Brewer: Dogfish Head
Location: Milton, Delaware
Type: Russian Imperial Stout
ABV: 9%
And now we jump from Colorado back to home base…or close to home base, at least, with Delaware’s Dogfish Head. I honestly wasn’t expecting to revisit DFH this Darktober. Then I was broadsided by their Bitches Brew.
First, I’m going to let Sam Calagione, DFH’s founder, explain why he created this brew, in honor of the same-titled Miles Davis album:
Calagione was drawn to the alchemical spirits in Bitches Brew right out of college, acquiring a copy of the album “within months of the first time I brewed a batch of homebrew in my apartment in New York City. I listened to it when I was writing my Dogfish business plan. I wanted Dogfish Head to be a maniacally inventive and creative brewery, analog beer for the digital age. You could say that my dream was to have Dogfish Head, in some small way, stand for the same thing in the beer world that Bitches Brew stands for in the jazz world. You can imagine how excited we are to be doing this project 17 years after I wrote that business plan.”
One more quote (both from this Huffington Post article), explaining the multiple fermentation process used for Bitches Brew:
“We just did the test batch our pub. It is a threaded beer which means multiple primary fermentations […] and then you blend them together from multiple threads. It is a blend of Tej, which is the native African beer which is actually honey beer. They use gesho root because hops don’t grow in Africa and gesho is the bittering component that counterbalances the sweetness of the honey. That’s one thread. Three threads is an imperial stout with Muscovado sugar. Post-fermentation, we’ll blend those together to make Bitches’ Brew and that will come out in August.”
Why the quotes? Because I think it’s important to understand how special this beer is to DFH…which, in turn, I hope helps you all understand how devastatingly delicious this beer was when I drank it.
Again, I was lucky to drink this one fresh from the tap. I suspect, however, that this is also one I should buy bottled for some aging fun. If it’s this stunning fresh, I suspect it turns into an orgasmically bodacious beer when aged for a few years.
Yes, I did just write that.
Again, I’m trying very hard not to hype this beer. I don’t want to damage its standing with any of you by building it up higher than it should be. However, I can tell you this: The flavors of this Imperial stout almost perfectly match my preferences and even expand them to levels I hadn’t expected. It is a gorgeous brew, rich and intense with balancing notes of bitter, sweet, hoppy (or gesho) and malted. Let it linger in your mouth for a while and savor the taste rotation: dark chocolate, molasses, summertime honeysuckle, wintertime fire, soft spring rainfall, crisp autumnal earthiness.
Even better, let it warm for a while in your glass and return for deeper yet noticeably mellowed flavors surfacing from the darkness.
I’m sure a bottle is going to be predictably prohibitively priced. This is a DFH specialty. However, I’m going to vote that this one is worth it, denizens. It steps up to that edge of kitschy experimentation that DFH has sidled up to many times before, but this time they don’t tumble over into the abyss. This time, they stand their ground quite well.
