"Dogfish Head" news and stories

Back in 1970, jazzman Miles Davis released the boundary-busting album Bitches Brew, which brought jazz-rock fusion to the mainstream. Now, forty years later, a special anniversary edition of Davis' masterpiece is being released with a special feature that beer fans can appreciate -- a real Bitches Brew made by Delaware's Dogfish Head, sold in a bottle featuring the album's trippy original artwork.

"There's a spirit of innovation, of creativity and individuality that's at the core of Miles' music," notes Adam Block, Legacy Recordings' senior vice president and manager. "Sam [Calagione] and Dogfish Head approach their art from the same place."

To pay homage to Davis' tunes, head brewer Calagione constructed what he dubbed a threaded beer -- that is, batches of separately fermented brew that are blended into a cohesive elixir. Of Bitches Brew's four threads, three constitute an imperial stout made with Muscovado sugar. The last thread is an African honey wine called Tej, which receives its bitterness from the gesho root (hops aren't native to Africa).

Lately, breweries have begun resuscitating vintage brands such as Rheingold and original-recipe Schlitz. But the last century of American brewing doesn't interest Delaware's Dogfish Head. Instead, the brewery has looked back 9,000 years to create Chateau Jiahu. It's a fermented beverage based on ingredients discovered in preserved pottery jars hailing from a Neolithic Chinese village named Jiahu.

How did this happen? Using scientific tools such as infrared spectrometry, Dr. Patrick McGovern, a biomolecular archaeologist from the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology analyzes ancient vessels that once held fermented beverages. To date, his discoveries have led Dogfish to create Midas Touch (brewed according to an old Turkish recipe with ingredients discovered in King Midas' tomb) and Theobrama (based on a cocoa-driven alcoholic elixir dating back to 1,200 B.C.).

Read more about this Dogfish Ancient Ale after the jump...

Photo: Joshua M. Bernstein.

Joshua M. Bernstein, Gourmet.com's beer columnist, has written about brews, bars and booze for New York Magazine, Time Out New York, ForbesTraveler.com and the New York Times.

When fall hits, kids get giddy about the mother lode of Halloween candy to come. But adults, too, have reason to celebrate the harvest season -- namely, pumpkin beers.

These vegetable-influenced ales are as varied as jack-o'-lantern carvings. They range from Cape Ann's smooth and chocolaty Fisherman's Pumpkin Stout to Dogfish Head's Punkin Ale, a rich ale dosed with brown sugar and pumpkin flesh. But our favorite Halloween sipper hails from Lakewood, N.Y. -- Southern Tier.

Since the western New York brewery's humble 2004 beginnings, it has spread across the country like kudzu, reaching more than 20 states. The rapid success is due to burly brews like the ludicrously hopped Unearthly Imperial IPA (11 percent ABV!), the dessert-like Crème Brûlee Imperial Milk Stout and the Pumking.

The new movie "Beer Wars" was shown last night to an extremely sympathetic audience at Brooklyn's bar-cum-music venue Bell House.

How can one be "sympathetic" to, um, beer? Well, in this very straightforward good guy versus bad guy documentary, the Big Three (Miller, Coors and Anheuser-Busch/InBev) are set up as the Goliath to the microbrewers' David, including Dogfish Head's charming Sam Calagione.

Of course, the Big Three are now just the Big Two, but that small detail didn't stop this Brooklyn audience from engaging in a rowdy shout-down over the course of the film -- a distinctly one-sided vehicle with a chipper bespectacled narrator. Vintage ads and interviews with "Bad Beer" millionaires in polished boardrooms are interspersed with folksy, homey interviews with Calagione and Rhonda Kallman, the woman behind caffeinated brew MoonShot. Various microbreweries also snagged cameos. (Pennsylvania's Yuengling received rousing cheers).

The most telling parts of the film came when the camera zoomed into the refrigerated aisle of grocery stores and placed big red boxes around beers clearly dear to audience members' hearts. It was with a collective gasp that suds-lovers realized their beloved Stella was connected to Anheuser-Busch.

So did the film's message hit home?

Kyle Spencer, 23, and Xiao Yu, 24, are barely of drinking age and have been brewing beer for less than a year, but nonetheless wear their ambition, literally, on their sleeves.

"Brewing for a living is something we both wanted to do," says Spencer, promoting his nascent brand by wearing a gray, short-sleeved Beta Beer T-shirt alongside partner Xiao Yu. Despite his expert presentation, Spencer is nervous: For the first time his product will be tasted by "actual people who have beer backgrounds."

This kind of fledgling enthusiasm was par for the course at the Brooklyn Beer Experiment, a new cook-off in a city obsessed with cook-offs, part of the groundswell of our nation's craft-brewmania and a first from competitors turned co-organizers Theo Peck and Nick Suarez. "We were cook-off rivals," says Suarez, "and decided we could do this as well as anyone else could." Sunday afternoon at Brooklyn's the Bell House -- a space primarily used as a music venue -- more than 25 chefs infused their eats with beer, and local homebrewers like Spencer and Yu hawked their wares.