Mariah: Yeah, I would even say that internally some of us took a while to come around to it. Some people thought it was awesome right off the bat, but those were the more hophead-focused people at Dogfish.
Now, looking back, it almost seems compared to its peers 90 Minute kind of falls right in the middle of the pack when it comes to hop intensity, feeling much more mild than it did at the time, most likely because our palates have evolved as American IPAs have evolved.
Sam: At the same time we were brewing 90 Minute we were also developing Midas Touch, the strong beer made with honey and white Muscat grapes that came from chemical research from a 2,year-old tomb. It was more wine-like in its alcohol and its complexity and for whatever reason I was much more confident about it than 90 Minute.
Because Midas Touch was sort of like a wine, we built this packaging rig that would allow us to fill Midas Touch into Champagne style bottles but we needed to pay for the rig, so we figured why not bottle a few other beers in these large format bottles as well, to sort of make up for the slack.
Since I thought there was no way 90 Minute would ever sell more than Midas Touch would sell we decided it would be one of the beers we used as filler to help us pay for the system. So we took this intensely hoppy beer that we had made and bottled it in a corked Champagne bottle.
For the label we took an old photo of a circus freak hammering a nail into his nose to symbolize just how intensely hoppy it was and sent the beer out to the marketplace, not knowing how it would be received. You are doing all kinds of crazy exotic beers and fun events and stuff.
Mariah: We sort of knew there were these beer forums online but the idea of marketing beer online would be a little bit of an overstep at that point. Sam: Within months of sending 90 Minute out some of our distributors around the country started sending cases of the stuff back to our brewery because they said the beer was too hoppy, people thought it was gross, no one would drink ml of that hoppy of a beer, the label was offensive, and that kind of stuff.
Yet at the same time, as we were taking cases of beer back, we started hearing reports of hard-core beer geeks trying to sneak 90 Minute out. Basically get their hands on it any way they could. Sam: We had a tiny little office in our house where we shared one family computer where Mariah mostly worked.
The site is called Beer Advocate. I want to talk to these guys. Mariah: So we had the buzz among the community of real craft beer obsessives, but it was the Esquire article that really caused the beer to take off. With the growing demand we moved the beer from its large format bottles into ounce vessels with the more traditional Dogfish label. Mariah: It is still our second best selling beer right now. But you have to remember that even when it came out we were so much smaller in terms of production and it was still one of our best selling beers.
Sam, do you remember the exact barrelage amount when we first started to put it into production in terms of ounce beer rounds versus now? Sam: In terms of scale, we started off probably brewing hundreds of barrels per quarter, barrel batches once a month, to brewing thousands of barrels per quarter within a year or two.
But wait! Before you hop in your ride and drive to pick up that elusive Dogfish you see on the screen, please, please call ahead to confirm availability. Here is the list of where we currently have wholesalers.
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Dogfish Head 90 Minute IP. In Show me all locations! Stores only Restaurants and bars only. Specs ABV: 9. IBU: Release: Year Round. Original Release Date: Style Imperial India Pale Ale. Enjoy Glassware IPA glass. Cheese Pairing Stilton.
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