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>>Presenter: Welcome everybody. So today I'm happy to introduce Sam Calagione who is back
to visit us again for a second time here in New York. So thank you, Sam.
>>Sam Calagione: Thank you. [Applause]
>>Sam Calagione: Thank you, bud. [Applause]
>>Sam Calagione: I'm gonna move around between the podium and this chair. I'm wearing a girdle
not just to emphasize my girlish curves but I've got a ruptured disc in my back. So I'm
gonna kind of be moving back and forth and self medicating a bit
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: as we do this chat. I know
I'm in a place with many, with my brethren when I walked in and I emailed Adam to say,
I'm definitely still coming, I got this little issue with my back. Da, da, da, da, it's hard
for me to stand for awhile. And it was kind of like Goldilocks up there with like 4 different
chairs, this one's too soft, this one's just right.
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: That one looks just right
so thank you for thinking about that, Adam. Three members of the Google team that were
responsible for Urkontinent are with us; Cameron, Keith and Adam. And as questions come up that
may be a little bit to technical on the Google side for me to address during the Q and A
component of this very loose presentation, I'm welcoming them up to answer those questions
as well. So very basically, I know a number of hands went up of folks that were here the
last time I got to speak in front of this room, so I'll do real, real brief who is Dogfish,
our company, in the context of the craft brewing community and the beer industry at large then
I'll jump into the Urkontinent project and then I'll jump from that into the story around
the other beer that we're serving besides Urkontinent tonight which is our Positive
Contact. And then also kind of weave in just the overall importance of collaboration in
our industry but more specifically in Dogfish Head's approach to business. All these projects
are examples of collaboration. So, starting with Dogfish, we are now 17 years young. We
opened in '95, I think I was about 25 years old when we opened and we were the smallest
brewery in the country when we opened in Rehoboth Beach Delaware. I know there's a number of
home brewers in this community and I was basically just brewing beer on glorified home brew equipment.
I had an early three keg brewing system that we did some things to to make it more, you
know, volume friendly. But right from the get go when there was all the first, the first
sort of, uh, generation of craft brewers, some awesome ones, and they were brewing really
flavorful, intensely flavorful beer in comparison to largest breweries selling in this country
which intentionally made their beer more approachable, some would say dumbed down, uh, but very,
very consistent but very samey. Frankly, most of the largest breweries that sell beer in
this country make some slight variation of the same style of light lager. And the first
generation of craft brewers came in and kind of re embraced continental styles like Pale
Ales from England or Lagers from Germany. So knowing we were starting small, we said
we're gonna do something very different, we're gonna try and embrace the entire culinary
landscape for potential ingredients to brew with and that's where that sort of motto of
'off centered ales for off centered people' came from, was that philosophy of that kind
of global approach to ingredients for brewing. If you look back in the longest history of
beer, the beer geeks in this room know the Reinheitsgebot, the beer purity act of 1516.
Bavarian government mandated beer could only be made with water, barley and hops. Yeast
wasn't included cause it wasn't discovered by Louis Pasteur in its context of how it
works in beer yet. And 90 something percent of the beer sold globally, today, commercially
roughly is kind of done in accordance with that Reinheitsgebot. I say roughly cause the
biggest breweries use a lot of corn and rice, cheaper adjuncts that, uh, instead of all
barley. But if you look back in the longer history of beer, 1516, we've, human beings
have been drinking beer for about 9,000 years. The first known, like by physical evidence,
fermented cereal based beverage, i.e. a beer, was discovered in the Jiahu dig site in China.
We do that beer in collaboration with the molecular archaeologists that vetted that
discovery called Chateau Jiahu and it's made with Sake yeast, Sake rice, Hawthorne fruits,
so that is the longest history of brewing. So this concept of beer really only being
four ingredients has only been with us about, for, for ten percent of our human brewing
timeline in the history of civilization. Yet, the recent generations just kind of assume
that beer is beer. That kind of happened until the craft brewing renaissance in this country.
The Europeans were a little bit better than we were at preserving these traditions of
brewing very inspired, very flavorful beers that were outside the light Lager, Juggernaut
style that dominates globally, but still they were existing styles. And you look at these
cultures, almost every culture around the world had its own indigenous beers and, of
course, they predated the Reinheitsgebot so they too kind of just embraced this idea of
whatever could grow in their region or their world, whatever they could pick out of their
terroir or their local ground, that's what they made beer with. A project we did, I don't
know, probably now it's been, my son's 13, it's been 9-10 years ago, was when the first
shock and awe bombing was happening and I was watching a dinosaur video with my son
to stop watching CNN and the other stuff that was dominating TV and there was, they showed
a picture of dinosaurs and da,da,da,da, before continental drift there was the one super
continent and that gave us the inspiration to do a beer called Pangaea. I was stuck in
this pretty remote little area in Montana where we were on vacation with our family
and it wasn't like I could go, do too much outside of ski and hang with my family. But
really once I watched that I put my son to bed and for the next three or four hours I
sat there using Google as a resource and I decided, you know, I wanna do a beer with
every continent included as an ingredient. Kind of our way as putting the fractured world,
that shock and awe bombing, messy world that we live in, back into one thing, you know,
a sort of cohesive thing. I did that without knowing that Antarctica was a continent, I
wasn't geography major. [Laughter]
>>Sam Calagione: I was an English major, not geography major. So that presented some challenges
as I did my Google searches for what we could include. Every other continent was fairly
easy but literally within four or five hours, that evening, sippin' beers and looking out
at the snow, we came up with this recipe and by the next morning I had emails back from,
you know, I had penguin *** or water to choose from in Antarctica.
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: You'd be surprised which
one we chose. [Laughter]
>>Sam Calagione: But that night, searching those ingredients, that was obviously the
real challenge. And through that search I found a US military base down there and as
I went further into their website world, I found like a 'contact me' type thing and by
the next morning there was a "Hell yeah! We're all home brewers down here cause we can't
get beer." [Laughter]
>>Sam Calagione: "We totally know Dogfish; if you send us some bottles of this we'll
take a picture of this on the actual South Pole drinkin' it!" He's like, "We got this
awesome reverse osmosis machine that turns icebergs into awesome water, we'll send you
that." I was like, alright, I got my ingredient. [Laughter]
>>Sam Calagione: From Antarctica. So then we worked out the shipping issues and, cause
at first we we're like it's brewed with 100 percent Antarctica water, that's what I wrote
that night, and by two days later looking at UPS and da, da, da, da, da, we're like,
and every bottle has a molecule of Antarctica water in it.
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: So we get the four, five
gallon buckets every year of the Antarctic water and it has crystallized ginger from
Australia and all these different ingredients. And I, I've gotten to be friendly with Adam
through the years and got invited to speak here again a few years ago and for small businesses,
the idea for this Urkontinent which is kind of a word that I think has more Germanic history
and uses but it essentially also means Pangaea, is I think an earlier word that predates it
for what this super continent was called. When Adam approached me about seeing if we
had an opportunity to collaborate here, I thought the best way into this, because the
moment that we're at in the brewing history of America, we now have more breweries in
America than we had pre prohibition, back when every neighborhood had its own brewery
and it's impressive. In the year 2012 there's now over 2,012 breweries in the country, average
American lives within 10 miles of a brewery, amazing stats. But what's more incredible
is we're on the cusp of this, another giant surge of brewery openings. So many of us,
I'd say 98 percent of those of us that opened those 2,000 breweries, started as home brewers
and just turned our passion into our livelihood. While there's 2,000 breweries open right now
there's also 800 people that are registered in the startup phase of opening a brewery.
So here we are as craft brewers with about six or seven percent market share and we're
getting ready to have about 800 breweries open. But instead of freaking out and the
biggest craft breweries being like, "Oh, we gotta do what we can to stop them." We kind
of all came together as a community and do what we can to help them open whether it's
through our work as an association called the Brewer's Association that represents a
vast majority of small breweries in this country or individually when a brewery like ours that
might be mid-sized reaches out to make a beer with a brewery like Shorts in Michigan or
the Brewery in L.A. that are maybe, you know, less than one tenth of our size, even though
Dogfish is only one fifteenth of one percent domestic market share, we are sizable and
established now that we can use our outreach and our resources to engage with these smaller
breweries. And we learn as much as they do when we do these projects. But knowing we're,
at this moment, sort of a reflection point of an explosion of good beer, I thought it
could be really fun if we could do this project together in a way that lets us celebrate and
do a sort of tutorial without it feeling teachey or preachy on the ways that small companies
can use, not just Google, but technology that is accessible to grow because Dogfish, whether
it was the Pangaea project or today, we don't have focus groups, we don't have rooms full
of MBAs, when we decide to do a project we just decide to do it ourselves and often times
that involves a lot of online research. And much like the internet in general has been
a great leveler on the marketing side of beer; a brewery like Dogfish Head can have a social
media world that's nearly as robust as the largest breweries. We're like, I don't know,
the 20 something biggest brewery in the country but my wife, Mariah, who runs all our social
media has done such a great job at that world that we have the presence of, I think, like
the fourth or fifth biggest American brewery online whether it be gauge it by Facebook
and Twitter or whatever she's doing that day. But the important thing is we recognize an
obligation to share with the other small breweries that are just coming online or are smaller
than us now, the ways you can be successful in business. And it's, again, not preachy
because there's as many different approaches to opening and starting and brewing beer as
there is great styles of beer that are out there. Beer is a subjective thing, we all
have different palates, so there should be a limitless, you know, landscape of different
beers that are out there. But what is important is, you know, like I said, collectively all
the small breweries are seven percent market share so we really need to stick together
and a kind of rising tide floats all ships as it gets more competitive in the beer market.
You know, a few weeks ago, Anheuser Busch InBev reached out to purchase Modelo, it's
still sort of pending a Department of Justice look at it, but for all intents and purposes,
that most likely will happen. So they'll go from having roughly a 47 percent market share
to 53, you know, overnight with one purchase. That's six percent which is about the entire
world of craft beer, all 2,000 of us, but that moment and that much market share shifted
in the time it took for those two companies to sign contracts to merge. So, God bless
em', it's a, there's competitive components that I'm not gonna go into here, other than
to say our priority as small breweries, is helping the other small breweries grow so
that small breweries can still exist. So, that's my little preaching here about what
we wanted to do with this project. So then moving into the project itself, basically
we try to make this as iterative and open as possible. And while the Pangaea project
was so much fun to do, that was just me in one room, sitting there for four nights doing
Google searches of ingredients that led to that beer and that recipe. This one, instead
of a bunch of beer geeks from the Google and Dogfish side just sitting down saying, "I
like this. I like that," we said why don't we try and make not just, the reference point
of Urkontinent is obviously a global reference point, let's make the actual conceptionalization
of the beer as global as possible. So what I'll do is since it's hard for me to talk
in the actual, um, what products we used or what kind of tools we used to do that, let
me just get that list out of the way and then I can go back to speaking the way I do. A
guy from our team, Trey, runs our IT department and he was instrumental on our side in helping
these things happen because I don't often speak the same language as my friends from
Google that were on this project. So really just moving through these, these, the products
that we used, we used, and these guys can go further into how we used them as we do
this, we used Google search, obviously, for ingredient research and searching the whole
way, we used Google Docs for the online spreadsheets, documentation about the project, we used Moderator
for the initial idea submissions which I think is just a really cool component of this that
I don't thinks been done in the beer world before, and also for the voting and comments.
The fact that you don't even, you can submit something or not but you can also just click
on, if you like someone else's suggestion and that way it just became this really democratic
view of the ingredients and the process. We used Google chat as we went through this process,
we would meet up every month or so as we were bringing this toward the test batch and then
from the test batch toward the market place. We did Google Sites for the actual Urkontinent
website and we used Google Video, some people submitted videos to go along with their ingredient
submissions. We also set up our Google+ business page, my wife did, at some point during that
process and that's another important social media tool that we use. So what was really
neat about this global component is you had this influx of over 100, I think, ingredient
ideas, that came into our world, so you had the one component of how many people in the
Google universe would have liked to see that ingredient included in this beer and then
the other component of, oh ***, those things would taste horrible together.
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: for some of the things, every
single idea, if I could read you that list it's like a free form poem of awesome ideas
for ingredients that don't usually go into beer; all 100 of them had their merits. Really
then our job became sort of curators of that recipe, the Google team sat down with the
Dogfish team and this over 100 list of ingredients and we started whittling it away for what
things would work well together. So I forget, can you remember any of the really weird ones
that we had to just throw out immediately? Keith?
[Inaudible]
>>Sam Calagione: Poisonous, right. [Laughter]
>>Sam Calagione: We try to, you know, sort of hallucinogens and things that kill you
were pretty easy for us to knock off of that list. So there were a few of those. That wasn't
my weirdest ingredient moment, I was in Cairo a couple years ago sourcing some ingredients
for a beer we do called Ta Henket based on ancient Egyptian beers and I was at the market
place and I was horribly ineffective trying to use my Italian, gesticulating to describe
what I wanted and why and they're just kind of, and then they're like "Yeah" and we made
the agreement and I'm walking away with deer *** as an ingredient.
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: because I was trying to get
dates and the words were very similar. [Laughter]
>>Sam Calagione: Dom fruit which is a palm fruit and then I'm walking away and I'm like
that's really neat, you know, we're gonna be able to use these dates and the one thing
I caught in translation earlier was that this ingredient would also be very good for my
sex life. [Laughter]
>>Sam Calagione: And I guess that's what the deer *** does so, um
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: that's a bad digression but
let's get back to Urkontinent. Know that we don't ever use that ingredient in any of our
beers. [Laughter]
>>Sam Calagione: So, oh the ingredients are up there, the list is up there. So that's
an example of the page, is that also the actual ones that we chose, Cameron, or is that an
earlier version?
[Inaudible]
>>Sam Calagione: Okay, cool, so if you kind of, you get the idea of range, and then to
the left is where people are saying, right, whether they like that idea and then we tallied
that as well and that went into our decision process. What was also neat was from around
the world, some of the ingredients were chosen two, three or four times that were submitted,
I think rooibos, right, was one of the ones that came to us, we're still in the process
of getting the cases of beer, if you were part of the Google community and your idea
got chosen we sent you, or are in the process, some people already got theirs, a case of
the Urkontinent as, for having the ingredient that was chosen. We had to narrow honey down
a little bit further 'cause there were different kinds of honey, that was one of the ones that
multiple, multiple entries. But the other part of this is how much of the editing process
informed what ended up being the recipe, especially the things that we chose not to consider because
then really, Dogfish Head had value in this beyond just the ingredients that we chose.
It allowed us to get this global sourcing of over 100 ingredients and some theories
behind why they might be good in beer and believe me, we've kept that list and we refer
to it and think about it as part of our process of coming up with additional recipes. And
really that's part of what we, as small business people, how we use Google as well, particularly
in an industry, if you're a small business person it means that you're most likely in
an industry where you're in a niche, you're not gonna be able to compete on scale or on
volume with the biggest players in your industry regardless of what they are. So in order to
stand out in an industry where you're tiny, you have to do something really different.
So I know other brewers, like myself, use Google search to do that first phase of vetting
an idea, a creative idea because you can go there and say I got this awesome idea for
beer with blah, blah, blah and you can do a quick search, "Beer with blah blah blah"
and if it's already been done it's probably not a good choice to try and stand out in
the world by doing that or beer names, you might not have an IP lawyer on your staff
at a three person nano brewery but you can come up, you can say hold on a second I'm
gonna call my brewing company, blah blah blah, that's the name and you type in blah blah
blah brewing company and before you have to go through all that official research to get
in use or trademarks and all that stuff, you can quickly look, without lawyers, kind of
parse down or work through those options. So, I know that's something that we all do
pretty regularly as small businesses. So, at any rate, there's some great ideas for
recipes that, for ingredients that came out of that, but back to our process was the hard
decisions of editing that and curating that list which we did together over some of the
video conferencing that we did. And then these guys came down to Rehoboth and we brewed the
test batch together, I don't remember what month that was.
>>audience member: August.
>>Sam Calagione: August. So that was kind of nice. When we were down there we also took
a lot of video. I think, Cameron, you were wearing the crazy go pro head thing so there's
some neat shots in the video that we did together that are super, you know, kind of Indie movie,
jumping all over the place type stuff and then we did some more nice, more formalized
editing stuff that became part of that film. And then after the test batch we sent samples,
I think, or we discussed that and you guys, some of you came back down didn't you when
it came on tap? Or didn't any of you come down in between? No? Mike maybe? So the next
process was actually the sensory component, not just did they all sound nice on a page
and we thought they could work together but how they would work together. So that's why
we do these smaller test batches and, again, not using focus groups, what we had when we
were talking about, you guys call it dog, dog fooding an idea of kicking it around and
making sure, at least internally, that these are gonna be, your coworkers are also the
best and most critical judges that you could have. And we kind of do the same thing at
our pub where we always do a test batch before we bring a beer to market, at least one sometimes
two, and I talked to my buddies at a chicken company much bigger than us that also is kind
of near us, and they were saying, "Wow that's so lucky that you get people that pay for
your R and D batches." [Laughter]
>>Sam Calagione: You know? They have focus groups where people are paid to go try their
new ideas for chicken and they were frankly like, you know, yes there's some good data
that comes from that process but let's face it, someone's in a room getting' paid to eat
some chicken they're like, "That's good! I like that one! That's good!"
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: you're getting paid to do
that. You kind of reverse that idea and you got hardcore beer geeks coming to our pub
in Rehoboth and now we get over 1,000 visitors to our production brewery every week. These
people make a pilgrimage from Ohio or Kentucky or there was some from Brazil there 3 days
ago cause they were showing the Brew master show down there and they decided that's what
they wanted to do with their week's vacation. If these people are gonna come that far to
the brewery then of course they're gonna say, since Dogfish has a reputation for experimentation,
of course when they get to the source they're gonna say, "What's new? What haven't I tried?
What's just being brewed in your pub right now?" So then these people drove from Brazil
and I don't know what the currency is there but they put out their money on the table,
I'd say about six bucks, and we give them a beer, they're gonna tell us if it sucks.
It's not like we're paying them to give us opinion, that process of actually asking,
expecting people to pay for even your R and D batches is wonderful in terms of getting
you very real feedback. So there were some tweaks that we made to the test batch. I forget
which, which spice it was that we decided was not coming through as much and we upped.
>>Adam: [Inaudible]
>>Sam Calagione: Oh, okay, as we made that call, was that based on the teas? The water
teas that we made?
>>Adam: [Inaudible]
>>Sam Calagione: Shh! Adam, we're filming here.
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: That creative decision that
we made to go in a different direction. [Laughter]
>> Adam: [inaudible] I'm just trying to say--. I think you referred to it as the [inaudible]
>>Sam Calagione: We called it an audible. [laughter] So, uh, what I really think actually
what we wanted to pull up forward was the wattle seed which comes from Australia which
we now we, to get it here was not easy cause it hadn't been acknowledged in a beer ingredient
before so that process of submitting that label to the TTB, the feds that, the federal
arm that regulates us, it involves an SOP, a statement of process and there wasn't really
a history of wattle seed and then finding a wattle seed producer that could get us this
much in this volume, the first guys we called in Australia was like, "Oh yeah, mate, I got
200 plants in my backyard." We're like, "We're making 4,000 cases of this beer."
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: You got a bunch of neighbors
with 200 plants each, like, 400 neighbors or so?
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: So it led to us working with
a consortium of wattle seed raising type people. [Laughter]
>>Sam Calagione: And we had to over buy, we had to commit to a certain volume which led
to some really good wattle seed ice cream at our pub.
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: You had wattle seed salad
special, you had, we're tired of wattle seed on its own, we like it in Urkontinent though.
But at any rate it's what contributes the almost, the dirt, it's almost it doesn't sound
good as a beer descriptor but there's a very earthy, dirt like note to this beer that we
think is really unique in beer and the roasted dark grains that give this the color in comparison
to, say, Positive Contact, really complimented that earthy notes that came from the wattle
seed. It was also a heroic effort done by the Google team to get what I think was like,
you know, three fifths of the Mountain View's honey supply that the chef keeps up on the
roof up there. But he was excited to be part of this project as well so that was another
"Oh ***" moment of ingredients to say will we really be able to get. So it's pretty ironic
that we have ingredients from around the world and our anxiety was mostly around the honey
that was coming because we wanted to make sure we used Google's honey cause that's how
we promoted it. So at any rate we do, there wasn't one Urkontinent advertisement, we didn't
pay in any traditional extent for any of the marketing of Urkontinent. We served it at
GABF, the Great American Beer Festival which is the largest single beer even in the country
put on by the Brewer's Association. I took a couple sixtels to a couple special events
that I knew would be very high impact whether it was just 60 of us beer geeks in a room
I knew it would resonate online and then the internal chatter of those folks won and the
true champions on the team getting the word out about it and, of course, the film that
we made together. So really that film was the centerpiece of sort of our marketing,
bringing this beer to market plan. So it really was just timed where folks from the Google
side shared the world, shared the word at the same moment that Mariah, my wife, kind
of blasted it out through our social media. As Adam mentioned, there was some anxiety
caused by that because, of course, the idea is a Google brewing company and I Googled
that, someone's already got that, you can't use that name.
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: But there was some concern
because, obviously, Dogfish Head was making the beer all ourselves as professional brewers
and we understood the liability was there. My hats off to Google that they still allowed
this film to go out there it's one of the most viewed YouTube videos that Dogfish has
ever made. So that in itself meant that by the time the orders of this beer shipped they
were already 100 percent sold out. When it came off the packaging line the demand from
the distributors was such that we probably could have made twice as much and still immediately
sold it out before it actually got to retail. So a wonderful challenge but intentionally
so and Dogfish does this all the time, we don't wanna be just 60 Minute Brewing Company,
our flagship beer, we're probably the only sizable top 20 craft breweries that high fives
each other when the percentage of our revenue based on our best selling beer goes down in
a year. Like, we got down to 47 percent! You know, you get fired if you ran a public company
for making these kinds of decisions I'm sure. [Laughter]
>>Sam Calagione: But, again, if we really believe in 'off centered ales for off centered
people' as a concept then we need to practice what we preach. So our goal is to always put
as much efforts and energy into one off, you know, single time a year release beers like
Urkontinent and Positive Contact as we put behind 60 Minute. So, that process allows
us to have 30 something, 35 beers that we package every year compared to maybe the norm
of a little less than half that for most brewers but these beers act as a de facto marketing
or sales team because there's always something to talk about if you're at a retail place
and someone says, "Hey, what's new from Dogfish?" We try to make sure that every month, and
maybe two or three times a month, there's something coming up that's a limited release
and we intentionally gauge our volume to make sure that demand is higher than supply so
that these experiments continue to be exciting for beer lovers who really kind of wanna come
on this journey with us and explore the outer edges of what beer can be. So, the gang will
take questions when we get to the Q and A part but I should probably move on, I'm gonna
take a drink real quick. Does anyone have a question while I have a few ounces of beer?
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: Go ahead. No? You wanna wait
til the end?
>>male #1: What's your favorite Dogfish beer?
>>Sam Calagione: It's usually the one I'm drinking when I'm asked that question.
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: Um, I probably by volume
drink mostly Indian Brown, 60 Minute, Hellhound, our IPA. In the summer I drink a whole lot
of our Festina Peche which is a tart light 4 ½ ABV beer, Namaste, which is like a Belgian
white we do with lemon grass. By volume those, and then every week if something new comes
our packaging line I bring home either a 750 or a six pack or if it's one off we do every
year I still bring that home to see if it's evolving and I have a nice little library
at home and at the brewery to compare everything that we've brewed again. So, it's a fun job.
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: So I'll move on to Positive
Contact and I guess in between them I'll talk about that approach to collaboration for us.
And, again, I mentioned it earlier when I said collectively the small breweries have
less than seven percent market share so we recognize the rising tide floats all ships
component of our niche, of the beer industry, but collaboration in Dogfish is even more
central to our approach. You know, we think that there's a lot of good karma that comes
with prioritizing collaboration instead of competition and we catch ourselves in moments,
at meetings, talking about competitive subjects and we consciously try to stop ourselves and
bring our discussion back to, you know, what we can do that's positive. So, one of the
most positive things we think we can do is work with other companies that we believe
in and regardless of scale. And sometimes we take *** for that, you know, when we do
a beer called Theobroma, an ancient, an ancient recipe we use a tiny company called Askinosie
Chocolate in Saint Louis and we got to tell that story and share the word on Askinosie
and bring some attention to them through what we did and they shared the word and kind of
got their chocolate and our peanut butter but our peanut butter's beer and it was kind
of a one plus one equals three as it is with any collaboration because you're accessing
the group of people that love one company and turning them on to the other company so
it kind of allows both those companies awareness to grow exponentially when these new demographics,
or groups of people, are suddenly turned on to something that they didn't know about.
So, Askinosie's a no brainer, tiny little artisanal company, but when we do a beer with
Sony music, Miles Davis *** Brew, you know, we took some flak from that from a few
beer geeks, fellow beer geeks online saying, "Oh, you're working with Sony that'd be like
if you were working with Budweiser." And our theory there is yeah okay, but if you love
Miles Davis as an artist and he's kind of, frankly, a little bit marginalized compared
to maybe where he was in recognition for really exploring that fusion jazz, rock world that
a lot of bands play in today, this is a nice opportunity for us to celebrate that and kind
of bring Miles Davis to a bunch of hardcore beer geeks in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, that
might not have been as familiar with his work. So we make sure the opportunity to collaborate
makes sense and we've said no, there was a mustard, big *** mustard company that wanted
to do a co branded thing with us and we basically just said, okay we're gonna do this, this
and this and they're like, "Oh, no, we'll use our own, a beer that we make here in this
Dogfish co branded thing just cause of the way we produce." And that was a very short
conversation cause there was nothing authentic about that process. And then, uh, compare
that to recently we talked to two different companies; I was eating pickles one night
and had [Laughter]
>>Sam Calagione: with my 60 Minutes IPA, [Laughter]
>>Sam Calagione: and I was like, dang, these go really well together.
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: I was, and they were from
Brooklyn Brine, a small company here and that led me to explore an opportunity to work with
Shamus and the gang at Brooklyn. And, meanwhile, there's a big, there's at least one big cucumber
slash pickle company with big locations in Delaware. We thought about that for a moment
but that one didn't seem like the right fit. If they were big and local and locally owned
and weigh into the local Delmarva peninsulas community, the scaled wouldn't have mattered,
but the feeling that there was nothing that we felt warm about and my HR director was
the one that was like, "This one doesn't feel right." And that's kind of how we make these
decisions and our process at Dogfish is really demo-, democratic. We have basically seven
people that I sit with, I'm the president, my wife Mariah's the boss
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: the vice president, Nick,
is our chief operating officer and then VP of sales, brewing operations director and
brewmaster and HR director, we all seven sit at a table. And a few years ago they were
like, "Sam, we're all in. We don't want to work anywhere else. The one thing we would
like, though, is a little more input on the what we're doing next stuff. That's still
we know what you're good at and what you love but for us to feel 100 percent all in at the
executive level of running this company, can you kind of run these ideas [chuckles] by
us before you tell us this is what we're doing next week?" So that was probably one of the,
in 17 years, kind of the biggest moment of humility for me because I already felt like,
this is starting to feel like a self help thing over here.
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: I should lay down. But, you
know [Laughter]
>>Sam Calagione: I should sit in the chair. But, for me, what I recognized, a kind of
existential moment was that I'd done a pretty good job of hiring people whose skills compliment
my own and that's what was really hard as a small business, startups all about we don't
have cash, we don't have money, we gotta survive, survival mode. And then as you grow the challenges
become more about people and finding the right people to fit culturally and finding the right
people with the skill set to match your own as you try and grow this company. And I'd
done a pretty good job at that so I could just focus on what I'm good at which is a
new beer recipe, a new idea for an event, a new idea for collaboration or a project.
So I took great pride in saying I've got this part of the company but then you also have
to realize that that's kind of one of the fun parts of working at a small business and
being at the executive level, is being involved in these giant risk decisions to do something
you haven't done before. So it was a real challenge for me to listen to them and say
okay and now it's turned into this big dysfunctional sort of Italian family approach to strategy.
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: Where it's like, ah, and
I basically have to whine and cry, I don't cry but I whine and don't yell.
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: I whine and, like, I walk
up and down the room and the cliché is that I rarely say I'm gonna put my president's
hat on for this one and you know it got bad if that happened. And I rarely do it because
I know if I don't have all of them on board and wanting to push with me in the same direction,
the project's gonna have a less likely chance of succeeding. So the real goal is getting,
is convincing all, the six of them to want to do what I do, what I wanna do. Then a lot
of times that leads to us altering that idea, you know, when I did the pickle collaboration
with Shamus and Brooklyn my instinct was I really like this guy let's just trust him
we don't need a contract. [Laughter]
>>Sam Calagione: And Nick, our COO, is like, "I like him, too. I wanna do this project,
we need a contract." [Laughter]
>>Sam Calagione: So that's an example of that process. So it's really also an example of
collaboration not just outside with companies, but collaboration internally within our company
and how the seven of us try to work together to move Dogfish Head in the right direction.
So, I learn from them every day. So, the project behind you is one that was pretty unified,
yes, that they were behind doing it because it's not a giant label band and because, you
know, the idea to bring food into it hadn't been done before and they really loved that
idea. So basically this beer, Positive Contact, came from Dan the automator, the musicians
from, he's in Gorillas and Deltron 3030 is the band that this one came about from and
basically this album was a pivotal album for me when it came out 11 years ago or whatever
it was, I just loved it cause it was so distinct in the world of Hip Hop cause, again, it had
a lot of that jazz and orchestration components, very like grand music for the world of Hip
Hop. And Del's like, Del the funky *** sapien is also in this band, is an amazing rapper.
So
I got the call from Dan and I was just walking around the conference room on the phone with
Dan the Automator and I'm like yeah. And so he told me, he's like, "I'm a big Miles fan."
He named his son Miles and he's like, "I love what you guys did with that and with Robert
Johnson" we did a beer with and he was a big fan of that and he's like, "Let's do something."
So, as we walked into that he wasn't a huge beer geek he was more of a foodie and so he's
like, basically I sent him every beer we make, it was about $400 worth of beer, I think 40
different beers from different vintages and it was more in shipping than just the beer
cause I wanted to make sure it got there in really good shape so I overnighted it from
Delaware to his home in San Francisco, like $600, I don't remember what it was to ship
it but it was a lot. [Laughter]
>>Sam Calagione: Shipping it overnight was not an idea I brought in front of the seven
people that I work with. [Laughter]
>>Sam Calagione: I don't think it would have gone well. I think I would have had to put
on my president's hat. So, anyway, he was awesome about it. The idea was I asked that
he drink each beer and then send me a little diary entry on his impressions of that beer
and it was also a canary in the coal mine to see if this was a project that he would
take seriously cause I know he's a very well regarded musician and probably gets pulled
in a million directions. So this is a way to see if he was really engaged and it would
be really an authentic equal sort of collaboration the way it was when we did Urkontinent with
the folks at Google. And it was neat, every single day he would, he wouldn't necessarily
finish them all cause it'd be a big champagne bottle and he'd say, "I had four or five ounces
of this. This is what I liked, this is what I didn't " and then I just asked for him to
do free form list your favorite culinary ingredients and then I met him here in New York City at
Birreria, the brew pub that Dogfish and two Italian breweries do the brewing, we're the
brewing sort of collaborators on the Birreria project, we just opened another one in Rome
with Eataly stores here and in Rome. So I met Dan the Automator up on the roof, I brought
a bunch of the ingredients that I thought from his list would work well in a beer, I
had cheese graters and tea steepers and paring knives and we just sat there and I took the
base beer of his four favorites beers of the 40 that we use and we just sat there and put
the different ingredients in those four beers. Alcohol acts as a solvent, strips kind of
the flavors and oils out of that ingredient and gives you a rough idea of how it'll contribute
to that beer. So, from that we were able to kind of do what our process was and figure
out what ingredients worked well together and really Fuji Apples, Cilantro and Cayenne
pepper actually proved to go really well together. And we've never commercially done anything
that's cideresque and to do this beer with a very high percentage of apple, making it
a hybrid between the worlds of a cider and a beer was something new and exciting for
us so, again, an opportunity to learn from our collaborator of something we might not
have known ourselves. So then the idea was, you're a foodie, how about this, if you come
up with four original sort of dub versions of the songs on the next album, let's, for
now, put them on CD, we'll do the test batch at the pub, we'll send out bottles of the
test batch to our favorite chefs, you pick a few and I'll pick a few, with the music
and we'll ask them to put the music on, drink one of the bottles and then think about the
other, the, the beer and the music and what food would go well with that. So we chose
five chefs from Mario Batali to David Chang and some great chefs and they all, again,
were all in on the project and sent us their notes and their thoughts and we asked to do
a recipe for six people, cause the idea was we wanna sell this as a box set, like you
would with music but our box set came with six beers, a vinyl album, on the sleeve of
the album was recipes from six people from the five chefs. And you can imagine the dozens,
no, hundreds of hours that my co workers and I had to spend putting a vinyl record into
a six pack, hand taping it with duct tape that we wrote
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: Positive Contact on the duct
tape. We sent out four cases around the country on pallets randomly to test that vinyl would
last, if it made a trip to Arizona and back, again, a shipping decision that I did not
vet [Laughter]
>>Sam Calagione: through the seven of us. And it worked. And then we even policed through
social media what happened once that beer was released in the market place, meaning,
that one UPC code on it, our intention was for it to be one product but some retailers
were a little less than ethical and chose to open that bottle, open that case up, sell
them individually which means those people would not get the album, would not get the
opportunity to do that among their friends, so what was so awesome, again, about harvesting
that world of social media as a small company, as Mariah sat there for days after that release
and watched beer lovers narc on the retailers that did this.
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: And then all we could do,
cause it would be price fixing if we called them up said you can't do that, you ***,
we can't do that cause it would be price fixing. So our message was, "We'll be very disappointed
in any retailer that decided to do this and we hope you guys, as beer lovers, will voice
your disappointment as well." And other than like a couple regions of the country, most
people were pretty good at respecting that decision to keep that as one whole beer. Now,
will we ever do that again and go through that bottling and putting an album in? Perhaps
not. [Laughter]
>>Sam Calagione: But our commitment, we have other, we have 'off centered ale for off centered
people' and 'analog beer for the digital age' and those are sort of our two rallying cries
and we will continue to do projects with the vinyl and with other musicians we love. So,
I think I'm pretty close to the Q and A part of the presentation and I'd rather just, let's
just open it up and if you guys have any questions at all, this will give me another opportunity
to have another sip of beer.
>>male #2: So the Google collaboration beer seems to be sold out everywhere, hard to get,
are there any plans to increase production and get this into the hands of people looking
for it?
>>Sam Calagione: We would love to. From what I understand, Keith is mostly responsible
for that. [Laughter]
>>Sam Calagione: I don't know from here how he's buying them in Kentucky but that's pretty
cool. Again, this is one that we love keeping demand in front of supply but we realize the
challenge when most of, a lot of folks from within the Google community couldn't get access
to this as well. We tried to send out to what areas, you know, we tried to send more to
New York, we intentionally found retailers around your California location and asked
them to stock up but it's a real challenge cause, again, at retail we have to make the
beer available to everybody, that's also federally mandated. It's barely answering your question.
The better answer would be we'd love to do this beer again someday and I don't know when
that day will come.
>>male #3: Dogfish Head has a really distinctive look in branding. Do you guys have an in house
designer that makes all your labels?
>>Sam Calagione: It used to be me and then two years ago we hired our first graphic design
guy and I loved that job and it was kinda like a, and I still, I painted the Urkontinent
type face and then brought that word in all the different fonts, kind of representing
all the different folks that, each letter's from a different font and then I brought that
to our graphic designer and from that, you know, using that color scheme the label developed.
So I still love staying very involved in that. I came up with our sort of ransom letter type
font called doggy, which was basically a 19th century stamp set that I just cut and paste
and scanned in to create a font and then I came up with our logo and that outer broken edge kind of, you
know, trying to talk about the, you know, looking kind of rustic. So I still love being
involved in that art project. Our challenge at our company is you don't want just the
art on the label to be perceived as the art of what we do so we kind of need to recognize
that every different department contributes toward that perception of how unique our brand
is. So we don't really put on a pedestal, the brewers or the guys that do the art, everyone's
kind of helping to get that beer to market. So, yeah, I don't know if that answered it
but.
>>male #3: Yeah, thank you.
>>Sam Calagione: Yep.
>>male #4: I'm a few drinks in so forgive me if this comes our slurry.
[Laughter] >>male #4: You talked a lot about the different
ingredients you use at Dogfish, can you talk a little bit about the ways you make beer.
I'm thinking specifically about cast gauging or whiskey casts that are really popular,
some of the ways you're thinking about expanding that.
>>Sam Calagione: Yeah, we're, right now the vast majority of the commercial brewing equipment
is stainless steel because it's sterile and, you know, easy to clean, very durable, but
long before stainless steel there were lots of other materials used in the world of brewing.
We do, we have the largest brewing wooden vessels built in America since before prohibition,
we're adding another palo santo wood which is a Paraguayan dark wood, 10,000 gallon wooden
brewing vessels. But we are playing around outside of that. We just did an ancient ale
with our Italian, the two brewers that we do Eataly with and we went to ruins, Etruscan
ruins outside of Rome and we vetted, sort of looked at those tombs and the materials
that were either written about coming from that culture or actually still had evidence
at the tombs were bronze, wood and terracotta and so our three breweries are doing the exact
same recipe but fermenting the beer with different material. So, Baladan's doing their fermentation
on wood, we're using bronze in our fermenters and then Birra Del Borgo just built these
beautiful huge terracotta fermenters. So in a way you kind of look at the whole culinary
landscape for ingredients we need to also kind of be looking at, you know, every potential
surface to use for beer as well.
>>male #5: How did a guy from Delaware get involved in Eataly?
>>Sam Calagione: Okay, um, yep. [Laughter]
>>Sam Calagione: Well,
>>male #5: You seem the only non Italian company down there.
>>Sam Calagione: Yeah, well that basically, that relationship didn't start with like Mario
Batali or what was happening here, it started with Salon De Gusto which is the bi annual
slow food conference that happens in Turin which is the, you know, birthplace of that
movement, that movement slow food was kind of in response to them trying to put a McDonalds
in downtown Rome and the Italians rioted. [Laughter]
>>Sam Calagione: Which is pretty cool. So it kind of birthed a modern era of sort of
the locavore thing, or at least the earlier modern version, I mean, again, craft brewers
were brewing beer with whatever was indigenous and local 10,000 years ago so locavore wasn't
invented by *** hipster in Brooklyn three years ago.
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: It's been going on for 10,000
years. So I was invited to speak at the Salon De Gusto maybe every other year for maybe
the last 7 or 8 years and there's an awesome Italian craft beer pavilion over there and
I, of course, would have some beers with these guys and just realized that they were, you
know, brothers in arms and very creative and using tobacco and rare grains and tree resins
in their beer. So I really hit it off with two of them and then those are two brewers
that are involved in Eataly, the retail company that's owned by a family over in Italy and
when Eataly, as a family, started to decide to open one in New York as their first American
Eataly, they said we love these Italian brewers, we love, you know, we get along really well
with Sam even the owners of Eataly I hung out with over there, they're like, "how about
you three open a brewery in this Eataly instead of just having a real good craft beer program?"
So, then, and Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich their American partners, so that's when I
got to know them. But it mostly started with a relationship with the Eataly family owners
and those two Italian brewers. And the one we opened in Rome, I think it's the biggest
single retail location in the world, the store in Rome just took over a giant train station
and we have a similarly sized brewery in the one there. I really kind of helped, I kind
of oversaw the installation and vetting the brewing equipment decisions here since I'm
a lot closer and they're doing that for Rome. It's a fun project.
>>male #6: So, what percent of beer batches would you say don't make it past the testing
phase at the brew pub?
>>Sam Calagione: Um, let's see, um, we always have a program where we're just kind of throwing
stuff against the walls to see what works without a goal of considering it for potential
wide distribution. Those are just like fun, creative flex your muscles, get input from
other brewers and make sure there's always fun small batches that we only do at the pub.
So a lot of them that we do at the pub are never brewed with the intention of national
distribution, they're one off, just fun. But usually it is, I usually work on what I think
would work well to come to market and there's usually two or three test batches. We did,
you know, and sometimes they don't work, I tell the story often about one we did with
wheat and lavender and peppercorns and there was way too much lavender and the first comment
card from someone that bought it came back and said it tastes like tongue kissing Laura
Ashley. [Laughter]
>>Sam Calagione: So there's another where we did, a beer called Immort Ale, 11 percent
alcohol and aged on wood and the first comment was, this was in '96 we were doing wood age,
peat smoke and barley beers and some of them were maybe ahead of their time and some of
them just sucked. [Laughter]
>>Sam Calagione: We're doing one right now that, I don’t think it's on tap right, yet,
but it's called Hot Thoup, T-H-O-U-P exclamation point, and I got the idea for it when my nephew,
who's only like 3, my sister was buying, they were buying a, they were getting a Labrador
Retriever dog and they asked the kids what they wanted to name the dog, they decided
on another name but the 3 year old kept saying, "Hot thoup! Hot thoup!"
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: And they're like, "It's not
time to eat" and he's like, "No, doggie! Hot thoup!"
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: So I laughed at that and
I'm like, wait a second, you know, so we did a beer with carrots and ginger that we think
would be really good soup, obviously used a lot in soup recipes, but we got the fermentables
from carrot juice, pure, unpasteurized carrot juice and the beer has an awesome orange hue
to it. Whether a beer called "Hot Thoup" made with carrots is gonna sell, I don't know.
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: The brewers aren't psyched
about it. They don't wanna see us do thousands of batches of Hot Thoup beer.
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: but that's one that I hope
people like.
>>male #7: So, what actually is it about the really large mass market that makes them taste
so bad? Why is it? [Laughter]
>>male #7: What practical part of the brewing process is it that is difficult to scale up?
Cause everyone seems to agree that the small microbreweries, craft breweries, have much
better beer.
>>Sam Calagione: Right, well, I mean, that's, you know, the biggest breweries make some
of the most consistent, quality consistent oriented beers in the world, that's how they
got to be the biggest breweries. I'm, I'm, I'm a beer geek and I'm not a beer snob, I
might not buy the beer from a giant brewery but after mowing the lawn or after a hockey
game, I love an ice cold can of Labatt's and I'll drink, I'll drink pretty much any beer
that's in someone's fridge if I'm having beers that night and I'm at their house.
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: But, the perception that
the larger a brewery gets the less good their beer is is a real challenge cause even a brewery
of Dogfish's size has giant tanks, relatively big tanks outside and we look, to the local
community, like a big brewery and there's other much smaller breweries within 100 miles
of us but the danger becomes, you know, if you go to the hardcore beer geek websites,
there's some unfortunate correlation between the scale of a craft brewery and their perception
online. It's kind of that phenomena of no one eats at that restaurant anymore, it's
too crowded. You know, where there's a reason that restaurants crowded and it's cause a
lot of people like it and just cause an early adaptor can't get in the door anymore to that
restaurant doesn't make that a bad restaurant. But there is sort of a minority voice of hardcore
beer geeks that are always, you know, we also excited for what's new but to be excited for
what's new while still championing the breweries that trail blazed on doing really exciting
stuff is really important for our community to stay healthy. And I'm sure you guys face
this in the tech world, too. If it's ubiquitous and everywhere, it's suddenly less cool but
ubiquitous and everywhere in our industry, you know, again, we're one fifteenth of one
percent market share and we get some of that backlash. So, you know, scale shouldn't play
into it.
>>male #7: But are there actual problems in the brewing process to make it bigger, like,
do you guys taste a little bit of it and adjust things along the way, things that you just
couldn’t do if you were-
>>Sam Calagione: Oh, scaling our batches, you mean? Oh, I answered that question totally
wrong. [Laughter]
>>Sam Calagione: But I'm glad I shared that stuff.
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: Uh, yeah, we intentionally
go, we training wheel our beers, you know, dog food them at our pub in five barrel, 10
keg batch to test that. We have a 10 gallon batch that we can even test further just when
we're trying to tweak one recipe in that but we don't wanna do a bigger scale thing, we
do a little tiny one. And then we jump up to the 100 barrel brew house and now we're
building a 200 barrel next to the 100. So we've got a nice, you know, litany of brew
houses of different scales to play around with those recipes. And, yes, it's not, brewing
recipes are not just proportionally extrapolated up, you know, you still tweak hops and barley
and different things in different scale batches, it doesn't all just go up equally, you know,
when you scale the recipe.
>>male #8: A lot of us here are engineers so we're very concerned about efficiency.
So, what's the highest alcohol percentage beers that you
[Laughter]
>>Sam Calagione: The front part of your question, I didn't know it was going in that direction.
[Laughter]
>>male #8: And that you've ever made.
>>Sam Calagione: Right, we had a fun, back and forth in the late '90s, early 2000s, I
guess, where we were in coastal Delaware and it's pretty quite in that era, demand for
beers than what it is now so we spent a lot of time working on how we can make beer stronger.
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: by just learning, we used
it as let's learn about yeast and, you know, why aren't, you know, so we made a beer that
was 18 percent and that became the strongest beer in the world, it was Triple Bock from
Boston Beer before that, we came out with World Wide, then they came up with Millennium
and then we came out with, I don't know what but we got out of the arms race.
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: And we're still very proud
of our stronger beers for really holding all the details, I brought Adam a seven year old
bottle of our World Wide Stout and beers that are over nine percent alcohol, the most important
thing to say is these aren't meant to be like, "Oh, it's strong I'm gonna da, da, da drink
way too much of it really fast, look at me." And that happens on YouTube, you occasionally
see a person and it makes me cringe, nothing makes me cringe more because these beers,
you know, a light Lager or light wheat beer, light wheat ale takes about 10, 12 days to
brew, this beer doesn't even go into the bottle till it's about 2 months so as an engineer
you'll appreciate this lack of efficiency where we're tying up a tank that could have
been turned over, you know, eight times, to makes something like this and then we put
it on a shelf and now it's seven years old before it was opened to share it with a friend.
So, these beers are meant to be sipped and savored and so we do, I think we do more volume
of beers and more styles of beers over, say, 11 percent alcohol then any brewery in the
country between 120 Minute, World Wide, Fort, Old School Barleywine, so we're always, we're
very considerate of that yeast process and we, I think we're still at the point where
our quality control department is larger in people than our sales are in the field sales
people. And the last question here?
>>male #9: Musicians can be very influenced by other musicians. How much would you say
you're influenced by other breweries and what other people are doing versus just stuff you're
coming up with purely on your own?
>>Sam Calagione: Um, I'm definitely spurred on by the passion of other brewers and I'm
really proud of the collaborations that we've done with the brewers that we've done. That
beer, Extreme Brewing, that some of you got tonight, the recipe's from all kinds of amazing
breweries, from Allagash to the Brewery, from Shorts to Portsmouth Brewing. So many breweries
excite me and inspire me but what I really try not to do is be, like, is take what they're
doing and somehow absorb it into something that we're gonna do. So we only advertise
in beer geek publications and, frankly, I never read them. If they're doing an interview
I'm really proud to be part of it cause I'm doing it to support the industry that supports
us but I also really don't wanna be influenced by what else is already happening cause our,
our approach at Dogfish is really there's no use in doing what's already been done.
So in the case of, okay, Sam you're a hypocrite the volume of what you sell, your biggest
selling beer is an IPA, that's an established style, and that might be fair but we try to,
we came up with a very unique hopping approach where instead of just one or two or three
big additions, we dose continually for 60 minutes in small volumes equally, or 90 minutes
or whatever. So that was our way into an existing style that allowed us to still approach, you
know, from an off centered perspective and kind of put our little thumb print on at least
what we do. So, I really love seeing breweries that are going for it. Probably my favorites
are just the other ones like us that are, you know, brewing outside the Reinheitsgebot
box type thing. So, I won't say their names but that's kind of the ones that I'm psyched
for and then, of course, the first generation brewers like Ken Grossman from Sierra, Nevada
who I kind of recognize as a real patriarch of our movement, Anchor Brewery was a little
bit earlier and deserves mad props but that was taking over an existing, but ailing, regional
brewery that never went out of business. Ken Grossman's the first guy that kind of was
a bike repairman, sat down with a drill, built his own mash tun, started in a room this big,
so for me that was really the starting point of our movement.
>>male #9: Thank you very much.
>>Sam Calagione: Wow, this has been fun. I've learned a lot.
[Laughter] >>Sam Calagione: I should sit now.
>>male #10: Thank you so much, really appreciate it.
>>Sam Calagione: This is great. [Applause]
>>Sam Calagione: Thank you Keith, thank you Cameron.
[Applause] >>Sam Calagione: You forgot your beer.
[Applause]