Craft beer
Posted: Fri Feb 17, 2012 6:42 pmAs it turned out, there was a reason that Delaware had no breweries like Calagione’s. Prohibition had been over for sixty years, but it was still illegal for a pub to bottle and distribute its own beer. Calagione found this out not long after he’d signed the lease. Luckily, Delaware was also very small and very friendly to business. “I literally drove to Dover, asked which one is the House and which is the Senate, and started knocking on doors,” he remembers. “They said, ‘You want to do what, son? Well, write up a bill!’ ” Six months later, the governor signed the bill into law. The only hitch had come when Calagione was applying for his liquor license, and one of the commissioners brought up his recent arrest for driving under the influence of alcohol. Calagione admitted to the incident—a few weeks earlier, on his way home from a restaurant, he’d run into a parked car and dislocated his shoulder—but added a small correction. The actual infraction was a P.U.I., he said: pedalling under the influence. “Commissioner, I was on a bicycle.”