After more than a decade of partnership, the Delaware brewery and American rock band finally have a hit befitting both iconic brands.
By Jerard Fagerberg
It’s a good thing Phil Lesh was a fan of the Discovery Channel.
In 2010, the legendary Grateful Dead bassist was watching Brew Masters with his sons when Sam Calagione flashed across his screen. In the series’ premiere episode, Dogfish Head cooks up a beer to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew. Lesh was so taken with the charismatic brewer and his utter devotion to the project that he emailed Calagione the next day.
That cold call kicked off a collaboration between Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead that has spawned annual events, co-branded merch, three vinyl records, and four special edition beers. The first of those beers, a pale ale brewed with granola named American Beauty, was released in 2013. Phil Lesh and the Terrapin Family Band played the launch party.
Grateful Dead allowed Dogfish Head to alter their iconic Steal Your Face logo for their two collaboration beers – a rare honor from the jam band. Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale is now Dogfish Head’s fastest-growing beer ever. It’s the third highest-selling beer in Dogfish Head’s portfolio, behind only 60-Minute IPA and 90-Minute IPA. In April, it became the second highest production beer for the Delaware-headquartered brewery, driving immense growth for the legacy brand.
“It’s cool that it started with authentic outreach from the band itself, not just a bunch of suits,” Calagione says. “Since then, it’s been a long, strange, wonderful trip.”
But like many trips involving Grateful Dead, it took some wandering to find the promised land. American Beauty and its 2019 follow-up Hazy Ripple were fascinating, eccentric beers befitting both Lesh and The Dead, but the true magic of the band is how they braid counterculture and the mainstream into one unanimous song.
It was the two brands’ third effort, the 2025 year-round release Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale, that finally united beer and band in complete harmony. The 5.3% ABV pale ale brewed with Kernza and, yes, granola shot out of Calagione’s bright tank and to the top of the sales charts for Dogfish Head.
Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale is now Dogfish Head’s fastest-growing beer ever. It’s the third highest-selling beer in Dogfish Head’s portfolio, behind only 60-Minute IPA and 90-Minute IPA. In April, it became the second highest production beer for the Delaware-headquartered brewery, driving immense growth for the legacy brand.
working with Grateful Dead since 2011.
“When you have these two community-oriented entities together, that’s been the heart of the success,” Calagione says. “That’s what’s so rewarding about it.”
Channeling The Dead
Calagione claims that he likes to listen to “at least an hour” of The Dead each day, so he intrinsically understands how to reach other “off-centered” individuals like himself. He’s got The Dead’s ethos tattooed on his heart.
Central to that ethos is the willingness to change course and let creativity lead the way.
American Beauty and Hazy Ripple were a very broad interpretation of what The Dead meant to American beer drinkers. They were focused on the environment and sustainability. They were rare, aligning with Deadheads who sought out rare recordings. They were experimental, activating that restless hunger for new horizons that Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, and Bob Weir espoused.
But the beers lacked a universalism that The Dead, now 60-plus years into their iconographia, represent to the average person today. When band archivist David Lemieux came to Calagione in 2024 to revive the collaboration, the Dogfish Head founder wanted to try to do something with the same headliner appeal that brought crowds of thousands out to see The Dead.
“We said, ‘Let’s make something that’s really approachable, not just for hopheads in this niche of super strong, super bitter beers,’” Calagione says. “Let’s make this for Deadheads at all levels of drinking interest from coast to coast.”
For the liquid, Dogfish Head went with a much more utilitarian pale ale, eschewing high-concept hop descriptors in favor of a basic, easy-drinking beer. They brewed with Kernza, a perennial grain famed for its incredible carbon sequestration, to keep the beer true to the hippie roots while also ensuring it was light and refreshing.
But what really jumps out about Juicy Pale Ale is the branding. Gone are the lesser-known dancing bears that adorned American Beauty and Hazy Ripple, their fuzzy visages replaced with the unmistakable blue, red, and white Steal Your Face skull with the Dogfish Head shark logo resting inside. A rare honor for a Dead collaborator, but one that Lemieux and the band felt was fitting given the new beer’s formulation.
“Fans of Grateful Dead are totally engrained in its culture and can easily identify when something doesn’t fit seamlessly with the band’s ethos,” Lemieux said in a press release. “It’s Dogfish and The Dead’s shared values of creativity and nonconformity, and their laser focus on remaining true to themselves, that has made this partnership so successful.”
A Book of Songs
Ed Zeizel’s friends call him “Shreddy Eddie.”
The Maryland-born bassist had been playing Dead tunes for decades by the time he formed Bloom & Decay in 2023. Zeizel grew up drinking Dogfish Head, and his Dead tribute band frequently plays local Pennsylvania breweries, so the tie between craft beer and The Dead has always been natural.
Zeizel, like many Deadhead beer-drinkers, was completely unsurprised when Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead launched another year-round collab beer, Citrus Daydream Lager, this past February. Leaning even more deeply into the light, approachable concept, this beer combines lime, sustainable Fonia grain, and a straight-up lager backbone.
While launching a second year-round band beer might seem like a risk for any other brewery, Dogfish Head spent 2025 proving that their collaboration with The Dead is far beyond a novelty. It’s a shared ethos – one that Calagione and Dogfish Head have been able to harness twice in a single year out of sheer devotion.
“The music has been taken so far beyond the original band at this point, I feel like it’s got legs to stick around for a while,” Zeizel says. “Craft beer has had the same progression.”
That reach has only grown more remarkable with time. Today, Bill Kreutzmann is the lone surviving founding member of Grateful Dead, but the music itself feels anything but frozen in history. Countless tribute bands keep Dead songs alive in taprooms, theaters, and festivals across the country, while major touring acts continue to fold the band’s catalog into their own sets. In some ways, The Dead have never felt more relevant or more mainstream: less a nostalgia act than a shared language passed from one generation of fans to the next.
The dividends are not in fan service alone. Grateful Dead beers are bringing genuine, sustained growth to a beer brand that, prior to its 2019 merger with the Boston Beer Company, was struggling to match creativity with results. But with the growing collaboration, Dogfish Head is finding those customers that Lesh and Calagione were dreaming about when they started their journey in 2013.
“This collaboration has not just captivated the consumer, but it’s become a national success,” Calagione says. “Over 75% of the people that are buying Grateful Dead beer have not bought our beer before, so there’s an awesome community that’s getting a whole group of new consumers into the Dogfish Head tent.”
About the Author: Jerard Fagerberg is a freelance drinks writer and product manager based in Kittery, Maine. His name is not Jared, but lotsa folks get that wrong.