beer pioneers have caught the bug. Fritz Maytag of the legendary Anchor Brewing Co. in San Francisco operates a winery and a distillery. Bill Owens, who founded Buffalo Bill’s Brewpub in Hayward, CA, and ran a couple of beer-related publications, is now the president of the American Distilling Institute. The ADI provides information resources and advocates for small distillers, plus hosts an annual Craft Distilling Conference.

“I don’t know if the potential volume for artisan distillers can match the growth of craft beer,” says Sam Calagione, owner of Dogfish Head Brewing in Delaware. “However, I don’t think the early craft brewers at New Albion or Sierra Nevada envisioned how large the craft brewing movement would become.”

Calagione is one of the pioneers who has decided that if brewing beer is fun and profitable, then distilling liquor also holds potential. “Our goal in opening the distillery was to further expand on our concept of off centered ales for off centered people,” Calagione says. “We don’t brew to style, we never have since we opened the brewery in 1995.”

Dogfish Head is sticking to that approach under distiller Mike Gerhart, who crafts rum aged in French oak with wildflower honey, a gin called Jin and a liqueur distilled from honey and flavored with maple syrup called Be. Dogfish Head’s Vodka Erotica is an exotic flavored vodka made with rose water, watermelon juice and a number of secret spices. If you show up at the company’s Rehoboth Beach pub you can even sample small batch specialty vodkas made with chocolate and vanilla beans.

Rogue Spirit

At Rogue Ales in Oregon, the brewing of extreme beers also led to the making of extreme spirits. Always up for a challenge, founder Jack Joyce said Rogue decided against making vodka in favor of starting with rum because “we figured if we could make rum, we could make anything.” Light rum and dark rum moved them to a rum flavored with hazelnuts and then to a spruce gin that contains 14 ingredients. Rogue is considering other products, perhaps a brandy, flavored vodkas and even beer schnapps.

“Beer is really hard to make. You have to deal with lower alcohol contents and a high level of sanitation. Booze is real forgiving along the way,” says Joyce. “The danger for any brewer going into distilling is if you don’t make great products it can reflect on your beer. Making great spirits requires a great palate. You have to balance the various ingredients along the way.”

In addition to its brewing and distilling licenses, Rogue also holds a permit for a winery, but has no plans to start crushing grapes.

“We have a bit of a brand problem, since someone else uses the Rogue name for wine. Plus there are 300 wineries in Oregon. We don’t think there is a need for another one,” Joyce says.

In Massachusetts, Jay Harman has become a triple threat in the drinks world. Starting with Nantucket Vineyards in 1981, then Cisco Brewing in 1995 and onto Triple 8 Distilling in 2000, he has seen each business up close and personal.

“It’s a juggling act. It’s seasonal where we are with tourists out here for eight to nine months, then we have three to four months to regroup,” Harman says. The company gets its grapes from Washington state vineyards, bringing in juice for the whites and crushing red grapes on site. The company brews a range of beers and uses honeybell oranges from Florida to make Triple 8 Orange Flavored Vodka.

Triple 8 has been raising money to fuel new brands by selling futures on 53 gallon barrels of single malt “Notch” whiskey. The futures that went for $3,000 a barrel back in 2000 now sell for $6,000. Harman uses Cisco’s Whale’s Tale Ale, minus the hops, as the wash to distill to make the whiskey, which is aged for at least five years in used bourbon casks. He predicts the 200 750-milliliter bottles that come out of each cask could sell for as much as $200 each.

Brett VanderKamp, president of New Holland Brewing in Michigan, started brewing beer in 1997 and added distilling in 2005, making a brandy, rum and whiskey.

“What is important to us is that New Holland is known as a great brewery,” VanderKamp says. “I think New Holland will always be a brewery that happens to have a distillery.”

Still, the company is getting creative with its distilling operation and is making some very interesting products. It started distilling and laying down whiskey using several grains in a mash that is double distilled to 115 proof. On the rum side, VanderKamp says New Holland is “dabbling” with small batches to determine the right mix of cane sugar and molasses, as well as trying different barrel combinations for aging, including used bourbon barrels. On the brandy side, the company distills its product five times and is selling juniper- and raspberry-flavored products.

The first portion of Amarillo hops he dropped in was already more than he’d usually use. He looked at perhaps 10-fold more in the remaining bags. Then he looked at the Americans. “How much?” he asked.

They didn’t hesitate, replying in unison: “All of it.”

If Roy didn’t already understand that these five American brewers who visited Belgium in March were different, he must have at that moment.

Brewers of New American Beers have been heading to the east side of the Atlantic for more than two decades to taste traditionally brewed beers and learn how they are made. Call it the inspired visiting the inspiration. Seldom, however, do they arrive with a large supply of their own beer and hand out samples to both brewers and consumers. Seldom do they end up with their photos accompanying stories on the front page of local newspapers, nor do they attract television crews who want to do interviews.

Dogfish Head founder Sam Calagione came up with the idea for the trip as part of “research” for his next book, Extreme Brewing (due from Rockport Publishers in the fall). It wasn’t hard to talk Tomme Arthur of Port Brewing, Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River Brewing, Adam Avery of Avery Brewing and Rob Todd of Allagash Brewing into joining him on the trip.

“We look forward to sharing our beers with them,” Calagione said before going. “We’re not saying our stuff is better than yours or anything like that. We want to recognize they are the Mecca.”

Delivering the keynote speech at the Craft Brewers Conference in Seattle several weeks after returning, Calagione made another point, “We knew we weren’t just representing the five breweries present but everyone in this room as we turned more and more people on to the amazing beers being made all across this country.”

Earlier in the same speech, Calagione drew an analogy between the revolution in American beer than began in earnest in the 1980s and changes in music—taking his electric guitar and electric backing band onto a folk stage—that Bob Dylan sparked in the 1960s.