Brewing creativity with Jim Koch of Boston Beer Company

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 certainly gonna 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. 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 in 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. And I actually and you were talking about the last episode.

It was it reminded me of the actually the secret of why that came out so well. Uh and if I may, I'm gonna uh give you the key to that. Which is I discovered long ago that I'm really boring when I'm dead sober. So

Ba back then, um There were about fifty seven hundred craft breweries in the U. Boston Beer Company, still considered a craft beer company. It's I think you make about you know, eight and a half 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 five Five and a half thousand. To date there are almost ten thousand. By twenty twenty two, almost ten thousand

craft breweries in America. Um You, Jim, are widely considered to be like the the guy who reinvigorated craft brewing in the U. Like you're like called the Godfather of craft brew. Brewing. But I wonder whether you think that there's too many. I mean, is there market saturation now? You know. W what do you think?

You're asking a brewer. Is there t too many beers? I mean a brewer always wants another beer. Yeah. Uh I'm very happy that there are ten thousand craft brewers and you're in all seriousness. Sort of what success looks like. Yeah. You know, when I started Sam Adams, it'll be forty years ago That was kind of what we dreamed about. That some day

Everybody was, you know, ten 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. Yes. 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. Um but on the other hand

It's stable, it's not going anywhere, it has totally changed the landscape. A beer. In the United States. And today the place where brewers from all over the world look for inspiration and innovation

It's 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. Yeah. 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. Right, because things like IPAs really, you know, which you see in Europe and and it's amazing, I mean, those are really influenced by

American Brewers. Um, but I'm just curious because I've been reading things like You know, craft br brewing we know is more competitive. And The market share is slightly decreasing. I mean the market share of spirits has really jumped from two thousand to today.

And it's now greater a greater share of the o overall alcohol market than beer slightly Yeah, beer still Big forty, forty, forty one percent. But Spirit's now outselling beer a little bit.

Do you think that it's it's sort of foreshadows of what is gonna happen over time. 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 twenty years from now it's possible that You know, beer consumption accounts for let's say fifteen percent of all Alcohol consumption in the US?

Well, lots of things are possible. Uh and uh there's a country western song called The Hard Way and one of the lines in there is uh we've got two lives, one we're given and the other one we make. Yeah. And maybe fifteen percent. is the life we're given. But it's not the one we make. Uh I want a different future.

And you I'm willing to take the challenge of creating That Different future. And to me as a brewer

There were great that have not been made yet. Right. 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 forty years and I wake up Excited. Every day. By the possibilities. And we make things that

Uh Almost beyond imagination. We make uh a special beer, we release it every two years. It's called Samuel Adams Utopius. It weighs in at about sixty proof. It's the strongest naturally fermented beer in history.

Um and We Sell it for two hundred and fifty dollars a bottle. And we sell out. 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. Yeah. On the other hand.

Yeah, we've made canned Cocktails. That are just flat out Delicious and it's not technically

Beer. but it leverages our culinary skills, our flavor innovation. And you know, it's in a can. You make it in a brewery, go through beer, wholesalers and so forth. Whether you call that spirit your beer, um To me it's just part of

this wonderful universe of beautiful things you can do with the fermentation of grain. How do you begin to think about you know, innovating. So you've you you start as a beer company, right, and then you make different kinds of beers. But now um Boston Beer Company makes

hard ciders, it makes seltzers. It sells uh hard iced tea. So let's kinda 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, we're younger consumers are going, what they're drinking, do you sort of follow the consumer essentially? No. No. Um 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 quantity of 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

B. Different. And so For me This starts with

Ideas. That are If you will, paradigm shifts. You know, we approach the world in paradigms. Yeah. And we are prisoners of those Paradigm.

And I 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. Our whole time in alcohol last few centuries, uh alcohol is basically divided into three realms. There's beer, there's wine, and there's hard liquor or spirits. Yeah and those are three lanes.

Okay, and it and an insight about that is you know, they're all acquired tastes. They all have uh a flavor structure that as human beings were not actually evolved. To like. Wine is actually titanic and acidic. You know, beer is bitter and has that uh tongue sting of carbonic acid on the palate. And of course hard liquor has that

Ferocious ethanol attack. Yeah. So they all are acquired tastes. Which is why kids don't like them. Kids, you know, drink a second beer or wine or No, you have to evolve your taste. To like them and and that's fine. Um, 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. And the fourth category is what do you call it?

I call it the fourth category. It doesn't have a name. But it is the space of intersection. Yeah. All of them. Things that are not traditional wine, traditional beer, 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'em, they exist. Yeah. They're just unrecognized and lying dormant. And m my job is to kind of dust em off and find them in this junkyard of bad ideas. We're gonna 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.

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. So for example, um we've developed an ability

And then clean it. And take out A lot of the less pleasant notes. We're essentially making this beautiful Clean

clear twenty percent Alcohol. Liquid. That then Can form a base.

For other flavors. It's like the pizza dough on the the country on it. You want. And you can turn that into Several other products. I can turn that into an unlimited

Number one. One of the first things that we developed it was over twenty years ago was hard tea. And it was very appealing to me because T has you know like beer and hops and so forth. T 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 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 a hard tea called Bodines. Chalk that one up, that was another failure. Um but uh I it didn't do that well, and then there was a band that sued us, so that was a fiasco. So just to just to clarify, what you're talking about is the twisted tea brand. And Already twenty years ago

Boston Beer Company released a a hard tea, but that didn't work. It it failed initially. Well, yeah, and then it failed again. So what happened? How did it How did that turn around? Well it Failed.

The second time as twisted T. 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. Yeah but this was like our baby and it had these little pockets. where it actually was doing reasonably well. 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. That does not explain anything, though. That is that explains nothing to me. There has to be a reason why people why? Um well that's the question you have to ask yourself. 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 and things that are outside the paradigm. Yeah. That's how Copernicus works, how Einstein worked.

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 w the main place that it was selling, and I stood in one of'em all day long and there were like five people that came in and bought twisted tea and I asked'em why they were buying Twisted T. 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 it had You know, a uh very familiar taste. It had the modicum of Caffeine in from the natural tea. Not a lot, but enough to just kinda 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. And it tastes like a kind of like a Regularized tea a little bit. Yeah, it's actually a bigger tea flavor profile, because a lot of the non Alk teas of Snapples and Arizona's there there's not much tea flavor. Yeah, and the tea isn't that I mean they they're

They're very successful. They sell a lot'cause the tea flavor is sort of recessive and the sweetness and the the fruit, the lemon, and things that get added are essential elements to it. And we were it was very tea forward, but it's 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 I talked to in Maine, he was a mason and he was building a stone wall. And the next guy was a sheetrocker. You know, he put up the plaster board in a construction site. And so and these were people who were very

sort of clever with uh doing it. 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 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. Um bikers adopted it. It's like the official drink of Sturgis, the big bike rally in North Dakota. And it's just grown over twenty some years. Uh it started with that base. It's still the base.

For it. sort of spread out now. There's college campuses. I uh remember moving my daughter out from her dorm in Harvard and she was on the top floor. So we walked down all the the five floors and the on two of them there was an empty case of twisted tea. Wow. All right. So let's d dig into this a bit more because obviously the T

Um sort of gamble worked. Um I one thing that that you w introduced, this is back in I think twenty sixteen, was hard seltzer. And initially hard seltzer also didn't take off. Like um it it was uh seen as a gimmick.

Well, no, it we it was actually I mean, I'll tell you a story of it, we misconceived it. You know, twenty five years ago we developed this Clear malt base. Cors released. Zima. Um this

It was after Curz release Zima, but The base that Coors had was not clean. They didn't know how to get those molecules out of there. So We had to I mean I'll Uh 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. Um and we actually did that in partnership with Brown Fort with the people who make Jack Daniels. And they had some chemical engineers and it was a a very fruitful

partnership and out of that came this clear malt base that the Jack Daniels country cocktails are built on. Uh and we kept thinking about well what else could we do with it and that was it took twenty years to come to this idea, which was hard seltzer truly was the first Hard shelter. here and it just came from just thinking, pushing, what could we do with this? And it was a very simple idea. You know, LaCroix was taking off. Um seltcher water was taking off and we said you know.

What if we made an alcoholic version of that? So you were you were paying attention to LaCroix,'cause LaCroix really Just exploded. I mean even though it's been around for a long time, it really started to explode in the two thousand ten. Yeah.

And you know, to me, when I go into a a store Um, 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 elk section. And just

Drawing stimulation. From that. And so this idea of an alcoholic hard seltzer and the parameters, the framework for'em it was what if we made something That

Had A hundred calories. You know We were gonna do no sugar, no artificial sweeteners. So we put relatively complex Fruit.

And I mean again, we were totally wrong. Um When We formulated we we thought who's gonna drink this? Well um our drinker is gonna be

A white blouse And she's gonna drink it. after she plays tennis and it's gonna be uh a substitute for like Chardonnay on the rocks or vodka soda with a lime. This is gonna be better version of that. And we're gonna sell a million cases a year. Um, which is not a whole lot in a business, you know, with uh it's like three billion cases or some huge number. Right. Um

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 T. We thought that was gonna be for like urban, yuppie, snapple drinkers, and we were totally wrong. So we put this out.

And we had in the 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. Uh yeah. So you know, it's just 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 backbench of this trawler boat and They started drinking.

Truly. The hides are designed for the white blouse women. And these are like big guys. And I said, Guys, do me a favor, just count the trulies.'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 want to understand what kind of buzz I get. 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. So sixteen apiece. And I realized Oh. This is different. And I ask, why are you drinking

Alda's truly your beer drinker. Yeah. And he said, uh Well Jim I gotta watch my girlish figure too. And the this it tastes great. And it doesn't fill me up. And I thought.

Oh then. Yeah, that sounds like tastes great, less filling. So uh I realized Hm. Um This is different than I anticipated. Let me explore that and after that we change 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. It's so interesting'cause you uh you you start out by sort of marketing and packaging it for a specific

Consumer. Only to discover that actually You know, it 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. Um because uh in part'cause they go to the gym and They you know, they don't want to to consume all the carbs. So Alright, so It's about sort of experimenting, but they're also failures, right? I mean you you you come up with products that are going to fail. Dozens and dozens and dozens guy. And that's part of it, right?

You know, twisted T or Truly we haven't talked about Angry Orchard, which is a hard cider, but even though those products have been huge successes. For

For the brand. But but in order to have the successes you have to take risks. Right. Taking risks means you're gonna have up some some dogs there that just fail. Oh yeah. I mean they were all birthed as failures. Angry Orchard Hard Cider began life as hardcore in nineteen ninety six. You know, we revived a very traditional beverage

Um beer was not always the number one alcoholic beverage in the United States before the Civil War D The number one alcoholic beverage was Hard cider. And Beard displaced it.

You know, after the civil war for A bunch. Hard side or even in the US. Yeah. And so I thought, let's do that. And we called it hardcore. Uh and it failed.

But Um the same kind of thing. It had a few pockets and it it 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 it a 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 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. It's very much like wine. You're not gonna make great wine from grocery store grapes. And so that again, it just took some time. Yes, it did. It took uh Fourteen years.

Yeah. 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'cause everybody associated with porn, which was not a good idea. Uh and we changed it to Angry Orchard, which was kind of a weird name, but it was a nice juxtaposition. Yeah. And uh And the orchard is a very primal image.

Of Childhood simplicity. Uh if you you know you m four quartets, the the the T. S. Elliott poem, though 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.

We're gonna 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 that it tastes. Stay with us, I'm Guy Roz, and you're listening to how I built this lab. Welcome back to how I built this lab. Guy Rise.

So Jim has boozeified 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. For a long time. Non alcoholic beer. Didn't taste good. It was terrible. It was pretty crappy. Yeah. And um for Thirty five years people would say, you know, I've used up my quota, uh, 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'cause non alcoholic beer taste like crap.

And Pretty much. all of'em'cause they're basically uh an unfermented beer that they carbonate so they don't get any of that yeast complexity in it. Or you know, they make a a beer and then they strip it. Uh and it ends up being unpleasant. And that was true for

Yeah. And then I Uh was at beer conference. And I tasted the first

non alcoholic beer. that was really good. And that was actually Heineken Zero Zero. And I I remember to the this day, it was like six years ago In San Diego and I

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 gonna figure this out. 'Cause 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 distillate and redistill it, t throw away the alcohol and put the flavor elements back in the beer, and then uh build some complexity with some hop character, blah blah blah. At the end of the day, we Got. A Hazy.

I P A That was non alcoholic. And had The T same. taste scores as the alcoholic version of it.

When people tasted it blind. They could not identify it. As a non alcoholic beer. Wow. 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. Yeah. Like summer long bike ride. Sure hike. Four hours later. You know, I'm a little I'm depleted. I need the hydration, but if I have a couple of beers, I'm gonna go to sleep. Uh that's a beautiful time for it. My most fun time is in summer, you're blasting down the highway at seventy, seventy five miles an hour, and you're drinking a beer. That's an experience we've been deprived of. Rightfully so. Um so let's talk about a failure. What what is something that you've introduced in the last twenty years that

you maybe hung on to a little too long. That just didn't work. 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 ideas. What if we nitrogenated it?

What if it wasn't CO two 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. And it gives it that beautiful um head that Creamy luscious and everybody thought about You know, that's Guinness. Yeah. So that was our idea.

Other beer styles. Let's do it for a white ale. And we'll put some coriander and some orange. in it. Um like a Cezanne. Yeah, a variation of a Saison. Um we're sort of riffing On that.

And let's try that with a red ale that has this sweet malty smoothness. that will just ride along with that creamy nitrogenation. So it's just you know once you get the idea, you can rip on it. A lot of times the ideas also require Not just culinary and aesthetic.

Innovation. But Their as a brewer were in some ways as an aspect of what it I do, other brewers do. It's like Christo. Christo the the artist. Yeah. Giant installations of

A fabric. And yeah, and crazy things, wrapping a building, 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 It's self-dished. And the other is making it exist. And

the real world 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 gotta figure out engineering things of how do you fasten it to the building, how do you keep the wind from d 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. 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. Yeah. So creativity comes in many forms and and I enjoy all of them. So what happened? I mean w why did you guys Give up on that. 'Cause nobody bought it. Um so I've learned except the verdict of the drinker. Um 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 okay with that. I mean I you know, I c if I make something really wonderful, beautiful that I believe in.

I'm done. That's okay. 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. Sam Adams is a product that will I I have no doubt we'll be around in fifty, a hundred years, maybe beyond.

Um it's like an enduring Brand. Of beer, right? Um there you go. I hope so. Aside from Sam Adams is an enduring brand, enduring product, does it matter if let's say Truly.

is just a a successful brand for, you know, seven or ten years and then fizzles out like is it important to in your view to build enduring products in brands or is it okay if something's really successful for a couple of years and then just kinda fizzles out? Mm. The answer is no. I do.

wanna build an enduring products and brands and it and I I believe that If you're making something Really good. It's not a flash in a pan.

Um it will Grow. People will acquire a taste.

Giving them Um so I don't want things that are sort of boom splat. Yeah. I want things that are Slow. builds. I mean like we were talking, you know, uh hard cider is now Twenty seven years.

Uh and it's now an enduring success, but it took it twenty seven years to get to where it is today. And to me that's all Build. On and the delightfulness of the taste experience. And those are enduring characteristics.

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. 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. 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 Ramteen Arablui. It was edited by John Isabella with research help from Chris Mossini. Our audio engineer was Neil Rauch.

Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Carla Esteves, Carrie Thompson, JC Howard, Malia Agadello, Neva Grant, and Catherine Cypher. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening. how I built this lab.

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