Sam Adams Brewery | Beer

Samuel Adams Brewery, est. 1985

It is never too early for a beer at Sam Adams. After receiving a free tour through the brewery, about 50 people take their seats around the three long wood tables, grabbing their tiny glasses and getting ready for the best part of the visit, the beer tasting. Meg Nypaver, the tour guide, starts passing the pitchers, full of Boston Lager and Alpine Spring, before demonstrating how to properly taste a beer.

The tasting takes place in a modest brewing facility located on Germania Street, Jamaica Plain. The brick building with some boilers, a barrel room and a tasting room is just a small piece of what nowadays is the number one craft brewing company in the United States, according to the Brewers Association ranking.

But Samuel Adams didn’t start big. The brewery was born in 1984, in the kitchen of Jim Koch, a Harvard Business School Graduate with a family history of brewing. In 1860, Lois Koch developed the recipe of a beer and called it the Lois Koch Lager. Six generations later Jim Koch used the original recipe of his relative when creating a home brewing company with his friends Harry Rubin and Lorenzo Lamadrid. They named the company Samuel Adams, after the Boston independence patriot, and the beer, now sold as Boston Lager, was awarded the best beer in America during the 1985 Great American Beer Festival.

Sam Adams has come a long way since Koch’s kitchen, 29 years later. Besides the Boston Lager, the company brews a series of seasonal beers, a brew master collection, a light beer, a barrel room collection, in addition to small batches of certain products and limited release editions.

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The brewery operates under the name of Boston Brewing Company and as of December 2012, it reported a Gross Profit of 315 millions of dollars in its Income Statement. The company employs more than 750 people in their facilities in Cincinnati, Pennsylvania and Boston and distributes its product in the 50 states and 20 foreign countries.

Part of its success seems to be the attention to detail, in particular when it comes to the ingredients. During the tour, Nypaver passes plastic cups full of green and smelly hops and roasted barley. People taste them, smell them and play with two of the main ingredients of beer before going to boilers, where they learned the order in which they are cooked.

No big secrets are revealed, however the company does have a few brewing tricks, such as the Hallertau Mittelfrueh Noble hops that are used in the Boston Lager and are especially hard to grow or the Boston Lager glass, a drinking device created specifically to contained the aroma an maximized the flavor of beer.

Sam Adams is also making innovations. On March 19 of 2013 Jim Koch announced its decision of using cans to bottle the beer. The CEO was fearful about the impact that a can will have on the craft beer flavor. But after a one million dollar inversion the company came up with a can bottle that will allow more airflow, therefore more flavor preservation.

But no matter how many innovations it has, Sam Adams keeps its Boston roots well grounded. In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, the company decided to donate all the profit from its Marathon special edition beer, the Samuel Adams Boston 26.2 Brew, to the victims.

It is only 11 in the morning but in a crowded tasting room people are pouring glasses and sipping beer, looking for a hoppy aroma or a roasted flavor or simply enjoying the free beer at the Sam Adams Brewery, a mandatory activity for beer lovers in Boston.