Dogfish Head Craft Brewery

Sam Calagione started small in 1995. He and his wife Mariah launched their first brewpub in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, using a repurposed 10-gallon dairy tank system that barely kept up with weekend crowds, serving just two house-brewed beers to locals and summer tourists.

Regulators dismissed craft beer as a passing trend. When Calagione applied for a production brewing license in the late 1990s, state officials told him the market had no room for a small independent brewery, forcing him to fight for months to secure the paperwork he needed to scale beyond his tiny brewpub.

They bet on bold, weird recipes. Instead of chasing mainstream light lager sales, Calagione and his team experimented with ingredients most breweries ignored, from foraged local fruit to rare spices, and their 120 Minute IPA, a massively hopped high-alcohol brew released in 2003, became a cult hit that put Dogfish Head on the national map after selling out its first run in 48 hours at the Great American Beer Festival.

They still experiment every week. Today Dogfish Head operates three production facilities in Delaware, distributes its beers to all 50 US states and more than 25 international markets, and maintains its original Rehoboth Beach brewpub as a test kitchen for new recipes, with 20 rotating taps that update weekly to showcase small-batch experimental brews alongside core lineup favorites.