The Brewer's Son

Jim Koch was a student with good grades. He went to Harvard and then was enrolled in a postgraduate program on law and business, but he was not sure what career choice he would make. This is a story about how he found his destiny and became a highly successful entrepreneur.

Jim Koch

When I was a teenager, my dad did everything he could to Dissuade me from becoming a brewer. He'd spent his life brewing beer for local breweries, barely making a living, as had his father and grandfather before him. He didn't want me anywhere near a vat of beer.

So I did as he asked. I got good grades, went to Harvard and in 1971 was accepted into a postgraduate programme there that allowed you to study law and business simultaneously.

In my second year of graduate school, I had something of an epiphany. I've never done anything but go to school, I thought, and I'm getting pressured to make a career choice for the rest of my life. The future was closing in on me a lot earlier than I wanted.

So, at 24, I decided to drop out. My parents didn't think this was a great idea. But I felt strongly that you can't wait till you're 65 to do what you want in life. You have to go for it.

I packed my stuff into a caravan and headed to Colorado to become an instructor at Outward Bound, the wilderness-education programme. The job was a good fit for me. Heavily into mountaineering7 and rock climbing, I lived and climbed everywhere, from crags outside Seattle to volcanoes in Mexico.

I never regretted taking time to "find myself." I think we'd all be a lot better off if we could take off five years in our twenties to decide what we want to do for the rest of our lives. Otherwise, we're going to be making other people's choices, not our own.

After three-and-a-half years with Outward Bound, I was ready to go back to university. I finished Harvard and got a highly paid job at the Boston Consulting Group, a think tank and business consulting firm. Still, after working there five years, I was haunted by doubt. Is this what I want to be doing when I'm 50 ?

I remembered that some time before, my dad had been cleaning out the attic and came across some old beer recipes on scraps of yellow paper. "Today's beer is basically water that can hold a head," he'd told me.

I agreed. If you didn't like the mass-produced American stuff, the other choices were imports that were often stale. Americans pay good money for inferior beer, I thought. Why not make good beer for Americans right here in America?

I decided to quit my job to become a brewer. When I told my Dad, I was hoping he'd put his arm round me and get misty about reviving tradition. Instead he said, "Jim, that is the dumbest thing I've ever heard!"

As much as Dad objected, in the end he supported me: he became my company's first investor, coughing up $65,000 when I opened the Boston Beer Company in 1984. I put down $150,000 of my savings and raised another $150,000 from friends and relatives. Going from my fancy office to being a brewer was like mountain climbing: exhilarating, liberating and frightening. My safety nets were gone.

Once the beer was made, I faced my biggest hurdle yet: getting it into beer drinkers' hands. Distributors14 all said the same thing: "Your beer is too expensive; no one has ever heard of you." So I figured I had to create a new category: the craftbrewed American beer. I needed a name that was recognizable and elegant, so I called my beer Samuel Adams, after the brewer and patriot who helped to instigate the Boston Tea Party.

The only way to get the word out, I realized, was to sell direct. I filled my leather briefcase with beer and cold packs, put on my best power suit and hit the bars.

Most barmen thought I was from the tax authority. But once I opened my briefcase, they paid attention. After I told the first guy my story -- how I wanted to start this little brewery in Boston with my dad's family recipe -- he said, "Kid, I liked your story. But I didn't think the beer would be this good." What a great moment.

Six weeks later, at the Great American Beer Festival, Sam Adams Boston Lager won the top prize for American beer. The rest is history. It wasn't supposed to work out this way -- what does? -- but in the end I was destined~8 to be a brewer.

My advice to young entrepreneurs is simple: life is very long, so don't rush to make decisions. Life doesn't let you plan.

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                                                    From Reader's Digest

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