We Talked To Dogfish Head Mastermind Sam Calagione About The New 30 Minute IPA And The Current State Of Craft Beer

Anyone who’s kept tabs on the craft beer industry since the boom that began around the start of the 2010s is likely aware the bubble has firmly burst due to the downturn it’s experienced in recent years. It’s a trend that’s impacted the smaller breweries that propagated in the decade preceding the bust as well as the stalwarts that led the initial push—a vanguard that firmly includes Sam Calagione and Dogfish Head, which is still going strong and has added a new beer to its core lineup in the form of 30 Minute Light IPA.

It’s been 30 years since Calagione opened up the establishment he dubbed Dogfish Head Brewing & Eats in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware and started pumping out the “off-centered ales” that became the calling card of what quickly transformed into one of the most innovative breweries on the planet.

A few years later, Calagione harnessed an electronic football table while jury-rigging the contraption that facilitated the continual hopping process for 90 Minute, the 9% ABV imperial IPA that soon emerged as one of Dogfish Head’s most popular and intriguing offerings.

The brewery found itself with a new signature brew when 60 Minute was welcomed to the family a couple of years later (along with the incredibly formidable 120 Minute boasting a double-digit ABV), and while a 75 Minute version was whipped up for a limited run in 2011, that particular family of brews hasn’t welcomed a permanent member in close to 25 years.

However, that’s no longer the case thanks to the grand arrival of 30 Minute, the light IPA that’s being rolled out to coincide with the 30th anniversary of Dogfish Head.

I recently got the chance to reconnect with Sam for the first time since our fantastic conversation in 2021 to get some insight on how 30 Minute came to be during a chat where he also shed some light on the aforementioned issues the industry he’s spent decades navigation is currently facing.

Dogfish Head founder Sam Calagione discusses the development of the new 30 Minute Light IPA and the challenges the craft beer industry is currently facing

Brobible: Sam, thanks for taking the time to chat, It’s been more than 25 years since you released 90 Minute and it only took a few more before 60 and 120 Minute came out, which begs the question: why did it take you so long to do 30 Minute?

Sam Calagione: With 90 Minute, there had been IPAs from England and imperial stouts invented for the trade between Russia and England, but no one had done an Imperial IPA. That was the main driver. I wanted to do a big, strong IPA and that was not a popular style back in the 1990s. Imperial IPAs didn’t exist.

I saw a cooking show about dashing in a little bit of cracked pepper the whole time a soup simmered, and that was what drove me to come up with the concept of continual hopping over the course of the whole 90 minutes and away we went.

The beer was born. It tasted beautiful. Originally it just came in giant 750 milliliter bottles with a photo of a circus freak hammering a nail into his nose. That was kind of the sensory experience due to the intensity of the beer.

That goes to why a 60 Minute and why a 30 Minute. People really dug the beer. I just kind of hit the zeitgeist where people were looking for more hop intensity in the late ’90s and early 2000s. The craft beer drinker was looking for more of everything—more ABV, more intensity—and while IBUs and bitterness might have been part of the discussion, things that were not when you’re talking about IPAs in that era were calories and carbs.

With 90 Minute, people were like, “Whoa, this is super strong. Sam. Could you give us something that’s a little less intense?” So we brought out 60 Minute soon after. Within probably two or three years, 60 Minute and 90 Minute became over half of Dogfish Head’s volume of sales.

We’ve always prided ourselves on the diversity of not just our beer lineup, but the diversity of culinary ingredients within our beer lineup itself. We had years where demand was so far in front of supply for 60 Minute we would mandate trucks leaving our brewery could only be half-filled with the green boxes it came in.

We didn’t want to be turned into the 60 Minute Brewing Company. We wanted to celebrate the diversity of all our beers.

Starting six or seven years ago, when we did SeaQuench Ale with sea salt and lime a 4.9% ABV, that was a wellness-oriented proposition. As you know, the federal government won’t let you make any wellness claims with alcoholic beverages, but we believe the concept of the beer is kind of woven into the name;  it’s made with sea salt, it’s a very thirst-quenching ale.

That’s one wellness direction. Another valid one is the non-alcoholic realm. I’m in a book club with Bill Shufelt, who owns Athletic, and he’s a great friend and I’m proud of his success. Our sister brand Sam Adams is doing a great job with non-alcoholic beers.

We didn’t want to go in that direction with Dogfish, but we wanted something that was really intentional with aggressive data points on the wellness attributes that exist in the beer world. We targeted Michelob Ultra being 95 calories and said, “Hey, can we make a full-flavored IPA that has the exact same calories as Mic Ultra?”

That led to years of R&D and tweaking recipes, and it came out in perfect time for our 30th anniversary: 30 Minute IPA, continually hopped for 30 minutes, 4% ABV, 3.6 carbs, and 95 calories.

I think the signifiers in the nutritional world have changed a bit since Mic Ultra came out. At that point, 95 calories was the biggest thing that people talked about. I think with modern eaters, the rise of paleo diets shows carbs are more and more a primary driver of wellness attributes.

30 Minute has roughly 1/4 of the carbs of regular Corona, which is considered a light, refreshing beer you drink on the beach. It has 1/4 the carbs of Guinness 0, which people are having for its wellness attributes. The carb level is getting a lot of buzz; we’ve gotten great reviews, really good Untappd scores, and couldn’t be happier with how the launch is going.

Bear with me, because you obviously know a bit more about brewing than I do. If you set the benchmarks for the calories and the carbs before you really dove into the development, did that make the process more involved? Was there a lot of experimentation that needed to be done or was it a relatively straightforward brewing process?

Sam: I wouldn’t say it was straightforward. Water treatment was normal, but we had to rethink the three big technical components that go into building a beer recipe, like choosing and sourcing certain barleys that ferment in certain ways—even at certain temperatures—to try to maximize the extraction of the sugars but in a way that didn’t steal all the body from the beer.

We are using natural enzymes to get the best ratio of alcohol out of the beer with the lowest ratio of carbs that we take from that alcohol. We don’t use any artificial ingredients, we don’t use monk fruit, we don’t use any artificial sweeteners. The grain regiment was really important.

The yeast that we use to do what I’m talking about—this fermentation where you’re maximizing alcohol and minimizing calories and carbs—there’s a yeast component to the technology there.

Lastly, for 30 Minute, we figured out the best way to get that expression of aroma, hop impression, and sensory taste hop impression was where in the boiling process to continually hop for 30 minutes.

The beer boils for longer than 30 minutes; it goes for about an hour. It’s a little different than 60 Minute where the beer starts boiling and we start the continuous hopping process. It took us about two years to say, “OK, let’s start the continual hopping at this point of the hour boil, but let’s only do it for 30 minutes because it’s gonna be a lighter, more delicate beer.” If we did it for a full 60 minutes, it would kind of overpower the beer.

Is this the same or a similar hop bill pill as 60 or 90 Minute?

No, that’s a really good question. With this one, we found that there are certain lighter hop varieties that are less grassy and further away from the other hops we use for 60 and 90.

The two rockstar hop varieties in 30 Minute are Citra, which throws in more grapefruit and pine, and Mosaic, which I’d say gives more tangerine and pine. It’s a good question because you might think it’s the same family of beers so we’re using the exact same hops and yeast, but we’re not.

This is also a slight departure from 60 and 90 Minute when you consider those respectively clock in at 6% and 9% ABV. I’m assuming that was a conscious decision given the difficulty of marketing a 3% beer, but I’m curious how you settled on that number. 

Sam: I mean, we did have those internal conversations; if it’s 4% alcohol, should we call it 40 Minute IPA?

However, 120 Minute is at about 15% or 16%, so we’d kind of already broken that rule to some degree. For us, it was most important to bow to the continual hopping process more than anything else.

As we trialed this beer, the right amount of time for continual hopping was 30 minutes. At 40 minutes, the beer tasted dislocated and it had a little bit too much lingering hot bitterness. The best way it expressed itself from a sensory perspective was to be hopped for 30 minutes.

Similarly, we had discussions about making it 3% if we were going to call it 30 Minute. We trialed that at our own locations. If you came to our pubs last year, we had a fake name for something we were testing out at 3%. It didn’t taste as good and was kind of watery, and I think among beer lovers, there’s a pushback for beers between .5% and 3.5%,

Right, you’re getting in table beer territory at that point. 

Sam: Yeah. I think there’s a lot of breweries that have done some valiant stuff with the table beer concept between 2% and 3.5% and I hope that doesn’t go away, but they just don’t sell in the three-tier distribution system.

The magic line is really at 4% ABV, where you can charge normal pricing and get normal sell-through for a craft beer version of something really good.

I know you have a lot on your plate, so I’m also curious to know just how involved you are in the development process at this point?

It’s still my favorite part of the job. I’ll give you some information soon on another project that’s probably the most robust collaboration that I’ve ever done—both internally with our team and externally with an amazing, artistic, world-renowned group. That’ll be a big part of our 30th anniversary and a new core beer just like 30 Minute.

I’m still working on canned cocktail recipes, I’ve gotten to work on Angry Orchard, I had Sam Adams brewers up to my little cabin brewery in Dogfish Head, Maine. The recipe work that I do is probably still the favorite of the work I do. I still call myself a brewer, not a businessman, and that’s the part of the job I get the most joy out of.

After that, as an English major, it’s creating the enticing stories around the beers and the events we do. It’s marketing, but it’s not traditional advertising. For our 30th anniversary, we have this really robust calendar of stuff we’re going to do every month, and I’ve been super involved in that work.

I’d also like to get a little more big picture while I’m talking with you. I think everyone sort of knew the craft beer bubble that started to grow around 15 years ago was going to pop at some point, and it’s pretty clear that’s happened. Are you concerned with the current downward trend? Do you think it was a natural or inevitable correction? You’ve seen a lot of ups and downs as someone who’s been in the game for 30 years, so I’d love to hear your thoughts on the current state of affairs. 

I’ll start by saying human beings have been making alcohol for millennia, and for 99% of that span, there’s been three categories of alcoholic beverages: distilled spirits, wine, and beer. It’s only in the past 10 years that the fourth category—”beyond beer”—has really started to emerge.

Dogfish Head was calling it “off-centered brewing” before the industry adopted that term. We would make beer-wine hybrids like Raison D’Etre, beer-wine-mead hybrids like Midas Touch, and we opened one of the first craft distilleries 24 years ago, so we’ve always had a very broad definition of beer.

I did not expect the explosion of that fourth category with hard seltzers and spirits-based RTDs to be so quick and so profound. Frankly, I’m glad because we’ve been making canned cocktails forever and it lets us show off the breadth of our creativity. But I do think that’s been one component of the craft beer downturn.

I think the bigger component is the “wellness lifestyle” or a younger drinker just not drinking as much as previous generations. Our industry relies on that 21 to 31-year-old age group to do the bulk of the volume drinking of any alcohol, and that’s not happening.

The rise of legal marijuana definitely plays a part in it. The way younger people socialize now plays a big part in it. We still can’t seem to get draft beer back on a good trend nationally, and that relies on getting people into bars. When you’ve got people Netflix and chilling at their homes instead of socializing, that makes me concerned on another level.

I think it’s more of a moment than an era. I think it’ll change as people realize, “Hey, I miss being out and socializing with people in the evening over drinks.” I’ll be having a bunch of beers while people are figuring that out.

Dogfish Head 30 Minute Light IPA Review

I figured there was no better way to truly appreciate 30 Minute than trying it next to the rest of the beers in the family (which was admittedly mostly an excuse to pick up a bottle of 120 Minute for the first time in a while), and it’s safe to say it’s a very welcome addition.

As you can see, the color is significantly lighter than its more aggressively-hopped counterparts, but more than holds its own in the taste category. It’s a bit of a malt sandwich when you consider that’s the flavor you’ll get on the front and back end, but the Citra quickly takes centerstage before the Mosaic arrives on the scene to add the piney backbone that comes through a lot more in the 60 and 90 Minute versions.

30 Minute’s predecessors are also very heavy on the dried fruit notes and feature a distinct sweetness, but 30 Minute is a much closer relative to the modern and floral East Coast IPAs that helped fuel the most recent craft beer revolution. The most obvious parallel is Founder’s All Day, but Dogfish Head’s new creation would definitely be my pick if I had to choose between the two.