"sam calagione" news and stories

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?

This morning, I was reading an article from DRAFT Magazine that ran over the summer. A quote from Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head really grabbed my attention. When asked why craft beer was currently booming, he replied:

"What [consumers] are seeing is that the world of beer offers a much more affordable connoisseurship than that of wine. The fact is you can go into a store with $10 and come out with a world-class six-pack of beer. Try and do that with a world-class bottle of wine. It's just not going to happen. That's what is, for me, really exciting, particularly in an economically challenging time like we have right now... [you] can go out tonight to Whole Foods and plunk down $10 and get the world's best something: really great, creative, and artisanal beer that fits into that price."

Oddly enough, this quote got me thinking about baseball cards.

Being a child of the 80's, around 1985, I started going crazy for baseball cards. Turns out I was just one of the sheep because so did the rest of the country. The number of companies selling MLB cards suddenly expanded and card speculation was at an all-time high (or at least it appeared so based on the knowledge I had amassed in the ten years I had been alive).