(Milton, DE) – Sam Calagione and the Dogfish Head crew rocked the airwaves last night.

[11/22 Update: The episode is now available for download on iTunes for $1.99. You must first download iTunes to your computer to do this.]

Note: before we start, please throw a vote into the poll on the lower right (and rather than just vote 10 if you liked it or 1 if you didn’t like it, give it a second and think). I will post a new poll each week and if the results prove interesting at all, I’ll share the results of which episodes were liked/disliked the most at the end.

As someone too poor for cable television, I’m waiting for Brew Masters to show up on iTunes (crossing my fingers) tomorrow so that I can watch last night’s episode, Bitches Brew. With that said, here’s a recap of coverage and other tidbits from the weekend.

Before the show…

First off, the PR team did a nice job getting the word out to major media outlets for the weekend papers: Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post and Denver Post. Delaware Online, being local to the brewery, had the most thorough preview.

Only two TV critic reviews have surfaced from what I can tell and both were not so kind to the show: AV Club and Media Life Magazine. Twitter user, vasuvasu, wisely pointed out that the AV Club’s review compared Sam Calagione to Sarah Palin and the new Palin show is the only other one that he has reviewed for AV Club.

As far as beer drinkers watching, after 430 votes, ~86% of you said that you would be watching the show.

To give it a solid lead-in for the masses, Discovery Channel aired a new episode of Dirty Jobs in the 9pm time slot right before it. Dirty Jobs is the #1 cable show for the young-middle aged male audience according to Discovery Networks. On the other hand, as BeerBrewin on Twitter pointed out this week, the Sunday night strategy seems peculiar.

Discovery chose to air Dirty Jobs and Brew Masters against Sunday Night Football, not only the #2 show in television among all males but the #2 show on television overall. Fortunately, Discovery will re-air it on Monday night at 8pm. This time, however, it will be going up against Monday Night Football, the #1 show on television. Discovery will be making up for that by re-airing it in primetime again on Thursday night at 10. Hey, at least they are giving it some serious runtime. It will be interesting to see the ratings for the premiere once they come out (tomorrow or Tuesday I think?).

After the show…

The sentiment on Twitter was overwhelmingly positive. Pretty much the only complaints that I saw were around the Blue Moon commercials and Dogfish agreed. I mused that Coors has deeper pockets than Samuel Adams.

Beer Advocate members are positive about it as well though many said that they could have done without the rapping segment. Several people posted new beer ratings, likely imbibing while they watched.

Dogfish Head came in at #4 on Google Hot Trends with a rating of “volcanic” shortly after the show was over. If we had access to the top 1,000, would we see “craft beer” anywhere on there? Hmmm. Needless to say, shopkeepers should have prepared some nice Dogfish Head displays over the weekend for the rush of new customers likely to come in asking for DFH this week. Or maybe cable television and Google searches won’t translate to a sales boom for DFH as much as we think it will? On that note…

If you work at a beer store or bar, feel free to email me this week on how DFH sales are going after the premiere…

Missed the episode? The Discovery Channel lists when it will be on again if you’re without a DVR. Don’t have cable? I would expect the show to be available on iTunes (with all the other Discovery Channel shows) in the next couple days. You won’t be able to find full episodes on Hulu, only clips.

As for the rest of the week, stay tuned for clips on next Sunday’s episode…Chicha.