Brewing creativity with Jim Koch of Boston Beer Company

When Jim Koch created Samuel Adams Boston Lager in 1984, American craft beer was still in its infancy. But forty years and thousands of new craft breweries later, both the competition and Jim’s drive to innovate are fiercer than ever... This week on How I Built This Lab, Jim reveals how thinking beyond paradigms and exploring aberrations has kept Boston Beer Company a leader in the alcoholic beverage industry. From hard teas to nitrogenated ales to non-alcoholic IPAs, Jim also shares the stories behind his company’s biggest hits — and biggest flops. Also, check out Boston Beer Company’s founding story https://art19.com/shows/831bd173-0992-41b7-b1eb-112db904d947/episodes/0fae3366-c691-4ba4-9e22-cfd7f5fb578e/embed told by Jim in October 2016. This episode was produced by Sam Paulson with music by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by John Isabella with research help from Chris Maccini. Our audio engineer was Neal Rauch. You can follow HIBT on X https://twitter.com/HowIBuiltThis & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis, and email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 2:16Guy Raz?

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• 3:00Guy Raz?

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• 3:45Guy Raz?

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• 4:27Guy Raz?

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• 5:12Guy Raz?

  Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So back in 2016, one of our very earliest episodes was on the founding of the Boston Beer Company, makers of Sam Adams Beer. Our guest was its founder, Jim Cook. I know lots of you remember that episode because so many of you have come to talk to me about it when you meet me. It was really funny. It was full of great lessons. And Jim talked about a framework he came up with that gave him the courage to start the company. And that framework was pretty simple. He asked himself, what's worse, doing something scary or something dangerous? Well, for Jim, leaving his comfortable job as a consultant to start a beer company was

• 5:55Guy Raz?

  certainly going to be scary. But not doing it, not taking the leap, and staying at a job you really didn't love? Well, that was dangerous, because one day, he might regret not trying, and it would be too late to start. Fast forward to today, and a lot has changed in the beer industry, even in the time since Jim first joined us. There's been a flood of craft beer brands that have started up. Some have prospered, many of them have failed. And American drinking habits have changed as well, with more people opting for spirits or even non-alcoholic drinks. None of this has ruffled Jim Cook or stifled his creativity in any way.

• 6:38Guy Raz?

  In fact, it's just made him more innovative, as you will hear. Jim no longer runs the day-to-day operations at Boston Beer Company, but he's still very much involved and a big part of product innovation there. A few weeks ago, I asked him to come back onto the show for an update. And when he sat down in the studio, he decided to celebrate our conversation with, well, a nice cold beer.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  And I actually, and you were talking about the last episodes, it reminded me of actually the secret of why that came out so well. And if I may, I'm going to give you the key to that, which is, I discovered long ago that I'm really boring when I'm dead sober.

• 7:23Guy Raz?

  So.

• 7:25Guy Raz?

  Back then, there were about 5,700 craft breweries in the US. Boston Beer Company, still considered a craft beer company. It's, I think you make about, you know, 8.5 million barrels of beer a year. So you're still considered very small compared to the big guys. Not the biggest, I think Yangling is the biggest craft beer, beer number two. But at the time, there were about 5,500. Today, there are almost 10,000, by 2022, almost 10,000 craft breweries in America. You, Jim, are widely considered to be like the guy who reinvigorated craft brewing in the US. Like you're called the godfather of craft brewing.

• 8:07Guy Raz?

  But I wonder whether you think that there's too many. I mean, is there market saturation now? You know, what do you think?

• 8:16Speaker 01

  You're asking a brewer. Is there too many beers? I mean, a brewer always wants another beer.

• 8:23Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  So I'm very happy that there are 10,000 craft brewers. And in all seriousness, this is sort of what success looks like.

• 8:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  You know, when I started Sam Adams, it'll be 40 years ago. That was kind of what we dreamed about. That someday, everybody was, you know, 10 minutes away from a craft brewer. And that there would be great beer everywhere. And, you know, the downside to that is, there is so much competition.

• 8:58Guy Raz?

  Yes.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  Everybody's innovating. Everybody's trying to make the next new thing. But that's wonderful. Yes, it's a much harder business to be in. But on the other hand, it's stable. It's not going anywhere. It has totally changed the landscape of beer in the United States. And today, the place where brewers from all over the world look for inspiration and innovation is not Germany. It's not Belgium. It's not England. It's America. We are teaching the rest of the world how to make great beer. And when I started Sam Adams, American beer was a joke.

• 9:42Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  And, you know, I come from a brewing family with a deep history of brewing in America, and it bothered me. And today, nobody makes that joke anymore.

• 9:52Guy Raz?

  Right. Because things like IPAs, really, you know, which you see in Europe, and it's amazing. I mean, those are really influenced by American brewers. But I'm just curious, because I've been reading things like, you know, craft brewing, we know is more competitive. And the market share is slightly decreasing. I mean, the market share of spirits has really jumped from 2000 to today. And it's now greater, a greater share of the overall alcohol market than beer, slightly. You know, beer's still... Big, I'm 40, 41%, but spirits now outselling beer a little bit. Do you think that it's, it sort of foreshadows what is going to happen over time?

• 10:34Guy Raz?

  Doesn't mean that, you know, Boston Beer Company and other companies won't come up with other products, but I mean, do you think that in 20 years from now, it's possible that, you know, beer consumption accounts for, let's say, 15% of all alcohol consumption in the US?

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Lots of things are possible. And there's a country western song called "The Hard Way," and one of the lines in there is, "We've got two lives, one we're given and the other one we make."

• 11:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  And maybe 15% is the life we're given, but it's not the one we make. I want a different future and, you know, I'm willing to take the challenge of creating that different future. And to me, as a brewer, there are great beers that have not been made yet.

• 11:24Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  And they may take a form that we can't imagine today. And to me, that's the opportunity, that's what's exciting. You know, I've been making beer for 40 years and I wake up excited every day by the possibilities. And we make things that are almost beyond imagination. We make a special beer, we release it every two years. It's called Samuel Adams Utopias. It weighs in at about 60 proof. It's the strongest naturally fermented beer in history. And we sell it for $250 a bottle and we sell out.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  We have to ration it. And to me, a beer like that... Easily stands next to, you know, a vintage port or a fine cognac, an old sherry. We've moved into a flavor space where beer has never been.

• 12:27Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  You know, and then, on the other hand, you know, we've made canned cocktails that are just flat out delicious and it's not technically a beer, but it leverages our culinary skills, our flavor innovation and, you know, it's in a can. You make it in a brewery, goes through beer wholesalers and so forth. Whether you call that spirits or beer, um, to me, it's just part of this wonderful universe of beautiful things you can do with the fermentation of grain.

• 13:08Guy Raz?

  How do you begin to think about, you know, innovating? So you, you, you start as a beer company, right? And then you make different kinds of beers. But now, Boston Beer Company makes hard ciders, it makes seltzers, it sells a hard iced tea. So let's kind of break this down. How do you decide what to do next? I mean, is it based on market research and looking at like where, you know, where younger consumers are going, what they're drinking? Do you sort of follow the consumer essentially?

• 13:42Speaker 01

  No, no. There are plenty of people who are very good at that. Big companies have lots of research and they buy reports and, you know, they get all this quantitative stuff and so forth. So we can't really compete with these big companies. They've got all these feelers out there. We have to, to be successful, we have to be different. And so for me, this starts with ideas that are, if you will, paradigm shifts. You know, we approach the world in paradigms.

• 14:16Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  And we are prisoners of those paradigms. And I've always tried to. Take those blinders and that structure away because it forces you to think in the same way that everybody else is thinking, and so it inhibits innovation and new ways of adding value.

• 14:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  For, you know, our whole time in alcohol, last few centuries, alcohol is basically divided into three realms. There's beer, there's wine, and there's hard liquor or spirits.

• 14:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  And those are three lanes. Okay. And an insight about that is, you know, they're all acquired tastes. They all have a flavor structure. As human beings, we're not actually evolved to like.

• 15:06Guy Raz?

  That's so true, actually.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Wine is tannic and acidic. You know, beer is bitter and has that tongue sting of carbonic acid on the palate. And of course, hard liquor has that ferocious ethanol attack.

• 15:23Guy Raz?

  That burn, yeah.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  Upfront. Yeah. So they all are acquired tastes.

• 15:27Guy Raz?

  Which is why kids don't like them. Kids, you know, drink a sip of beer or wine.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  No, no. You have to evolve your taste to like them, and that's fine. But you're fighting something. So the term I use is a fourth category. And that's kind of our blue ocean where we can innovate because nobody's really there.

• 15:51Guy Raz?

  And the fourth category is, what do you call it?

• 15:53Speaker 01

  I call it the fourth category.

• 15:55Guy Raz?

  The fourth category.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Because it doesn't have a name, but it is the space of intersection.

• 16:01Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Of all of them. Things that are not traditional wine, traditional beer.

• 16:06Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  Traditional liquor. I mean, there's a place for all these wonderful things, but there was this unexplored territory of wonderful beverages that had not yet been made, but were, to me, I think of them, they exist.

• 16:21Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  They're just unrecognized and lying dormant. And my job is to kind of dust them off and find them in this junkyard of bad ideas.

• 16:32Guy Raz?

  We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, how Boston Beer Company brought an alcoholic twist to some of our favorite non-alcoholic beverages. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

• 16:52Guy Raz?

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• 17:37Guy Raz?

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• 18:22Guy Raz?

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• 19:07Guy Raz?

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• 20:01Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So Jim Cook loves thinking outside traditional paradigms. A great drink doesn't need to be a beer or wine. It can be something totally different.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  So for example, we've developed an ability to ferment grain and then clean it and take out a lot of the less pleasant notes. We're essentially making this beautiful, clean, clear, 20% alcohol liquid that then can form a base for other flavors. It's like the pizza dough on the counter and you can put anything on it you want.

• 20:47Guy Raz?

  And you can turn that into several other products?

• 20:50Speaker 01

  I can turn that into an unlimited

• 20:54Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  number of products. One of the first things that we developed, it was over 20 years ago, was hard tea. And it was very appealing to me because tea has, you know, like beer and hops and so forth. Tea has a couple of thousand years of tradition. It's got big flavor variations between different teas. You've got black teas, green tea, red tea, white tea. And, you know, it's a flavor I know that people are familiar with, but I can introduce it to them in a new way. And so we came out with a hard tea called Bodine's. Chucked that one up. That was another failure.

• 21:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  But I didn't do that well. And then there was a band that sued us, so that was a fiasco.

• 21:41Guy Raz?

  So just to, just to clarify, you're talking about as a Twisted Tea brand?

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 21:45Guy Raz?

  And already 20 years ago, Boston Beer Company released a hard tea, but that didn't work. It failed initially?

• 21:53Speaker 01

  Well, and then it failed again.

• 21:55Guy Raz?

  So what happened? How did it, how did that turn around?

• 21:58Speaker 01

  Well, it failed the second time as Twisted Tea, but it had little pockets. Okay. And we're, you know, we're not a big company. Big companies, if something fails, they, they shoot it in the head and they move on.

• 22:12Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  But this was like our baby and it had these little pockets where it actually was doing reasonably well.

• 22:20Guy Raz?

  Huh.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  What it was, was states that start with M, but weren't Mississippi. So it was doing well in Maine. It was doing well in Massachusetts. It was doing well in Maryland, in Montana, in Michigan.

• 22:36Guy Raz?

  That does not explain anything, though. That is, that explains nothing to me. There has to be a reason why people.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 22:44Guy Raz?

  Why?

• 22:45Speaker 01

  Um, well, that's the question you have to ask yourself. You know, and that's part of this paradigm thinking. People every, you know, people focus on the paradigm and what works within the paradigm. And what you really have to do is focus on the aberrations. Things that are outside the paradigm. You know, that's how Copernicus worked, how Einstein worked. A lot of great scientists, they look at the aberrations. So we went to these aberrations. And I started with Maine. And I just went to Maine and I stood in convenience stores, which was the main place that was selling. And I stood in one of them all day long. And there were like five people that came in and bought twisted tea.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  And I asked them why they were buying twisted tea. And what I was told, well, I like the way it tastes. And it's not carbonated, so I don't get bloated. Um, and it makes me feel good. And it had, you know, a very familiar taste. It had the modicum of caffeine in from the natural tea. Not a lot, but enough to just kind of change the contours of the buzz that you got from it. Uh, and it was very flavorful, so you didn't chug it. You'd have one or two.

• 24:05Guy Raz?

  And it tastes like a, kind of like a regular iced tea, a little bit.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's actually a bigger tea flavor profile. Cause a lot of the non-alk teas, the Snapples in Arizona, there, there's not much tea flavor.

• 24:18Guy Raz?

  There's powder, right? They use powder.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the tea isn't that, I mean, they, they're very successful. They sell a lot because the tea flavor is sort of excessive and the sweetness and the fruit, the lemon and things that get added are essential elements to it. And we were, it was very tea forward, but it was very high quality tea. And the core drinker was a blue collar drinker, but a kind of educated blue collar drinker. Cause it wasn't cheap. You know, this was selling for basically craft beer pricing. I mean, the first guy I talked to in Maine, he was a mason and he was building a stone wall. And the next guy was a sheet rocker. You know, he put up the plasterboard in a construction site.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  And so, and these were people who were very sort of clever with, uh, doing.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Odd things and they started sending us pictures of them drinking twisted tea. The first one was this guy who looked like he was in a pool. But then when you opened the aperture, he put a plastic sheet in the back of his pickup truck, filled it with water and was sitting there in his bathing suit, having a twisted tea and it made me smile. This is our drinker. This is great. So it started to get traction. Bikers adopted it. It's like the official drink of Sturgis, the big bike rally in North Dakota. And it's just grown over 20 some years. It started with that base. It's still the base for it.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  And then it sort of spread out now. There's college campuses.

• 25:59Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  I remember moving my daughter out from her dorm at Harvard and she was on the top floor. So we walked down all the five floors and on two of them, there was an empty case of twisted tea.

• 26:12Guy Raz?

  Wow. All right. So let's dig into this a bit more because obviously the tea sort of gamble worked. One thing that you introduced, this is back in, I think, 2016, was hard seltzer. And initially, hard seltzer also didn't take off.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 26:32Guy Raz?

  It was seen as a gimmick.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Well, no, it was actually, I mean, I'll tell you a story of it. We misconceived it. You know, 25 years ago, we developed this clear malt base.

• 26:43Guy Raz?

  This was before Coors released Zima?

• 26:47Speaker 01

  This, it was after Coors released Zima, but the base that Coors had was not clean.

• 26:53Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  It had some off notes of sulfur that came out of the fermentation. They didn't know how to get those molecules out of there. So we had to, I mean, I'll. It's a little complicated, but we had to develop this ion separation technology. And I'm not a scientist, but I know it tastes good. We actually did that in partnership with Brown Forten, with the people who make Jack Daniels. And they had some chemical engineers and it was a very fruitful partnership. And out of that came this clear malt base that the Jack Daniels country cocktails are built on. And we kept thinking about, well, what else could we do with it? And it was, it took 20 years to come to this idea, which was hard seltzer.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Truly was the first hard seltzer here. And it just came from just thinking, pushing, what could we do with this? And it was a very simple idea. You know, La Croix was taking off, seltzer water was taking off. And we said, you know, what if we made an alcoholic version of that?

• 27:58Guy Raz?

  So you were, you were paying attention to La Croix because La Croix really just exploded. I mean, even though it's been around for a long time, it really started to explode in the 2010s.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, you know, to me, when I'd go into a store, you know, everybody stays in the beer aisle and they look and they try to copy other people's ideas, you know, I'm walking the rest of the store. I'm looking in the non-alc section and just drawing stimulation from that. And so this idea of an alcoholic hard seltzer and the parameters, the framework for them was what if we made something that had 100 calories? You know, we were going to do no sugar, no artificial sweetness. So we put relatively complex fruit flavors.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  And I mean, again, we were totally wrong. When we formulated, we thought, you know, who's going to drink this? Well, our drinker is going to be a white blouse woman who didn't want sugar and starches. And she's going to drink it after she plays tennis and it's going to be a substitute for like Chardonnay on the rocks or vodka soda with a lime. This is going to be a better version of that. And we're going to sell a million cases a year. Which is not a whole lot in a business, you know, with uh this like three billion cases or some huge number. Right.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  And what we've learned is make a beautiful flavor profile, make a beautiful product, and it will find its way to the right drinkers. We learned that from Twisted Tea. We thought that was gonna be for like urban, yuppies, Snapple drinkers, and we were totally wrong. So, we put this out and we had it in market a couple of months and we had our wholesalers, our beer wholesalers on a, they got an incentive trip and we take them to the Caribbean and one of the days is this booze cruise on a trawler. And these, these are beer wholesalers. They're like professional world-class drinkers. Sure, yeah.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  So, you know, this is a ten, twelve-hour booze cruise. We go to some famous, you know, Caribbean bars, Foxy's and Salty Dollar and things like that. But the boat is stocked with all of our things. And there were four of our wholesalers sitting on the back bench of this trawler boat and they started drinking Truly. The hard seltzer designed for the white blouse women. And these are like big guys. Yeah. There probably was, there were four of them. There's probably twelve hundred pounds of wholesaler on that bench. And I said, guys, do me a favor. Just count the Truly's 'cause uh we're gonna be on this boat for like ten hours. Um I just, I'm curious, 'cause I said, I'm only gonna drink Truly 'cause I wanna understand what kinda buzz I get.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. Do I get a hangover? Uh I'm like using my body to experiment. And at the end of the day, those wholesalers had like sixty-four of them. Wow. So sixteen apiece. And I realized, oh, this is different. And I asked, why are you drinking all this Truly? You're a beer drinker. Yeah. And he said, well Jim, I gotta watch my girlish figure too. And this, it tastes great and it doesn't fill me up. And I thought, oh, that, that sounds like tastes great less filling. So, uh I realized, hmm.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  This is different than I anticipated. Let me explore that. And after that, we changed the packaging to make it less feminine. And a great product that's really delicious will find its way to its natural drinker. So I don't try to anticipate that.

• 31:54Guy Raz?

  It's so interesting because you start out by sort of marketing and packaging it for a specific consumer, only to discover that actually, you know, it appeals to very different types of consumers. And I know, I know lots of big burly dudes who love Truly, so, and prefer it because, in part because they go to the gym and they, you know, they don't want to consume all the carbs. So, all right, so it's about sort of experimenting, but there are also failures, right? I mean, you, you come up with products that are going to fail.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  Dozens and dozens and dozens, Guy.

• 32:29Guy Raz?

  And that's part of it, right? Because any of these things, like the things we've talked about, you know, Twisted Tea or Truly, we haven't talked about Angry Orchard, which is a hard cider. But even those products have, by and large, been huge successes for, for the brand. But, but in order to have those successes, you have to take risks, right?

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:49Guy Raz?

  And presumably, taking risks means you're going to have some, some dogs there that just fail.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I mean, they were all birthed as failures. Angry Orchard Hard Cider began life as hardcore in 1996. You know, we revived a very traditional beverage. Beer was not always the number one alcoholic beverage in the United States. Before the Civil War, then the number one alcoholic beverage was hard cider. And beer displaced it, you know, after the Civil War for a bunch of reasons.

• 33:22Guy Raz?

  Hard cider, even in the US?

• 33:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so I thought, let's do that. And we called it hardcore, and it failed. But the same kind of thing. It had a few pockets and we were about to kill it, but it started growing and we went and see who was drinking it. And we realized... We had to clean up the flavor profile because our original Hardcore was based on traditional English cider. It had some sulfur, some sort of rough notes that, you know, was made of the rural drink. And let's clean this up. Let's make it nicer. Let's bring forth the apple flavor. Let's use great ingredients. So we still bring in apples

• 34:06Speaker 01

  from Normandy and from northern Italy because true cider apples are not grown in the US anymore. And we wanted to make this from true cider apples, not grocery store apples.

• 34:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  It's very much like wine. You're not going to make great wine from grocery store grapes.

• 34:22Guy Raz?

  And so that, again, it just took some time.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  Yes, it did. It took 14 years.

• 34:30Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  So we are patient. If we believe in something and it finds a niche, you know, we grow it from that niche. And we ended up, we changed the name from Hardcore because everybody associated with porn, which was not a good idea. And we changed it to Angry Orchard, which was kind of a weird name, but it was a nice juxtaposition.

• 34:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  And, uh, and the orchard is a very primal image of childhood simplicity. Uh, if you, you know, you, four quartets, the T S Eliot poem, there's a line in there, the children in the apple tree, an image of complete simplicity. And that was, to me, this beautiful metaphor of you have an angry orchard and it takes you into the orchard. And that's a place that we would love to return.

• 35:26Guy Raz?

  We're going to take another quick break, but when we come back, why Jim started brewing non-alcoholic beer, a drink that for a long time was notorious for how bad it tastes. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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• 36:53Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So Jim has boozified all kinds of drinks, but he's also done the opposite as he's gotten into the very complex art of brewing non-alcoholic beer.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  For a long time, non-alcoholic beer didn't taste good.

• 37:11Guy Raz?

  It was terrible.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  It was pretty crappy.

• 37:13Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  And for 35 years, people would say, you know, I've used up my quota, but I loved Sam Adams, you know, when I was still drinking. Can you make a non-alcoholic beer? Why don't you make a non-alcoholic beer? And I'd say, well, the reason I don't is because non-alcoholic beers taste like crap. And pretty much all of them, because they're basically an unfermented beer that they carbonate so you don't get any of that yeast complexity in it. Or, you know, they make a beer and then they strip it and it ends up being unpleasant. And that was true for 30 years. And then I was at a beer conference and I tasted the first non-alcoholic beer that was really good. And that was actually Heineken Zero Zero.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  And I remember to this day, it was like six years ago in San Diego. And I poured it to see, well, I'll see if this one's as bad as the previous one, which was called Buckler. And it was night and day. It was a revelation. Like this tastes like good beer. And I don't know how they did it, but I'm going to figure this out because they have opened the door. And we started rethinking it. There was technology that didn't exist before. It was a vacuum distillation, so you could essentially draw the alcohol out of the beer at almost room temperature. And then, and it got a little complicated and then take the distill it and re-distill it,

• 38:43Speaker 01

  throw away the alcohol and put the flavor elements back in the beer. And then build some complexity with some hop character, blah, blah, blah. At the end of the day, we got a hazy IPA that was non-alcoholic and had the same taste scores as the alcoholic version of it. When people tasted it blind, they could not identify it as a non-alcoholic beer.

• 39:12Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  And the scores on it that we were getting were equal to the alcoholic variation. And I thought, all right, this is something we can be proud of. This is something we can put out there. I mean, there's times when I want a beer, but I really don't want the alcohol.

• 39:28Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Like summer, long bike ride.

• 39:32Guy Raz?

  Sure, hike.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  Four hours later.

• 39:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  You know, I'm a little, I'm depleted. I need the hydration. But if I have a couple of beers, I'm going to go to sleep.

• 39:42Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  That's a beautiful time for it. My most fun time is in summer, you're blasting down the highway at 70, 75 miles an hour, and you're drinking a beer. That's an experience we've been deprived of.

• 39:56Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  Rightfully so.

• 39:58Guy Raz?

  Um, so, so let's talk about a failure. What, what is something that you've introduced in the last 20 years that you maybe hung on to a little too long that just didn't work?

• 40:06Speaker 01

  Well, uh, there was Sam Adams Nitro. Um, again, the conventional idea for beer is it's carbonated. Yeah. Right? We drink beer, you get that tongue sting of carbonic acid. It's part of the overall flavor profile. But the counter idea is, what if we nitrogenated it? What if it wasn't CO2 with that, you know, really sharp sting to it? What if it was nitrogen? And nitrogen has this velvety smoothness. Like a creaminess, right? Yeah, exactly. Um, and very small, tight bubbles, uh, instead of the bigger CO2 bubbles. And it gives it that beautiful, um, head, that creamy.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  Yes. Luscious. Yes. And everybody thought about, you know, that's Guinness. Yeah. So that was our idea was let's nitrogenate other beer styles. Let's do it for a white ale and we'll put some coriander and some orange in it. Like a saison? Yeah, a variation of a saison. Um, we were sort of riffing on that. And let's try that with a red ale that has this sweet, multi-smoothness that will just rides along with that creamy nitrogenation. So it's just, you know, once you get the idea, you can riff on it.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  A lot of times the ideas also require not just culinary and aesthetic innovation, but there, as a brewer, we're, in some ways, there's an aspect of what I do, other brewers do, it's like Cristo. Cristo, the, the artist. Yeah. Giant installations of, of fabric. And, yeah, and crazy things, wrapping a building. Yeah. Things like that. And when he talks about his art, he will point out there's two forms of innovation that are totally different. One is the art itself and the other is making it exist in the real world.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  That is physical elements, governmental elements, social elements, and both of them require creativity. I mean, you want to wrap a building, you know, you gotta get permits, you gotta get people who will go along with your crazy idea. You've got to figure out engineering things of how do you fasten it to the building? How do you keep the wind from? Doing this and that. And that was the same sort of dichotomy of creativity that, you know, we needed in order to make this beautiful idea. So we had to go to England

• 42:50Speaker 01

  and find a can maker that could put a small capsule in the bottom of the cans that was filled with nitrogen, pressurized to a level where, once you opened it, you changed the pressure balance inside the can, released pressure, which then allowed this little capsule in the bottom to rupture through tiny little pinholes and spew out all this nitrogen that created all those beautiful, gushing bubbles.

• 43:22Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  So creativity comes in many forms, and I enjoy all of them.

• 43:29Guy Raz?

  So what happened? I mean, why did you guys give up on that?

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Because nobody bought it. So I've learned to accept the verdict of the drinker. It was more expensive because we're, you know, the cans were quite expensive. It was a wonderful beer, but it just could not find a place. And I'm OK with that. I mean, I, you know, if I make something really wonderful, beautiful, that I believe in, I'm done. I mean, that's OK. People don't have to enjoy the same things I enjoy, as long as, you know, once in a while, I can create something that changes the beer landscape, that's enough.

• 44:13Guy Raz?

  Sam Adams is a product that will, I have no doubt, will be around in 50, 100 years, maybe beyond. It's like an enduring brand of beer, right? There you go.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  I hope so.

• 44:27Guy Raz?

  Now, but my question to you is, aside from Sam Adams as an enduring brand, enduring product, does it matter if, let's say, Truly is just a successful brand for, you know, seven or 10 years and then fizzles out? Like, is it important, in your view, to build enduring products and brands? Or is it OK if something's really successful for a couple of years and then just kind of fizzles out?

• 44:52Speaker 01

  The answer is no. I do want to build enduring products and brands. And I believe that if you're making something really good, it's not a flash in a pan. It will grow. People will acquire a taste for what you're giving them. So I don't want things that are sort of boom, splat.

• 45:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  I want things that are slow builds. I mean, like we were talking, you know, Hard Cider is now 27 years. And it's now an enduring success, but it took it 27 years to get to where it is today. And to me, that's all built on the quality of the product and the delightfulness of the taste experience. And those are enduring characteristics.

• 45:50Guy Raz?

  That's Jim Cook, co-founder and chairman of Boston Beer Company. Jim, thank you so much for coming on again. It's been great having you.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  Well, this has been a great pleasure. I got to finish my first beer and I'm halfway through my second. So that tells me this was a great time. And thank you for bringing us together.

• 46:09Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. This episode was produced by Sam Paulson with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by John Isabella with research help from Chris Messini. Our audio engineer was Neil Rouch. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Carla Estevez, Kerry Thompson, J.C. Howard, Malia Agudelo, Niva Grant, and Catherine Seifer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This Lab.