Dogfish Head's latest beer is a hazy IPA brewed with oat milk.
Dogfish Head Craft BreweryDogfish Head Craft Brewery founder Sam Calagione has sold some pretty bizarre brews over the last 26 years.
He’s put-on protective gear and produced a spicy stout with the active ingredient found in Mace. He’s masticated maize for a “Chicha” beer made with human spit. He’s even made beer with moondust.
So, by comparison, Calagione’s latest concoction — a hazy IPA made with oat milk from New York-based plant milk producer Elmhurst 1925 — is rather tame.
Dogfish is calling the new beer Hazy-O!, and promoting the fact that it is the first “nationally distributed oat milk-centric IPA.”
The inclusion of oat milk, Calagione claims, enables drinkers to more easily session a beer that clocks in at 7.1% ABV.
“We do believe you’ve got to try it to believe it,” he said.
In addition to oat milk, Hazy-O! features malted oats, rolled oats and naked oats, and it was designed to capitalize on two emerging trends: hazy IPAs, and plant-based milks.
“It really does make such a big point of difference in a sea of hazy IPAs,” Calagione said.
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According to Dogfish Head, which cited data from market research firm IRI, hazy IPAs are the fastest growing craft beer style in America. During a 13-week period ending October 25, 2020, category-wide sales of hazy IPA were up more than 80%.
Marked by their cloudy appearance, high hop aroma, lower perceived bitterness and an overall sweeter flavor, hazy IPAs have emerged as one of the most popular craft styles among beer drinkers.
Born in New England and beloved by beer geeks who have at times waited in line for hours to purchase liquid that can cost more than $5 per can, hazy IPAs have undoubtedly entered the mainstream.
Nearly every major craft beer maker has a hazy in its lineup — including Brooklyn Brewery, the most recent player to enter the game — and retailers are flooded with four-packs.
Boston Beer SAM , the fifth-largest beer vendor in America and the owner of Dogfish Head, first began distributing its Samuel Adams New England IPA nationally back in early 2018. At the same time, West Coast powerhouse Sierra Nevada was also making a big bet on its Hazy Little Thing IPA.
Sierra Nevada ultimately won the battle — its Hazy Little Thing is currently the fifth-largest craft beer in the country and last year it racked up $94 million worth of sales at off-premise retailers.
For its part, Boston Beer has since reformulated and rebranded what is now called Samuel Adams Wicked Hazy IPA, and it even purchased airtime during this year’s Super Bowl in an effort to juice sales.
And then there’s Dogfish, ranked as the 13th largest craft brewing company in America by the Brewers Association.
With nearly all of their closest competitors betting on hazy IPAs, they were essentially forced to create an offering of their own that could compete on both taste and price.
According to Calagione, Hazy-O! will sell for $9.99 per six-pack, alongside three of its other nationally distributed core beers (60-Minute IPA, SeaQuench and Slightly Mighty), but still boast the “off-centered” attributes that his most loyal customers have come to expect from the Delaware-based craft brewery.
“We feel really strongly that it's not only hitting on the right cylinders for innovation and style, but also for price, which was never really part of the Dogfish equation in our earlier years,” Calagione said.
I recently caught up with Calagione to discuss Hazy-O!, the company’s new pricing strategy, the state of innovation within craft brewing, and other creative projects happening at Dogfish Head.
The following conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Chris Furnari (CF): Broadly speaking, where do you see innovation in craft beer right now?
Sam Calagione (SC): When you think of craft beer in the context of top-50, IRI-defined brands — call it 90% of the volume of what's commercially perceived as craft beer — I think there's not as much innovation happening in that world as there was certainly 10 years ago or maybe even five years ago. But when you factor in the innovation that’s going on inside tasting rooms, regardless of this COVID moment, I think it is still happening at a really high level. And I do think that distributors and retailers are now more focused on the “beyond beer” segment, when it used to just the beer category, and that puts tighter restraints on how many new SKUs craft brewers can introduce successfully into three-tier system. So, you are seeing many of the Top 50 craft brewers being more judicious about “one in, one out” innovations, instead of trying to add more to their beer portfolio. Also, many top-20 IRI-defined craft beer companies are trying to introduce beyond beer innovations to that same group of distributors. They seem to be using more of their dry powder on beyond beer versus craft beer innovations. And I think that is just the reality of the competitive moment we are at. It doesn’t mean we are any less creative, we’re just spending more time and energy thinking about innovations beyond beer.
CF: And how is Dogfish staying creative in the taproom?
SC: We released a beer called “Bryan, These Bones Are Bananas,” where we took our learnings from the oat milk process on Hazy-O! and we made a hazy oat milk stout brewed with pureed bananas and bovine bone broth. That’s an example of us having fun in this better for you space since Namaste a decade ago, and then SeaQuench and Slightly Mighty a half a decade ago, and now with an oat milk-infused IPA, so we’re going to keep playing around with these concepts. Maybe they stay in our tasting room. Maybe they go into four-packs. But if people fall in love them, it could see national distribution.
CF: How do you distinguish between true innovation and what might appear to be more of a novelty or a gimmick?
SC: We try to find white space. There are two business models for companies that rely on introducing new products for their journey. One is a pioneering model and the other is the fast-follower model. We’ve always been a pioneering brewery and tried to take risks and create things that are unique. And hopefully the white space is sustainable, but to your point some of these beers just belong in our tasting room. We don’t introduce something unless we believe in it for how it tastes or the uniqueness of the story. That’s true whether it is Hazy-O! or Bryan, These Bones Are Bananas. We use our tasting rooms as a proving ground, and then we let consumer excitement tell us if we can bring something to national distribution the following year.
CF: How does Hazy-O! fit into the rest of the Dogfish Head portfolio? Prior to launching this beer, you seemed very focused on lower-calorie, lower-ABV beers — including a forthcoming nonalcoholic beer — and this is a big bet on a higher ABV and more caloric offering.
SC: We’re very thoughtful about the lanes our core national brands play in. We do see Slightly Mighty as our low-cal, hoppy proposition. SeaQuench Ale is the most refreshing beer Dogfish has ever made at a molecular level. Namaste is our yoga-inspired wheat beer. Hazy-O! is our oat milk-infused IPA. In that sense, every beer has a “better for you” attribute that is unique and different.
CF: Who is the target drinker for Hazy-O!?
SC: I think the sweet spot of the innovation is also the sweet spot of the demographic we're going after. It’s the craft beer drinker, but also the person that's leading an active lifestyle. And the crossover there we believe tremendous.
CF: Why are you bullish on Hazy-O!?
SC: Not only is Hazy-O! a national beer that fits in a sweet spot between the growth trend of oat milk and hazy IPAs, but I believe it has an opportunity to be one of the fastest-growing beers in Dogfish Head’s history because it is literally the best bang for the consumer buck. We've never had a beer this unique, at this ABV, that hits that kind of price. And within this greater universe of Boston Beer Company, Dogfish nationally is focused really on the two price points: the core price point of $9.99 — which is Hazy-O!, 60-Minute, SeaQuench and Slightly Mighty — and the $14.99 price point which is things like 90-Minute and the Art Series.
CF: This new pricing strategy seems like a pretty big shift for Dogfish. I know that for years you’ve talked about maintaining a higher price point on all your products.
SC: Our blended price is still significantly higher than our competitive set. But yes, in this competitive moment where we want to grow in every area of the country and not just in our backyard, we think it is the right time to bring these core beers to a more competitive price point.
CF: Outside of Hazy-O!, what are some of your other focus items for 2021?
SC: Every one of our national brands is slated to grow in 2021, and we’re really excited about that. I think we have the right products, programs, and pricing to achieve the growth that we are planning for each of our brands. We have a few more innovation announcements planned this year, including canned cocktails which will hit next month, but right now we are really focused on Hazy-O! Our Dogfish brewpub in Miami will also be opening in the Spring.
February 28, 2021 at 04:49AM
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Dogfish Head Founder Sam Calagione Discusses New Oat Milk IPA, Craft Beer Innovation - Forbes
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