Rebirth
Jim Koch, founder of The Boston Beer Company.
(2 of 2)
It turned out that I made the right recipe choice because six weeks after Sam Adams Boston Lager hit the market it got picked as the "The Best Beer in America" at the country's largest beer festival in early 1985. (TIME Magazine named it "beer of the decade" in 1990 and I was always proud of that.) The whole brewing world was surprised that this little company had come out of nowhere. I was stunned. We immediately ran out of beer. It takes six weeks to make beer and we were out for a month, waiting for it to finish aging. We went on to win "best beer" at the Great American Beer Festival four years running.
We basically just kept expanding the bars that would carry Sam Adams. We hired a third guy to drive the truck and deliver our beer. It took us ten years for Sam Adams to be available all over the country. We would add more bars, then more neighborhoods around Boston, then different states. A lot of what we had to do was not normal business activities. We had to educate people and change their attitudes about American beer. We were trying to show them that beer is more than alcoholic soda pop. It has history, tradition and quality. I did some radio ads where I would just talk. We didn't have a jingle; we didn't have any animals or sophomoric humor. We just had my boring voice on the radio telling people about beer, the styles, the ingredients and how it was brewed. We started hiring more sales people to do grass roots, guerilla marketing one bar at a time. We did small wait staff tastings where we would get ten minutes in front of them to show them malt, hops and the brewing process and have them describe the flavors. We were hoping to enlist them to educate others about beer. It takes a very long time.
I would love to tell you how hard this all was and how I almost went broke and couldn't make payroll. But I have to be honest. It was really pretty easy because our expectations were modest, but our goals were ambitious. In my business plan, the expectation was that after five years the company would be producing 5,000 barrels of beer a year and employ eight people. But my larger vision was that I wanted to help change the way Americans think about the quality of their own beer. My goal of 5,000 barrels in five years was completely wrong. It took us five months. But we never tried to grow too fast. We grew steadily for 12 years, partly because we had a lot of constraints. We had special hops that we could only get from a small growing area north of Munich so we had to work with the growers to get more planted. Today, Sam Adams has won more international beer awards than any other brewer in the world. And global brewers are looking to the smaller American ones for leadership and new brewing practices. That has been my life's work.
Today we have about 500 employees. People are always surprised to find out how small we actually are. Our market share is only eight-tenths of a percent. In 24 years we have not even gotten to 1 percent of the U.S. beer business. But I didn't start this to be the next Budweiser or Miller or Coors. I wanted to make a world-class beer in the U.S. for the small percentage of beer drinkers who can appreciate flavor and taste. One of the great things about being so small is that we can grow for another 25 years. I might even get all the way up to 2% market share! Sam Adams Boston Lager is still my favorite even though we have 21 other beer styles. I taste a sample of every single batch that goes out the door. It would be a rare day that I didn't have beer.
One of the great things to be able to do in life is to find something your parents don't want you to do because they think you are going to fail. Then go out and do that thing and succeed and make them proud of you for doing it. There is nothing I could have done that was stupider or would have made my dad prouder. He still gives me beer advice, whether I want it or not.