The Beerhunter

The subject of beer usually rates a lusty “Amen!” from most males,  who probably have a particular taste and color in mind when they think of their ideal brew.

But what about beer that dares go where no beer has gone before?

That’s when you need to call Sam Calagione. He’s the craft brewer who runs Dogfish Head Brewery in New York City and hosts Discovery Channel’s Brew Masters, a program devoted to tracking down the world’s most interesting beers.

Like, say, beer made with algae. Or bread. Or human saliva.

Okay, not for every taste. But Calagione is dedicated to finding the most exotic ingredients possible to take beer to the next level. On Brew Masters, this might mean heading to Peru (to try ancient corn beer), or Egypt (where in ancient times bread was part of the brewing), or China to track down the first recorded evidence of beer, some 9,000 years ago.

For a brewer, Calagione has an odd sales approach. “Our goal is to offend people,” he says in a phone interview. “We want our beer to be so flavorful that some people hate it. But that’s why we make 34 different kinds of very flavorful beers, because every human being palate is a little bit different, and beer is subjective. We want to really push the boundaries and make stuff that’s very flavorful and take that risk.”

Corn of plenty: Calagione visits Peru to investigate corn beer.

On the wall of Dogfish Head Brewery (the name comes from an actual jetty in Delaware where Calagione grew up), there’s a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Who so would be a man must be a non-conformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”

In short, go your own way. Don’t follow trends. How this ties in with brewing ale is a long story.

Another quote Calagione likes a lot is by Miles Davis, the jab-punching trumpeter: “Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.” The English lit major turned craft brewer wants to challenge not only American beer tastes — still dominated by pale pilsners of the Budweiser stamp — but also the world’s view of our favorite fermented hops beverage. He wants to raise the bar with beer you wouldn’t think imaginable, and show that it can actually be quite great.

Of course, there have been miscalculations. “I wanted to make a St. Patrick’s Day beer, which is served green,” he tells us. “Usually they use green food color, but I wanted to make a green beer that was natural, so I used algae. It tasted like pond scum.” Oh, well.

Speaking of Miles Davis, Calagione was asked by Sony to come up with a microbrew to celebrate the 40th anniversary of “Bitches Brew,” the seminal Miles fusion recording. So how did it compare to the classic fusion album?

“I reread Miles’ biography and learned that his favorite food was this chili recipe,” says Calagione. “So I reverse-engineered a beer to be the ultimate partner for his favorite chili — kind of roasty and sweet, because I knew that beer would work well with a spicy chili. I made it a fusion of tej, which is the traditional honey drink of Africa, and three parts imperial stout. So that was our way into the project.”

A typical day in the life of a Manila journalist? No, it’s the Brew Masters crew rating the quality of various beers.

In fact, Calagione thinks food is a perfect gateway drug to exploring new beer flavors. He urges people to pair hearty beers with steak or pungent cheeses to really unlock a whole world of flavors.

“The spectrum of flavors can be all over the place. We can add fruit and spices and herbs and different yeasts,” he says. “Brewers truly have the entire world at their fingertips in terms of ingredients, and that’s what I think is so wonderful about beer compared to wine” which he finds “uni-dimensional.”

But still. Human saliva?

In one of the later episodes of Brew Masters, Calagione and his team make beer by chewing special corn from Peru. “The human saliva has natural enzymes in it that convert the starch in the corn into sugar for the yeast to eat and turn into beer.” Sort of like having a brewery in your mouth. “But you can imagine how repulsive to some people the idea of making beer with human saliva is, so we at first make that beer just in our little restaurant and find out if people will like it. So that’s how we test very exotic ingredients.”

Calagione is full of interesting and fun facts, like the fact that women produce more saliva than men, so they’re better at making this particular Peruvian beer. Or the fact that having your own personal home brewery (which is how Calagione first started his hobby after graduating from college and moving to NYC) was outlawed in the United States until the mid-‘70s, when President Jimmy Carter overturned a still-existing statute of the old Prohibition amendment. So we have something else to thank Carter for besides Habitats for Humanity.

Brews brothers: The crew of Dogfish Head Brewery puzzles out a new flavor.

Someone asks Calagione which five people he would love to share a beer with, and he lists Robert Johnson, Coco Chanel, David Foster Wallace, Andy Warhol and Michael Jackson — the brewer, not the late King of Pop. Of course, the social benefits of beer are well known; Calagione would even go so far as to say that beer is responsible for civilization. “Beer dates back to the birth of human civilization. It was the time in history when man changed from a hunting and gathering nomad into a being that would settle in villages to watch crops grow. So there’s a very serious school of thought that says man settled down into civilization as we knew it to produce grains, rice and barley, to make beer.”

He reveals he had his own “beer epiphany” in 1994 after sucking down a Chimay Red beer from Belgium and a Sierra Nevada Bigfoot beer from Chico, California, both in the same week. “They were so flavorful and explosive and polarizingly different from each other, and I immediately fell in love with this idea of devoting sort of my life to beer.”

Most people who devote their lives to beer get called alcoholics. Or college students. Calagione and his wife, who co-runs Dogfish, have instead turned it into a mission, a passion, and a great way to get his hands on lots of frosty cold ones.

In future episodes, Brew Masters will head to Asia, a place that intrigues Calagione. When a journalist from Thailand asked if he had ever tried durian, you could almost imagine the brew master sifting the characteristics of the pungent fruit in his mind, and how it might go with nachos and salsa.

We’ll drink to that.

* * *

‘Brew Masters’ airs on Discovery Channel Thursdays, 9 p.m., starting this June.