GILL — What could Henry David Thoreau’s writings, cherries, a cornucopia of spices and beer possibly have in common?
Just ask Sam Calagione, a Northfield Mount Hermon alumnus, Greenfield native and the founder of the Milton, Delaware-based Dogfish Head Brewery – he’s used each of them to some extent when throwing together the unorthodox recipes that have become synonymous with his iconic craft beer company.
The answer to that question came Thursday night during a talk at the school, hosted by the Center for Learning through Action, that spanned the origins of his interest in brewing and inspiration behind his wacky concoctions to the philanthropy and socially ethical approach that underpins his whole operation.
OK, so maybe he hasn’t started tossing pages of “Walden” into his brews yet, but Calagione said his time at Northfield Mount Hermon School instilled a love for two things that have had a major influence on his approach to brewing – English literature and the culinary arts.
Calagione said his lessons in classic American literature, which led him to pursue a master of fine arts degree at Columbia University, gave him the outside-the-box mind-set that’s led him to include unconventional ingredients like honey, Muscat grapes, spruce tips and chicory — some of which he had used during his work-job participation in the school’s kitchen — in his beer.
The result was the country’s first brewery founded on the idea of breaking the traditionalist mold of the industry, codified in German purity laws from the 16th century, and bringing a culinary approach to his craft.
“My beer recipes were my own version of the poems I loved,” he said. “They were recipes for beers that had never existed before.”
Since launching the company in 1995, he has traveled the world learning about ancient brews, using modern science to analyze the organic matter in terracotta pots that once held the beverages, and working to bring inventive those culinary techniques to his products.
Initially, that didn’t sit well with beer traditionalists: “We weren’t being looked at as cool or inventive, but more like heretics and jerks screwing with tradition,” he said, recalling beer fairs and gatherings he had attended in the early days of Dogfish Head. “So I went back and researched to find out what those traditions I was screwing with were, because I thought ‘Maybe I should do more of that.’”
The result? One of the most recognized names in craft beer today.
All the while, Calagione and his wife, Mariah, the company’s vice president, used their successful business as a platform to engage in philanthropic work, benefiting organizations like The Nature Conservancy, and other business, like the independent record stores he said hold common ground with the craft breweries as they fight to keep the Anheuser-Busches and Amazon.coms of their respective industries at bay.
“Because we’re a private company we have a lot of latitude to what public companies can’t do and define what goodness means to us,” Calagione said. “A public company’s primary obligation is to maximizing its shareholders’ profits, but ethically those decisions can be car crashes.”
“Many times when we release a product, it’s not on profits but on ‘Does it fit and allow us to approach this collaboratively instead of competitively?’” he said.
And, he and his wife involve all the company’s employees into those efforts, too, even going so far as to shut down the company on Martin Luther King Day each year to take their engineering and maintenance equipment out to the field and build houses for Habitat for Humanity, an event called “Benevolence Day.”