YouSaid · the spoken record

Sam Calagione

lines on the record: 163
first: 2025-02-03
most recent: 2025-02-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, and telling people that we're making fun of us or laughing at us. He said, hey, wait a second. Dogfish is a very traditional brewery. If you look thousands of years back, every culture in every region of the world was using local indigenous ingredients to make beer. And in the beer world, that gave us, you know, we were always thinking beyond beer. How can we recontextualize beer? And moments like that were impactful.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When we come back in just a moment, how Sam and Mariah begin to turn things around with help from a famous beer journalist, a retro children's toy, and King Midas. Stick around, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to how I built this. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This I'm Guy Raz. So it's the late 1990s and Dogfish Head has a strong cult following, but it also has cash flow problems and it needs to start growing faster. Fortunately, the famous beer journalist Michael Jackson, yes, a different Michael Jackson, starts saying some really nice things about the brand”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was awesome. But to your point of what was the cash flow like, one of our first board meetings where Tom Draper, I stood up and showed him like some magazine article about our beer that got national coverage and he was quiet for a minute. And then he just said, Sam, Cash is king and you have no cash, which is true.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd add to that it was all crappy used, we had a bottling line that came from East Germany that I think made soda over there in the 1950s and was sent to America as part of a Cold War initiative to screw up American manufacturing. And we literally paid a guy who was a very skittish and wore ski goggles to just stand behind the bottom line and push valve number seven down as his job because the machine didn't work. And literally, I think one-fifth of the beer that came off that bottling line wasn't even a full bottle and we couldn't sell it. Not a very sustainable business model. And then that was really around the time that Mariah's dad, Tom Draper, could see that we needed some help. He's like, you know what? All right. I want to put in this amount of money and I don't know if it was $100,000 or it was some meaningful amount, but I do want a minority equity stake and we're going to form a board of directors. And we're like, oh.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, anytime you want to make more beer, you need more capital because it's such a capital-intensive process. It's like, you can't just Make more beer without investing in more tanks and more bottling lines and more. So we were living hand to mouth in any money that we got in, we were putting right back, whether it was into our people or our ingredients or our equipment.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What was it? Was it just you were running the business inefficiently or you just weren't selling enough beer or what was going on?”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had the most beers available under one roof. So I'm there. And they were like one of the first places to host these brewers' dinners. We all get our five minutes at the microphone. There'd be a room of 100 people and you get up there and describe your beer and then you'd go back to the brewer's table. And I remember very proudly saying, you know, getting up on the stage and being like as a homage to like the fruit aromatics of Northwest American hops, I've decided to infuse the beer while it's fermenting with fresh pureed apricots and kind of made my passion plea to describe the beer. And I sit back down and a little older brewer than me gets up on the stage and quiets the audience with a spoon on his pint. And he says, I believe that fruit belongs in your salad, not in your beer. Okay, all right”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I read a story about a beer event that you were at, Sam, in'97, so you're still in your late 20s, 28, maybe around then. And this was an august crowd of beer makers, and you stood up to talk about this new beer you were making with apricot puree. What happened?”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, other people that give a shit in every city about this art movement that you're involved in. So, really, I found that grassroots network of hardcore craft beer bars and restaurants that prided themselves on exotic lists. And that's where I would drive to when I go to Pittsburgh or Hartford or wherever, and I try to do a beer dinner and talk to the local newspaper. And really, it was like the Sonic youth model of growing a brewing company.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Much like, and I know you did a great story with merge records, and if you look at how much the indie music movement in America, essentially in the same era when Craft Beer was coming up late 70s, early 80s, that whole concept of getting a van as a band, and you go across the country and you find this grassroot networks of other people.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we knew as we were growing, making these really exotic beers. It's not like the biggest chain apple bees or chain Costco's was going to take a chance on a beer made with raisins or a beer made with apricots. So our goal at first was to find these”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so at this point, both of you are working at Dogfish Head full-time and you're starting to take your beer outside of Delaware, trying to get some national attention. And so how exactly were you doing that? Were you marketing mostly to small bars or were you also, I don't know, try to get into some big stores or some of the big restaurant chains?”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. So I often use that analogy of like a comic book universe as an entrepreneurial universe where there's all these mutants with complimentary superpowers that take on the big bad guy, you know, a giant corporation or some monolithic industry. And so to use the Marvel universe, I'd say I was a lot like Cyclops where I just was like spraying creative energy in a million directions out of my brain and eyes and sometimes for good and sometimes recklessly and destroying stuff. And Mariah has definitely always been more like the Professor X. Like she could read my mind and could kind of see the lay of the whole land, you know, cultivating and nurturing creative ideas that I have into a direction that's positive for dogfish, but just also for us as a family.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's remarkable to me when I meet people who met when they were teenagers or kids because that is so rare, right? Like your judgment as a kid or teenager is just so different from your judgment. And even our judgment as adults is people, marriages don't last or whatever it is, right? Part of it is luck that just two of you guys happen to be compatible and liked each other. I'm just curious, Sam, from your perspective. You married very well, right? Like you married somebody very smart and who was like the brains of the operation at dogfish head, right? In Mariah, did you see somebody who could be like, you know, not just life partner, but like a business partner?”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right before I left my full-time job to come to Dogfish, we opened a separate production brewery to brew and package beer that we could then distribute to these markets around us. My last job in TV News, I was managing the assignment desk for the news department, so I was like the receiver of all of the press releases and media alerts. And, you know, so I naively assumed that that meant, oh, I know how to do the opposite of that and put out all this information. And I, of course, I know how to do marketing, but quickly I realized that I was not needed as much to do marketing as I was all of these other things that we needed to be able to do.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So what, Mariah, what gave you the confidence to leave your job in television to go full-time? Because I think 1997, you joined the company full-time.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and that kind of drove us to get our bottling line going in our building and buy a little box truck and get on the road. And I would drop off two pallets at a distributor in New York or Philly, but then take a bucket of beers to art forum magazine or interview or food and wine. And usually people would let us in their door, say, hey, we want to throw an impromptu happy hour for your editorial staff or your writers. And that really helped us start getting national attention.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, because you could not do that with just that Delaware market. You had to go to those huge media markets and consumer markets like Philadelphia, DC.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The restaurant actually did pretty darn well, like right out of the gates, bringing people in But what did become challenging is I knew that our recipes were unique nationally by that focus on the culinary. I knew that if I could start distributing the beers to cities like DC, Baltimore, Philly, Manhattan, and I could get the Washington Post to write about a beer made with raisins or the fully inquired to write about a beer made with chicory, or that would help our brand grow disproportionate to our tiny scale down in coastal Delaware.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so you've got the restaurant going, but it's very rare for any business, let alone a restaurant, to break even or become profitable in the first year. I'm assuming that you were not profitable in your first year.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, like the Holy Trinity was original beer, original food, original music. We also refused to have any cover artists, which, you know, 93% of the bands that play back then were Jimmy Buffett cover bands. So we were like finding all these indie rock bands from across the country. So that was a big part of kind of the brand building as well. And then trying to foster relationships with other entrepreneurs, knowing that the tourists were going to go away and try to get other sort of entrepreneurs to.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No one trusts me with a math guy. Come on. I was more, I was doing the front of house, basically talking about the beer and the food and how they work together with the customers. I'd be getting ready to get the bands on stage.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whatever needed to be done. And Sam, you were brewing the beer and doing payroll and doing the shifts and the schedules and stuff like that.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I had a mattress in the cellar of the pub. So I would only go home to our house maybe three or four nights a week and then stay in the basement of the wow. Solar, and we would shut at midnight or one, and then I'd start brewing, you know, before the day would get hot, you'd want to start brewing by, you know, eight in the morning or so. So five or six days a week, I would triple brew, you know, 12 gallon batches. It worked fine. I would use the hose before people got there in the brewery for my showers. And Mariah had a real job because we needed insurance.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So from what I understand, initially, maybe in the first at least year, you were brewing all of the beer for this restaurant in fifteen gallon kegs on propane burners. That's not a lot of beer for a restaurant that has 150 seats every night. So help me understand how you were brewing enough beer. What were you doing?”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yet to a degree, but that's the education we were doing anyway to explain to them what the different beer was in the first place. So I think it kind of worked hand in hand. You know, I think in the bigger context, you know, beer is pretty much an affordable thing to splurge on. So that worked in our benefit. And yes, it was more expensive than the regular beer that you would buy down the street, but you could only get our beer at our place. And I think people appreciated that it was going to cost more because they knew why. You know, they saw it being made.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things about what you were doing was that it was expensive, right? You were using a higher volume of grains and expensive dried fruits and sugars. And so you had to sell your beer for more money. Pint of beer might be like double the price of a pint of Budweiser, Miller Light. Did you have to educate people around that?”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And back then, I would hand out file cards when we'd hand people beers and ask them, what do you think of these? And I wish that we kept them. I remember we had one beer on tap called High Alpha Wheat that was made with lavender buds. And one of the comic cards came back and says, this beer tastes like tongue-kissing Laura Ashley. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but probably fair point.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, especially once we open necessities and other invention and the fact that we couldn't afford a full scale commercial brewing system and had to start with tiny little pots and pans, making 12 gallons of beer in the corner of our restaurant, it was actually a blessing in disguise because I would brew two or three batches per day and let's say I was brewing raison d'etre, Belgian brown eel with raisins and beet sugars in the three brews that day I would tweak one variable in that recipe three times and that was our first like de facto focus groups I would ask the customers who cared enough to visit this crazy little brewery hey did you like the batch that more raisins less raisins and we kind of developed the recipes in concert with our original fans and that's kind of how our brand grew”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, most people's palates at that time was like your standard Cours and Miller Light, and maybe Sam Adams, which is a great beer, but was not as radical as what you guys were doing. Were there people who were like, not for me?”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Good. I mean, people came in, people wanted to explore. We had a lot of people ordering their standard beers, and we'd explain that we didn't sell those beers. We made our own beers. So every customer was a teaching opportunity, I guess.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“june twenty third, nineteen ninety five You open the restaurant's now fully open, right? How was business that first summer?”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that was an amazing moment. And I remember calling Mariah from a payphone, you know, like, let the faucets open. You know, it was kind of like one of those post-prohibition moments of, wow, we made this happen.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe that too. But they were super cool. Like they're helping me. They're like, all right, so write this up. Get a lawyer who can stand with you and massage the language and literally a guy within a month, we were on the floor getting a bill that we wrote brought forward. And then Governor Carper, who's now... Sign that bill and it actually turned into this kismet moment because all of a sudden our state's biggest newspapers are writing 24 year old kid you know foolishly rents a restaurant to open a brewery it's illegal and he has to go to Dover”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess that's what it would be. And I walked through the little security thing and I get on the other side, like, can we help you? And I'm like, yeah, I'm under construction on a brewery. And somebody told me it's illegal. Who do I talk to about that? And they were really sweet. I mean, they were like, well, son, you're going to have to write a bill. And they opened their doors. And I think that's something that I want to give shouts to the state of Delaware. It's a super business-friendly state when you think of its history from DuPont to Gore to agricultural.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So literally that same day that we ripped two old restaurant sides off a wall, put ours up on the wall, I drove up to Dover and literally I was like, hey, Mariah, what do I do when I get to Dover? And she's like, oh, go left under Lockerman, blah, blah, blah. So I found the right road and I rolled down my windows and I was kind of like, all right, which one of these is the House of Representatives?”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is an old law, probably goes back to prohibition. It seems like it was just a technicality, but even Just a regulatory stuff and the filings and finding the employees and building out the kitchen and the space and then brewing the beer. So what did you do?”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, one fail, two failed, and now here you go. It gets worse. It gets worse, guys. Because then I'm like, okay. And so I screw the dogfish brewings into each side. Mariah's taking old school analog photos of this whole hot mess. And literally some guy walks by and goes, brewing's and eats. You know it's illegal to open a brewery in Delaware, right?”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we rented it from a woman, wonderful woman, who her family had had a crab place that they ran there for like decades. And then they started just renting it out to tenants. And it had this reputation of not being a well-run place. But literally the day I got the wooden sign made that said dogfish had brewings and eats, I said, hey, Mariah, stand across the road so you can get a full view of me taking off the old restaurant sign from the facade of the building and putting our sign up on the building. And so the first surreal moment was I unscrew their sign and I take it off and there's a side of another failed restaurant behind that underneath.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My folks had a little summer place on an island that was in Mid Coast, Maine, and it looked out at a jut of land called Dogfish Head. And I liked how that name kind of meant a place to me, a rustic woodsy place, kind of like the rustic woodsy beers. But I also liked how it just sounded like three kind of whimsical words, you know, put together in a creative way so that it wouldn't reek of geography if we ever distributed our beer coast to coast.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Alright, so okay, you guys find this place and you come up with a name for it, dogfish head brewings and eats. And by the way, how did you come up with that name?”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I also knew that beautiful coastal Delawares pretty much two hours from DC, Baltimore, Philly, three and a half from Manhattan. So it'd actually be like an ideal hub to eventually distribute beer to major metro markets.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And at the same time, my dad called and he said, hey, there was a group that was trying to open a brew pub in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, but they're not opening. So we said, okay, let's control alt delete all the providences in this business plan and replace with Roven Beach, Delaware.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. So, you know, Mariah and I talk it through, and we were kind of like, well, let's see what's another state close to New England where we are right now that has yet to have a brewery opening post-prohibition. And it happened to be Marai's home state of Delaware where we worked in the summers of our college years.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I guess you guys go ahead with that plan, but from what I understand, you start to get cold feet when you find out that there's another brew pub about to open in Providence. You guys were, presumably, I think you were hoping to be the first ones there. So at that point, do you start to look elsewhere, like in another city?”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I mean, I love the idea of opening the pub, particularly, as you said, as a restaurant, because I had worked in restaurants every summer during high school and college, so I was familiar with that whole world of waiting tables. And so the original plan was, yeah, he'll move to Providence and start looking for restaurant real estate while I was working in local TV news up there.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, um, all right, so while you're writing this business plan, Mariah, while Sam is writing this plan, what were you thinking? I mean, you were coming out of this august, you know, Ivy League institution and, you know, you were had lots of options to do many different things. And I wonder, did you immediately think, yes, this is it. This is a great business idea. Or were you thinking, you know, maybe Sam will move on. Maybe this will be interesting to him for a couple months and then he'll figure something else out.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Same as dogfish had punk and ale today. So his fresh pumpkin meat, fresh crushed allspice, cinnamon, nutmeg, and then instead of fermenting it with regular sugar, I ferment it with brown, you know, organic brown sugar. And we still use brown sugar in the pumpkin ale today.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you won. You won this. I mean, it wasn't like a massive national, but it was a local little comp. But still, that's kind of cool. You won.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wait, you hijacked a baking competition of old women grannies? With your beer, which is not even a part of a baking competition, and you won? That's amazing, but that's not fair.”
2025-02-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Sam and Mariah Calagione (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT