Before copper and stainless steel became standard materials for brew vessels, beermakers mixed malt and hops in wooden vats. Lighting a fire under such a vessel could burn down the house, so brewers boiled the wort (the unfermented beer) by tossing in red-hot rocks, causing a partial caramelization of the malt sugars and adding smoky overtones to the beer.

Sah'tea is Sam Calagione's take on sahti, a type of Finnish home-brew. He flavored the strong ale (it measures 9 percent alcohol by volume) with juniper berries, a traditional ingredient that adds an "earthy, perfumy" flavor, and black chai tea, a nontraditional ingredient that augments the beer's citrusy character.

"It gives us a chance to look backwards and forwards at the same time and put our own off-centered spin on Old World traditions," says Calagione, president of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery in Milton, Del.

Read more in the original article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/06/AR2009070603892.html

The New Yorker's annual Food Issue hit the stands this week with a great article about craft beer (featuring Dogfish Head).

...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.”

(read more...)

Source: The new Yorker