Sam Calagione started making beer in 1995 when he opened Dogfish Head Brewings & Eats in the beach community of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. It was the smallest commercial brewery in America at that time. Within a few successful years, the company activated a major expansion, switching from making very small, homebrew-style batches to industrial-sized sessions in a sizeable brew house. Dogfish Head expanded and moved to a 100,000 square foot facility in nearby Milton, Delaware in 2002. They’re one of the largest craft brewers in America but yet there may be no brewery today that exhibits such a dedication to experimentation and boundary pushing. Tonight, we’ll host Dogfish Head for a pre-Record Store Day celebration. Every year, the brewery creates the official beer of Record Store Day; this year it’s Dragons & YumYums, an intensely tropical — yet subtlety bitter — pale ale, as well as nine other Dogfish beers. In conjunction, we present a flight of the brewery’s beers that we call Craft Beer Crosscut 4.19.18: A Flight of Dogfish Head Crafted Brewed Ales.

Dogfish Head SeaQuench Ale

4.9% ABV, 10 IBU

SeaQuench Ale is a session sour mash-up of a crisp Kolsch with lots of wheat and Munich malt, a salty gose with black limes, coriander and sea salt, and a citrusy-tart Berliner weiss made with lime juice and lime peel, blended together in the fermentation tank to create this German hybrid. Dogfish Head’s experimentation focuses on three thirst-quenching styles with German roots, but no single style quite hit the mark and mood the brewery was going for — so it blended them for a cloudy gold brew with a savory and citrusy smell. It has a fair amount of tart wheat and coriander character, but the salt and lime are extremely strong. There are many goses brewed in the same vein, but not many are this dry, bright and thirst quenching.

Dogfish Head Romantic Chemistry

7.2% ABV, 40 IBU

As you know, Dogfish Head is good at breaking rules and mixing things up. If it has flavor and can be consumed, Dogfish brewers have probably given brewing with it a stab. The inspiring ingredients in the brewery’s Romantic Chemistry aren’t particularly weird. There’s mango. There’s apricot. There’s ginger. In combination with a hoppy India pale ale, they result in a hybrid brew that stands out from the crowd. Aromas of hops and fruit mingle, with neither dominating. The flavor is as balanced as the aroma. The mango-apricot-ginger flavors never really go away, and the hops never really come in and rough up the joint. Balance.

Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA

6% ABV, 60 IBU

No stranger to IPA fans, Dogfish Head’s 60 Minute IPA is continuously hopped with more than 60 hop additions over the entire boil to create a powerful yet balanced East Coast blend with a ton of citrusy hop character. Inspired by a cooking segment he saw in the late ’90s where a chef added little increments of pepper over an extended period to enhance flavor, Calagione turned to a vibrating magnetic football game to create a system that would continuously add hop pellets during the entire time a beer boiled. The 60 minutes of continuous “A Northwest Hop” contributes to sweet aroma of apricot and pear — similar to a Riesling. The beer doesn’t taste as sweet as it smells and instead we get notes pungent grapefruit pith with a slight bitterness.

Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA

9% ABV, 90 IBU

The 90 Minute IPA, which debuted in 2001, is the first beer that Dogfish Head continuously hops, adding hops for 90 minutes during the boil for bitterness, and then dry-hop in the fermentation casks to achieve high aroma and flavor. Despite the massive amounts of hops, a clean, grainy malt character ekes through — maple and golden raisin — balancing some of the bitterness and grassy flavors.

Dogfish Head Olde School Barleywine

15% ABV, 85 IBU

Olde School Barleywine is a powerful beverage, and that’s an understatement. This bruiser tips the scales at 15 percent ABV, with apricot, plum, apple, orange and sharp, peppery spice on the nose. It has a solid orange-vanilla-fig sweetness up front, somewhat like Cointreau or Grand Marnier, but does not finish too sweet at all, with tobacco and light licorice on the back end.