King of Craft Beer

[HFBEER] Samuel Adams

BEANTOWN BREWMASTER | Jim Koch, CEO of Boston Beer Co.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN the small get big? Craft beer is at a turning point. While upstart breweries continue to blossom—more than 150 opened last year—the companies that started the movement two and three decades ago have grown into relative giants. The largest by far is Boston Beer Co. Started by Jim Koch in 1984, today it operates three breweries and produces 1.2 million 31-gallon barrels of beer annually—so much, in fact, that last year the Brewers Association raised the definition of “craft” from a yearly cap of two million barrels to six million. This jostled a few industry pint glasses. After all, Boston Beer seems a far different breed than your local brewpub. And yet, it’s farther still from, say, multinational beverage behemoth Anheuser-Busch InBev, which hit the two-million-barrel mark back in 1938. I joined Mr. Koch in his bustling Jamaica Plain, Mass., brewery to sample some new recipes and find out, as craft beer grows up, what it means to be small and whether Samuel Adams still counts.

You came early to craft beer, but you weren’t the first. What did the craft beer world look like when you started Boston Beer?

Originally, craft brewing was marketing driven, not quality driven. The hope was that people would forgive you because you were small and cute. Drink the marketing, not the beer.

The names Boston Beer and Samuel Adams imply a specific story, or at least history. How’d you settle on them?

We’re in Boston, so that wasn’t hard. And you don’t need to be a genius to know that you don’t put the name Koch on a product 26-year-old men put in their mouth!

[HFBEER] F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal

While upstart breweries continue to blossom—more than 150 opened last year—the companies that started the movement two and three decades ago have grown into relative giants.

You started by making lager—something that seemed both cutting into big guys’ turf and expanding what most drinkers thought lager was, or could be.

Lager was a huge problem. It’s much more expensive and difficult to make. But my family’s German. This is what we do. I had a recipe from my great-great-grandfather. My dad said, The big guys will kill you. I said, Dad, I’m not competing with them. They make clean, consistent, inexpensive beer extremely well. You can go your whole life drinking Bud, Miller and Coors and never get a bad one. That’s not true with craft beer.

So what makes you different than Budweiser?

It’s what’s in the glass. It tastes different. It’s obvious.

What makes craft beer craft?

It’s not quality. Everybody jumps on Budweiser. But they have better brewing skills than you do and they care just as much about their product as you do.

This month you’re releasing a couple of new beers in your small-run Single Batch collection—Norse Legend, a Finnish juniper beer, and Verloren, a gose, made with salt and coriander. Most American drinkers have probably never heard of gose. Do you try to find old styles to resurrect?

Not that much. This didn’t come from thinking, I want to educate people about salt in beer. It’s about wanting to make great beer. The gose has a unique mineral note that I can’t recall ever having in a beer. It’ll be really interesting to see drinkers’ reactions.

Have any beers failed?

There was a beer called WTF. Very experimental, a lot of things going on—steeping of whole flowers, barrel aging, very high alcohol. Everybody who rated it [on the beer-rating website Beer Advocate] gave it an “F.” I remember watching people try to drink it out of the bottle and just blowing it out—Pffffff! I thought, We have the lowest-rated beer in history. Cool. Maybe we can get another one.

Our beer will make its own friends. Or not. Most of these [Single Batch series beers] have been commercial failures. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea. At our size, we can do whatever we want. You need to be big enough to be able to do it, but you also have to be small enough to want to do it.

You started a microloan program, Brewing the American Dream, for small food and drink businesses. But it’s more than that—it’s really a mentorship program.

When I started out, nobody made brewing equipment, nobody had brewing skills. You used old dairy equipment. Now, it’s gotten easier—you can actually make your beer. But there are different problems. And I thought, just giving money away is lazy. That’s ticking boxes. Businesses that recognize their social return perform better.

If big brewers like Anheuser-Busch wanted to make, say, a gose, they could, right? Why don’t they?

You’re focusing on the hardware, not the software. They have the resources. But it’s more than money and hard assets. It’s also a matter of passion. What do you love, what are you proud of? These are the things that motivate people.

You started as a home-brewer. Do you think you keep that spirit?

The line between a talented amateur and a practicing professional is largely arbitrary.

—Edited from an interview by William Bostwick

[HFBEER] F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal

Norse Legend

New Boston Beer to Try Now

Norse Legend

7.0% ABV

This ancient Finnish rye-and-juniper-flavored beer, called sahti, was traditionally home-brewed by women; Boston Beer’s Jennifer Glanville helmed its take on the style with a rustic, loamy bloom and fresh pine-needle finish.

[HFBEER] F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal

Verloren

Verloren

6.0% ABV

German for “lost,” Verloren dusts off a forgotten salt-infused Saxon style called gose. Just a dash (think milligrams per liter) goes a long way, balancing the beer’s slightly sour tang, juicing up the touch of coriander and finishing the mix with a curious mineral edge, like a Manzanilla Sherry.

[HFBEER] F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal

Whitewater IPA

5.8% ABV

A year-round brew, but perfect for summer, Whitewater blends a witbier’s refreshing orange-peel spice with the earthy sweetness of apricots and passion fruit-juice punch of trendy, Australian Topaz hops.

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