Excerpted from Brewing Up a Business
By Sam Calagione
Reprinted with Permission

As Dogfish Head moved forward though the start-up phase and into a period of sustained but hectic growth, there were more moments to catch our breaths and look into our past at lessons learned the hard way. It has not been easy to transition from a bootstrapping little brewery, hand delivering hand-bottled beer in a pickup truck, to a brewery distributing to 26 states and 4 countries. But it has been fun. As the president of this growing company, I find that my role is constantly changing. It has been quite a challenge to build a great brand, but that is what we are aspiring to do. It takes strong leadership, commitment, and passion to persuade the rest of the company to follow your vision. You must have a clear understanding of who you are, and what your business goals are. I still do not have 20/20 vision when it comes to the business, but I am a lot less blind than I was in the old days. Living through inevitable mistakes provides clarity. Living through the wrong way to do things teaches you the right way. Starting a business can be Sisyphean: Sometimes you crush a toe as the rock lurches back at you, but when you love your job those instances only give you more conviction to push the rock forward. This is a story of one of those instances.

NOBODY TOLD ME THERE’D BE DAYS LIKE THIS

It was the end of the summer, early September 2002. I was scheduled to face another physically impossible workday. As our bottling crew loaded our undersized delivery truck with pallets of beer, I stood at a worktable constructing tap handles.

Most of the big breweries opt to order generic tap handles out of a catalog, but to be consistent with our off-centered motto, our brewery produces an off-centered tap handle. First a local blacksmith bangs out a metal rod and welds bolts to the base of it, then a friend of the brewery who is a guitar maker designs and whittles a few dozen foot-tall wooden fish. The rods and fish make it to the brewery in paper bags and land on my workbench. Then I put them together by drilling a hole in the fish, filling the hole with epoxy, jamming the rod into the hole, and affixing a metal badge onto the fish that describes what style of beer is on tap. I then take these tap handles to potential draft accounts in the surrounding cities along with cold beer samples and try to convince them to put Dogfish on tap. When I’m making these tap handles, I always feel like a Zulu warrior, sharpening his spear before a big hunt. I’m thinking about nailing a few new accounts and the thrill of the chase more than the incredible inefficiencies associated with making tap handles this way.

On this particular day, after completing the tap handles, I had to deliver a truckload of beer to Friedland Distributing in downtown Philadelphia, check in with a few existing accounts, drop off samples at a couple of potential accounts, and end my day hosting a beer tasting at a hip-to-be-square art gallery in downtown Philly. Since we first began distributing our beers in 1996 I had been playing the role of delivery guy-salesman-president-brewer with blurry and varied results.

Believing this to be a great way to kill a whole mess of birds with one heavy stone, I would schedule other appointments while in the city to drop off a delivery. I drove the truckload of beer into the city, unloaded the truck by hand, headed out into the city to solicit new business, patronized an existing account for an early dinner/happy hour tasting during rush hour, then drove back to Delaware to be home in time to tuck my children in.

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