In 1984, when he was 35, Jim Koch approached his father to tell him he was giving up his career as a corporate trainer to take up the 150-year family tradition of beer brewing. Expecting to be embraced with open arms, he didn’t anticipate his father’s response:

“You’ve done some dumb things in your life, but this is just about the dumbest!”

His father had a point. In the mid-1980s, starting a craft beer company sounded like business suicide. The producers of Budweiser, Coors, and other mainstream big beer conglomerates had locked down the American market. But Koch knew he didn’t have to be big to make an impression.

“I wanted to change the perspective about American beer,” he says. “I knew 100 years ago American beers were respected before they became a joke. I wanted to restore that respect in the same way California winemakers did to American wine in the ’60s and ’70s.”

Thus driven, Koch made a batch of his great-great-grandfather’s recipe for Louis Koch Lager in his kitchen. He bottled it as Samuel Adams Boston Lager and handdelivered the final product to bars around Boston on Patriot’s Day, 1985. Within six weeks, his brew won “The Best Beer in America” in The Great American Beer Festival’s Consumer Preference Poll. The Boston Beer Company was on its way.

Sam Adams caught on for just the reasons Koch anticipated. American beer drinkers were ready for craft beer made from better ingredients and with more interesting flavors than the formulas mass produced by big beer companies. In this way, he predicted and helped pioneer the craft beer revolution. “There was no great fresh beer available to American beer drinkers at the time,” says Koch. “I knew there were people out there who would enjoy a fresh, great-tasting beer—I just didn’t know how many.”

With thirty accounts to his company’s name (and his loyal if cynical father as an investor), Koch started producing beer from a 100-year-old brewery in Pennsylvania. By year’s end, he’d sold five hundred barrels. Though his brew had only started to sell outside Massachusetts, it had already found adherents in tough-toplease West Germany, where people are picky about what they put in their steins.

Now the beer named after the brewing patriot (who also inherited his family’s beer tradition) has become the country’s largest craft brewer, its 350 employees in Boston and Cincinnati making over one million barrels of Samuel Adams Beer a year. Despite this growth, Samuel Adams and the hundreds of small, local, and regional breweries that have popped up all over the country still only account for slightly more than half a percent of the total U.S. beer market.

Big Fish, Growing Pond
As the leading craft brewer, the next logical step for Sam Adams would be to emulate the way mainstream beers make and market their products. But Koch prefers to stay true to his craft beer roots. Not once has he changed the recipe of his signature brew, and he still insists on sticking to the traditional four-vessel brewing process and time-honored brewing methods such as decoction mash, krausening, and dry hopping. He says he settles for nothing less than the best all-natural ingredients too, and travels the world to get them: the finest hops from Germany and England, Tworow Spring Barley grown in the Northern Great Plains, Grains of Paradise, even a pepper from West Africa for Samuel Adams Summer Ale. He’s developed a reputation for not just sniffing Bavarian hops, but diving into them.

Likewise, Koch, who to this day tastes every batch of beer brewed to ensure it meets his high standards, has developed a curious habit of dipping himself in stale beer at exhibitions. The practice is meant to dramatize his dedication to consumer readable freshness dating on every bottle of his beer. (Samuel Adams is the only brewer that buys back its beer when it passes its peak freshness.) It’s that kind of showmanship that has helped the voice of the little guy get heard in the world of big beer—literally. Koch also regularly narrates commercials for his product.

“I’d rather be in the brewery, but no one else has the same level of passion and care for my beer,” he says. “So I decided to be my own spokesman because I work cheap — I work for beer — and because I have the knowledge and love of it.”

In true craft beer fashion, Samuel Adams brews twenty-one distinctive styles of beer, from the flagship Samuel Adams Boston Lager brew to more exotic flavors like Chocolate Bock. The brewery comes out with a new beer every year: year-round beers, four seasonal styles, signature holiday brews, and the Brewmaster’s Collection, all geared to provide tastebuds with a wide range of variety. Next up for the company’s planned releases: a malty, almost creamy Irish Red Ale or a dark, Bavarian-style Dunkelweizen — whichever gets the most votes in bars across America — will join the Brewmaster’s Collection in January 2008.

One of the seasonal brews in the stable, Samuel Adams Octoberfest, exemplifies the care Sam Adams puts into its product. The brewery’s ode to the beer-drinking festival of the same name, OctoberFest, adheres to the strict Reinheitsgebot, a German Beer Purity Law which requires only four classic ingredients: malt, hops, water, and yeast. The golden-hued beer’s blend of five barley roasts creates a sweet flavor of caramel and toffee tempered by a sophisticated bitterness from German Noble hops. A 2005 Euro Beer Star Awards gold medalist, the brew stands as the perfect complement to a sausage or spaetzle.

The same traditions to which Koch has hewn he’s also bucked. Starting in the 1990s, Koch pioneered the extreme beer movement, stretching the meaning of what constitutes a beer with flavorful, high-alcoholby- volume brews like Samuel Adams Triple Bock, Samuel Adams Millennium Ale, and the 52-proof Samuel Adams Utopia.

“Beers have more variety of flavor than wine,” says Koch. “There are a lot of great flavors a brewer can create that haven’t been tapped yet.” The Future Almost since the beginning of his enterprise, big brewers have offered Koch large amounts of money to buy Samuel Adams. Koch, preferring independence, has repeatedly turned down these offers. He chooses instead to continue following the philosophy that has kept the brewery going for over two decades: If you make great beer in a variety of styles, the market will grow around you.

“We’ll continue to grow as American beer drinkers develop their palates and upgrade their tastes,” he says. “People are switching over to better beers and just discovering small, high-quality brewers like Sam Adams. In some ways, the excitement in the entire alcohol market is shifting to beer. That’s where there are new discoveries to be made.”