How Dogfish Head Finally Found Growth Again — With the Grateful Dead
Sam Calagione’s long, strange craft brewing trip started in 1995 when he co-founded Dogfish Head. The offbeat Milton, Del., brewery built buzz and sales by embracing quirky culinary ingredients like black limes and oat milk and unexpected collaborations with Wes Anderson, Pearl Jam, and Woolrich.
Dogfish Head became a top-20 craft brewery in America in 2010, but in 2019, sales growth stopped and started trending downward the following year due to heightened competition in an increasingly localized, IPA-crazed market. To better navigate such a “challenging moment to be a mid-size brewery,” Calagione told me in 2019, Dogfish Head merged with Boston Beer Company and entered its robust distribution network. Then came the pandemic, compounded by consolidations and a contracting beer market.
So in 2023, with the brewery’s 30th birthday looming, Calagione started conceiving a sales-rebirth plan by partnering with the Grateful Dead, itself gearing up for its 60th birthday celebration. “The stars aligned across our anniversary universes,” Calagione says.
Last February, Dogfish Head released Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale in striking cans featuring the Dead’s colorful skull logo. The packaging and fruity, approachable flavor reverberated with the fan base for the Dead and spinoff touring band Dead & Company. Pints of Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale paired well with 12-minute jams. The collaboration became Dogfish Head’s fastest-growing beer ever and, in tandem with the brewery’s ready-to-drink canned cocktails, helped return the brand to volume growth.
“We tapped into this cult following,” Calagione says.
With a second collaboration, Grateful Dead Citrus Daydream Lager, debuting this February, Dogfish Head is officially better off Dead. “This is absolutely the most successful brewery-band collaboration by a long shot,” says David Steinman, the vice president and executive editor at Beer Marketer’s Insights. “This is relatively unprecedented.”
The Checkered History of Music Collaborations
Band-brewery partnerships are rarely smash hits. A co-branded beer might generate immediate buzz, but sustaining interest and sales is difficult in a crowded, churning marketplace. (R.I.P., Barenaked Ladies imperial stout, Luke Bryan lager, and that Gwar pale ale.)
“It ends up being part of the same cycle,” Steinman says.
With the Dead, though, there’s a die-hard fan base that loves cracking cold ones. “Deadheads have always enjoyed a beer, whether it’s in the parking lot after a show or at home listening to the Dead,” says David Lemieux, the archivist and legacy manager for the Grateful Dead.
The band’s countercultural roots intertwine with early craft beer. The Grateful Dead long called San Francisco home; about three hours northeast, in Chico, Calif., Sierra Nevada Brewing began producing its fragrant Pale Ale in 1980. In the parking lots outside shows, vendors stocked icy coolers with Samuel Smith Nut Brown Ale, Anchor Steam, and Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. The proceeds, Lemieux says, funded travel expenses for future shows.
“It was ubiquitous,” says Lemieux, who followed the Dead between 1987 and 1993. After dancing for hours, “you’d come out of a show, and whether it was a cool, rainy evening or hot summer nights, there were Deadheads selling beer.”
Around 2013, the Dead explored partnering with a brewery that fit with the band’s creative ethos. “People kept mentioning Dogfish Head,” Lemieux says. The brewery’s try-anything streak — Midas Touch took inspiration from ingredients found in 2,700-year-old drinking vessels from the King Midas tomb — aligned with a culture of thoughtful collaboration that, to date, has included more than 100 breweries plus musicians like the Flaming Lips, Deltron 3030, Guided by Voices, and Miles Davis.
But Calagione’s favorite band? The Grateful Dead. A collaboration was kismet. The Dead enlisted its fan base to suggest a signature ingredient — granola — to star in American Beauty, a potent pale ale named after the band’s 1970 album. Six years later, Dogfish Head reformulated the beer as the spelt IPA American Beauty Hazy Ripple IPA, a nod to Dead track “Ripple.”
“This is absolutely the most successful brewery-band collaboration by a long shot. This is relatively unprecedented.”
Deadheads and beer drinkers responded well to the partnership, so several years ago, conversations sparked about a year-round beer approachable to everyone. (Hazy Ripple checked in at 7 percent ABV, and “that beer was a commitment,” Lemieux says.) This was the prelude to Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale.
Craft beer’s core demographic is aging, and a little less alcohol is often welcome. Dogfish Head aimed to “appeal to the broadest age and demographic group of Deadheads, not just hardcore hopheads,” Calagione says. The pale ale contains tropical, fruity Azacca and El Dorado hops, plus granola and sustainable grain kernza, “but those are background stories,” Calagione says.
Today’s younger drinkers don’t care about “craft beer geekery nomenclature,” Calagione says, especially while staring at a wall of beers in a grocery store’s cooler. Kernza and granola live, like liner notes, in small print on the label that Dogfish Head designed for maximum eye-catching appeal. The band’s striking logo and Juicy Pale Ale take top billing. “People want an awesomely flavorful beer and they want it to look cool,” Calagione says.
Following Up a Hit Release
After one year in the market, Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale is Dogfish Head’s No. 3 beer, trailing only 60 Minute IPA and 90 Minute IPA, according to Circana. As Boston Beer’s next earnings call nears, 2026 data will say more.
Restaurants like Mellow Mushroom, a pizza chain with a hippie bent, regularly stock the Dead beer, as do independent music venues.
Brooklyn Bowl’s locations in New York City, Nashville, Las Vegas, and Philadelphia regularly book jam bands, and a “big chunk of that audience is Deadheads,” says Connor Falvey, the senior director of partnerships for Dayglo Presents, which operates Brooklyn Bowl and other venues. “They go crazy over anything that has the [Grateful Dead] logo on it. That beer has been crushing it.”
In part, it’s because the Dead are attracting a new generation of younger fans. The Grateful Dead’s average listener age sits between 25 and 34, according to Warner Music Group, one of the band’s record labels. “Younger people are finding their grandparents’ band and making it cool again,” Calagione says.
“Deadheads have always enjoyed a beer, whether it’s in the parking lot after a show or at home listening to the Dead.”
No band likes being a one-hit wonder. Two months ago, Dogfish Head introduced the second year-round collaboration, the Citrus Daydream Lager flavored with lime and lemongrass and featuring the African grain fonio. Dogfish Head uses the beers as drivers to entice people to communal events, such as Calagione spinning records at a Japanese-style vinyl bar during South by Southwest in Austin. “It’s kind of a grassroots effort the same way the Grateful Dead grew,” Calagione says.
To keep the collaboration fresh in the marketplace, Dogfish Head is prioritizing auxiliary components such as co-branded tapestries and T-shirts, plus the “On a Back Porch” compilation of “live Grateful Dead music that you’d want to listen to on a back porch while you’re sipping a cold beer in the summer,” says Calagione, who works with his son, Sammy, and Lemieux to select tracks. The third vinyl volume will be released April 18 on Record Store Day — Dogfish Head is the official beer sponsor — in conjunction with a collectible poster.
Be it beers or bands, fandoms evolve as the years and decades accrue. Burning passion not properly nurtured relents to smoldering appreciation and then flickering nostalgic embers. The 360-degree collaboration is fueling new fan bases finding beers that might be their jam.
Says Lemieux, “If there were a parking lot right now with the Grateful Dead, you’d see a lot of this Dogfish Head beer being sold.”
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