CHICAGO – Jim Koch, who launched Boston Beer Co. from his kitchen 30-some years ago with a 19th-century family recipe, said he had no idea that his Samuel Adams beer was name-checked in Broadway's megahit "Hamilton."
His eyes lit up when played the playful allusion to the signature brew (named for a patriot) in a pub scene set in 1776: "I'm John Laurens in the place to be! Two pints o' Sam Adams, but I'm workin' on three, uh!"
"Love it! Love it! Love it!" Koch said. "You know, somebody probably said, 'You can't have the founding fathers as black actors doing rap,' and look at what they did. That's kind of the story of Sam Adams. People saying you can't do it. … But I said I'm going to do it anyway."
Koch, 67, has three degrees from Harvard, including an MBA and law degree. He ditched a thriving career advising manufacturers for Boston Consulting Group (where colleagues included Mitt Romney, who later left to join Bain & Co.) to belatedly extend a family tradition in brewing beer to a sixth generation.
Koch answered some questions while promoting his book, "Quench Your Own Thirst: Business Lessons Learned Over a Beer or Two." He brought both Sam Adams and pint glasses and started out with his own question at 10 a.m. "Mind if I have a beer? I'm a trained professional."
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: It was just you and your former secretary trying to make a go of it in the beginning. She didn't have a background in business and you didn't take a salary to start.
A: I told her we only have to worry about two things. We're going to make great beer every time and we're going to work our butts off to sell it. So we had no office, we didn't even have a telephone. Remember those answering services with old ladies in a basement, where you'd call in? That's how we got our messages. If we had to have a meeting, we did it in a bar, because they were our customers.
