Founder, Brewer & Chairman of the Board, BOSTON BEER INC -CL A
BeerSweden interviews Jim Koch from Samuel Adams
In the first of a new series of Skype video interviews I speak with one of the most innovative characters in world brewery - Jim Koch, founder and chairman of Boston Beer Company. I even get to 'share' a transatlantic drink of Utopias with him!
About C. Koch
Jim Koch, founder and chairman of Boston Beer Company, has continued to be a prominent voice in the beer industry through numerous interviews and public appearances. In late 2025, Koch discussed his personal philosophy on wealth, stating that "getting rich is life's biggest booby prize" and that he would rather be happy than rich. He also recounted advice from his uncle to focus on sales, saying "sales cures everything," and noted that he has retained all voting shares in his company to maintain control. Koch has spoken about the competitive environment for new craft breweries, advising them to innovate and "raise the bar" to justify consumers choosing their beer. He has also discussed the company's succession plans, jokingly describing his "foolproof" plan as "don't die today," while acknowledging the company's governance structures as a public entity. Koch has addressed several business trends and challenges. He described the company's decision to enter the cannabis space in Canada as an "experiment" and noted that delta-9 THC beverages in the U.S. are "a mess" due to inconsistent state laws. He has also commented on the anti-alcohol sentiment in the press, calling it "alarming" and "self-inflicted" due to the industry's withdrawal of funding for neutral health research. Regarding the company's products, Koch discussed the evolution of Samuel Adams Boston Lager, comparing the process to "remastering a vinyl record," and highlighted the growth of non-alcoholic beer, attributing it to new brewing techniques that improved the taste. He has also spoken about the company's investment in the hard seltzer category, stating that Truly has gained market share despite competition from major brands like Bud Light Seltzerainer.
Transcript (28 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Host0:03
Hi everyone, welcome to this very special edition of Beer Sweden TV. It's actually going to be the first of a new series of Skype interviews where we try to get hold of some of the most influential people in world brewing. We are starting at the very top of the tree with Jim Koch, who is the chairman of Boston Beer Company, better known here in Sweden as Samuel Adams. Jim, a huge thank you for joining us. We're very honored and privileged to have you here on the show, our first ever Skype interview guest. Thanks for joining us.
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C. Koch0:42
Well, it's an honor. Now listen, the technology between I'm sitting up here in the frozen north of Sweden and you're sitting over there... It's pretty cold over there too, isn't it? About freezing. But the picture is going in and out, but let's continue anyway.
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Host1:01
Jim, I always like to start at the very beginning. Let's go back to the very beginning of the story. How did you start out brewing beer?
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C. Koch1:09
Well, I started out brewing beer when I was very little because my dad was a brewmaster. I'm actually the sixth oldest son in a row to be a brewmaster here in the United States. My father was a brewmaster, my grandfather, my great-grandfather, great-great-great-great-grandfather. So I grew up around beer. That's where my dad worked.
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Host1:37
So it's been passed on, it's kind of in your blood.
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C. Koch1:44
Yeah, but at a legal level about four... So was it always going to be that you were going to go into brewing, or is it something you fell into? Well, I think it's more like fell into it. When my father got out of brewmaster school in 1948, there were about a thousand breweries in the US. By the time I started Sam Adams in 1984, that thousand had condensed down to about 35 or 40. His brewing career was littered with all the small, local, and regional breweries that were driven out of business by the mass marketing and mass production of beer in the US. I didn't originally go into brewing. I was a manufacturing expert. Then in 1983, I got tired of my job, wanted to do something new, thought about a lot of businesses, and I latched onto the idea of starting one of the first microbreweries here in the United States with the simple idea of making really high quality beer and giving it to Americans fresh.
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Host3:06
That must have been a pretty difficult sell. You must have been going in at the bottom of the market.
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C. Koch3:21
Absolutely, at the bottom of the market. But my original business plan didn't really contemplate what eventually happened. I never believed that Sam Adams would get very big. My original business plan was to grow to about 6,000 hectoliters, and I thought it would take five years to get there. It turned out that six weeks after Sam Adams was introduced here in the United States, it got picked as the best beer in America, which wasn't quite as difficult then as it would be today. It won that award for four years, and that put us on the map. The company grew 50%. We went from two people to three.
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Host4:17
From those early beginnings until today, there's been a huge change in the brewing landscape in the US. You're often cited as one of the driving forces in the craft brewing revolution. That's eventually taken a little while, but it's blown over the Atlantic and hit Scandinavia. It landed in Denmark first, but it's definitely here now in Sweden. The term craft beer or craft brewing is being used a lot in the media. How would you define craft beer? What makes a beer craft beer?
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C. Koch4:59
In the United States, the Brewers Association, which is the organization of craft brewers, has undertaken the difficult task of creating a definition. Like any definition, at the edges there's always a little blurriness. But the definition we've adopted here in the US is that a craft brewer is small, independent, and traditional. Small is about a little under 3% of the market. Independent means you're not owned by a big brewer or another company, but you can control your own destiny. Traditional means essentially that you use your ingredients to add flavor and taste to the beers, especially barley, rather than adding adjuncts to lighten it up.
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Host6:00
Sweden is the largest export market for American craft beer in the world. We love the inventiveness and energy in US craft beers, but it's still a very small percentage of the total market, about 5%. Is that right?
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C. Koch6:30
You probably know more than I do, Darren. It's reached 5%. That's stunning and exciting. If someone had told me 27 years ago when I was making Sam Adams in my kitchen that someday we'd be exported to Sweden, I would have been amazed. I'm still amazed today. We're having great fun with your brands. There are quite a few of them here in the systembolaget, so it's pretty well known nationally here.
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Host7:02
Sweden is still pretty much wine-led. I'd be interested to know if you have a tip for how to persuade a wine drinker to drink better beer.
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C. Koch7:20
I would explain to them that the brewer's art encompasses much more than the winemaker's art. The winemaker has one ingredient: a grape. Their choices in making wine are basically skins or no skins, and steel or oak. That's it. To me, that's why most red wines all taste the same and most white wines all taste the same. But when you go to brewing, a brewer is much more like a chef. When I make a beer, I'm preparing a dish of food, and I can draw ingredients from anywhere I want. In making the Samuel Adams beers, I use cherries, blackberries, spices like grains of paradise or rose hips, powdered plum, jasmine, lavender. I can choose my grains and roast them to different levels. So a brewer has much more creativity to work with, and as a result, the range of beer flavors is enormously greater than the tiny little spectrum that wine drinkers and winemakers are confined to.
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Host8:54
Fantastic. I don't think there's a better introduction to the beer that might demonstrate exactly what you're saying than this one. I'll hold it up to the camera. It's one of your very special bottles of Utopias from 2009. Only 60 or 70 of them landed in Sweden a few weeks ago. I've poured a little glass, and the entire studio smells of raisins, rum, dates, prunes, all sorts of beautiful aromas. The beer itself is very unusual. How did it come about? What's the story behind Utopias?
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C. Koch9:46
The story behind Utopias began in 1993. I had been brewing for nine years at that point. The American craft brewing movement for the first decade or so was driven by recreating in the United States the traditional styles of beer from Europe, bringing them to the US, whether it was a porter, stout, pale ale, bock, ESB, or Oktoberfest. American craft brewers were just recreating previously existing styles. I got somewhat bored with that. We're Americans here, and we were very comfortable doing crazy things and pushing the envelope. So I began the Starship Enterprise of beer: take beer where no beer has gone before, discover new life forms. At that time, one of the barriers of beer was that nobody had ever made beer over about 14% alcohol. That was the sound barrier for beer that nobody could get beyond. I started thinking about it and realized, yes, I can do that. I don't know what it's going to taste like, it's going to be something nobody's ever had before. But I set out to push the envelope in flavor creation and ethanol creation of the yeast. I introduced the first beer that got beyond that sound barrier, called Triple Bock in 1994, and it was about 18% ABV. I've continued to work in this world of extremely high alcohol beers. After 17 years, we've gotten to Utopias. The ABV is about 28%. It's the strongest naturally fermented beer. To get any stronger, you have to distill it, turn it into liquor. What you get in here are simply the natural fermentation products, esters, aromatics. That's why it just explodes out of your glass.
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Host12:15
It's so intense in terms of aromatics. Is it right that the liquid is aged in various different styles of casks? You've got Cognac, Sherry, and all sorts of different influences going into the beer.
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C. Koch12:35
Yes. When I first developed Triple Bock and began to create these very high alcohol beers, one of the problems was that they begin to be very hot and boozy, with that ethanol attack on your palate. I was trying to figure out how to solve that. Then I realized that a bunch of illiterate farmers in the backwoods of Kentucky solved this problem 200 years ago. They made their whiskey, their moonshine, and they realized that to smooth it out, they could put it in charred oak barrels. Those barrels can only be used once by law. So all the bourbon makers, once they've used their barrels once, they can't use them again. It was very easy to call them and get used bourbon barrels with all this nice charred wood with vanillas and other very interesting flavors. I got a lot of bourbon barrels. We were the first brewery in the world to age beer in used spirit barrels, and now it's become a big movement here in the United States. We've also started using port, cherry, Madeira, oloroso sherry, even some Chardonnay and Cabernet barrels to bring in different wood elements.
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Host14:09
I hate to see you drinking alone there, Darren. It's very kind of you, Jim, to keep me company. When would you drink a beer like this? It's so special and unique in its complexity.
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C. Koch14:22
To me, it's so enormous and intricate in its flavors that it really stands alone. This is one of the few beers that doesn't benefit from pairing with food. I would drink it after a meal, maybe with a good cigar. It's definitely a sipper. You pour about 30 milliliters into a glass.
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Host14:55
Fantastic. It's a wonderful drink. We've rated it as high as we can rate it. I don't suppose there are many bottles left. I've got a couple more questions for you, Jim, before we sign off. Samuel Adams is pretty well known here. We have quite a few of your seasonal beers coming in. You do a lot of experimentation and come up with lots of styles all the time. Is there one type of beer that you have not yet brewed but always wished you had?
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C. Koch15:39
To be honest, at this point, no. There's not an existing style of beer that I've always wanted to brew because in the 27 years of brewing, I've probably made well over a hundred unique beers. But the one that I haven't brewed yet is the one that hasn't yet been imagined. I'm as excited about brewing new beers today as I was 27 years ago. At our brewery in Boston, we are experimenting with some entirely new, very radical, revolutionary beers. Right now, I'm playing around with tinctures of various flowers to go beyond just hops and see what other aromatics can be brought into beer from additional flowers. That might result in some kind of new beer in the next year or two.
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Host16:49
So it's not a style that exists. The type of beer you want to brew is going to be completely new. You've got to invent it.
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C. Koch16:59
Yeah. We all have to realize that while beer has this wonderful and enormous tradition going back thousands of years, every style that we have today was created by a brewer. They didn't exist when God made rocks and dirt and trees. They are the product of human passion and human creativity, and that didn't stop just because we got to this point in time. To me, what's exciting is that some of the best beers that will ever exist have yet to be brewed, and I want to make one or two of them.
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Host17:42
Fantastic. Jim, last question. Beer, what does it mean to you? What is so great about beer? What is the greatest quality about beer?
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C. Koch18:03
I have to borrow some words from a drinking partner of Samuel Adams, the original Samuel Adams, the patriot, the revolutionary. He shared many pints of fine ale in taverns of colonial America with his friend Ben Franklin. Ben Franklin told us that beer is the best proof we have that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
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Host18:35
Fantastic. Jim, thanks very much for joining us. Wonderful beer, Utopias. To all the Beer Sweden community, if you see it, buy it. It's absolutely sensational and a completely different beer experience from anything else you've ever tried. Jim, thanks very much for taking the time to join us. It was a pleasure to have you on the show. We'll be following all the Samuel Adams beers very closely over the coming months and years here in Sweden. As I always say on the show, we sign off with a little phrase: cheers and beers. I'd like to do that with you, Jim. Cheers and beers.
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C. Koch19:09
Cheers and beers. Thank you for letting me speak to some of the world's greatest beer drinkers, the Swedes. Thanks, Jim.