via Dogfish Head
Last November I flew across the country to Milton, Delaware, for Dogfish Head’s 30th birthday. All day, people kept stopping to shake hands, hug, and high-five Dogfish Head founder Sam Calagione, and I wrote here on BroBible that it felt like “an off-center coronation.”
On that trip, I joked to a friend that Sam Calagione is the King of Delaware. Watching him work the crowd at his own birthday party, I stand by it. He’s the kind of king who remembers your name, asks about your grandma, and pours you something weird and delicious. Every state should be so lucky.
And it turns out the King of Delaware has always had a soft spot for other kings.
Dogfish Head is bringing back Midas Touch, the brewery’s most-requested rare beer, after roughly five years in the vault.
This particular beer kicked off the Ancient Ales series in 1999. It’s brewed from a recipe reverse-engineered from a drinking vessel found in a tomb associated with King Midas, aka the guy who basically coined the phrase “golden touch.”
via Dogfish Head
What’s Dogfish Head Midas Touch?
Midas Touch lives in the liquid borderlands between beer, wine, and mead. It’s brewed with barley, honey, white Muscat grapes and saffron, and it lands at a serious 9% ABV.
Dogfish describes it as sweet but dry, with honey and orchard fruit up front, a little earthy spice in the middle and a crisp finish. As a kicker, to truly make the beer golden, Sam Calagione brewed it with saffron.
This is the beer to hand your buddy who swears he doesn’t really drink beer. Watch him go back to the fridge for a second can when he thinks nobody’s looking.
via Dogfish Head
Perhaps you’re wondering how this one-of-a-kind beer came to be?
If you’re a history buff, the backstory is quite compelling: During the tomb’s excavation, archaeologists found a drinking vessel still holding residue from whatever the Phrygian royals were knocking back at the funeral.
The late Dr. Patrick McGovern, a biomolecular archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s museum, ran a series of chemistry tests on the vessels and worked out the likely ingredients. Sam jumped at the chance to bring an ancient Phrygian beer back from the dead.
Midas Touch kicked off a long run of mad-scientist experiments in the Dogfish Head R&D lab. After the beer launched in 1999, Sam and Dr. McGovern kept teaming up like Indiana Jones and Willy Wonka, and the formula never changed: find chemical traces in an ancient drinking vessel, figure out what was in it, then brew a modern version.
Chateau Jiahu (2006, 10% ABV) comes from a 9,000-year-old recipe found in pottery jars from a Neolithic village in northern China, made with orange blossom honey, Muscat grape juice, barley malt and hawthorn fruit. Ta Henket (2010, 4.5% ABV) is an ancient Egyptian beer pieced together from hieroglyphics and brewed with hearth-baked bread, chamomile, doum-palm fruit, and a yeast strain native to Cairo; it’s basically a sandwich and a beer in one can. Kvasir (2013, 10% ABV) came from a 3,500-year-old drinking vessel found in Denmark, and it’s brewed with red winter wheat, bog-grown berries, honey, and birch syrup, in case you ever wondered what the Vikings’ ancestors drank.
When I talked to Sam last year, he described Dogfish’s early days as a horror film. For example, beer purists were furious that he put coffee and raisins in their beer. Midas Touch arrived four years into that era, and his answer to the raisin haters was to brew a beer from a dead king’s cup. As a beer guy myself, I find that incredibly funny and incredibly punk rock.
Dogfish Head Midas Touch is rolling out to taps and shelves in select states nationwide. If you can’t wait, Dogfish Head’s Delaware locations already have it on draft and in six-packs of 12-ounce cans. The brewery’s Fish Finder on dogfish.com will point you to the nearest pour.
If you happen to find it at Chesapeake & Maine in Rehoboth, get the crab dip. Trust me on this one. Golden beer and Old Bay belong together.
Last year I closed by toasting grandmas everywhere who make excellent snack mix. This year the glass goes up to a Phrygian king who had excellent taste in drinks, and to the King of Delaware for remembering the recipe.
One more thing for your calendar: on Oct. 27, Dogfish drops Jett Black Lager, a collab with Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Joan Jett, through Give Them Beer as a beer and merch kit.