Dogfish Head....

I present you here an excellent excerpt from an article in the New Yorker about a crazy good brewery and some beer history:

'The seductions of drink are wound deep within us. Which may explain why, two years ago, when John Gasparine was walking through a forest in southern Paraguay, his thoughts turned gradually to beer. Gasparine is a businessman from Baltimore. He owns a flooring company that uses sustainably harvested wood and he sometimes goes to South America to talk to suppliers. On the trip in question, he had noticed that the local wood-carvers often used a variety called palo santo, or holy wood. It was so heavy that it sank in water, so hard and oily that it was sometimes made into ball bearings or self-lubricating bushings. It smelled as sweet as sandalwood and was said to impart its fragrance to food and drink. The South Americans used it for salad bowls, serving utensils, maté goblets, and, in at least one case, wine barrels.

Gasparine wasn’t much of a wine drinker, but he had become something of a beer geek. (His thick eyebrows, rectangular glasses, and rapid-fire patter seem ideally suited to the parsing of obscure beverages.) A few years earlier, he’d discovered a bar in downtown Baltimore called Good Love that had several unusual beers on tap. The best, he thought, were from a place called Dogfish Head, in southern Delaware. The brewery’s motto was “Off-Centered Ales for Off-Centered People.” It made everything from elegant Belgian-style ales to experimental beers brewed with fresh oysters or arctic cloudberries. Gasparine decided to send a note to the owner, Sam Calagione. Dogfish was already aging some of its beer in oak barrels. Why not try something more aromatic, like palo santo?

Calagione was used to odd suggestions from customers. On Monday mornings, his brewery’s answering machine is sometimes full of rambling meditations from fans, in the grips of beery enlightenment at their local bar. But Gasparine’s idea was different. It spoke to Calagione’s own contradictory ambitions for Dogfish: to make beers so potent and unique that they couldn’t be judged by ordinary standards, and to win for them the prestige and premium prices usually reserved for fine wine. And so, a year later, Calagione sent Gasparine back to Paraguay with an order for forty-four hundred board feet of palo santo. “I told him to get a shitload,” he remembers. “We were going to build the biggest wooden barrel since the days of Prohibition.”'

See the rest of this enormous and great article here at the New Yorker!