Microbrewed Adventures - Charles Papazian [13]
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Only a Brick Remained
Jim Koch, St. Louis and Boston Beer Company
IT WAS IN 1985 that Samuel Adams Boston Lager washed over the microbrewed beer scene. Like an unsuspected wave, it drenched beer drinkers and was popularly received as an old European-style pilsener lager. That year, the company, only six weeks old, flew in 20 cases of its beer, barely in time for the opening of the Fourth Annual Great American Beer Festival. It took top honors, winning the 1985 festival’s consumer preference poll. From that point on, the waves created by Samuel Adams Boston Lager continued to wash over the landscape of American beer drinkers. Within years it could be found wherever beer was sold, paving the way for the thousands of brands of microbrewed beer that were seeking enthusiasts.
The 1980s were difficult years for most microbrewers. Their passion was evidenced by the quality of their beer, but the established ways of America’s beer distribution system have always been a major challenge for microbrewers and a frustration for beer lovers seeking a choice. Great beer was being microbrewed, but the system failed to provide beer drinkers the access to beers they were growing to love.
The founder of Boston Beer Company and creator of Samuel Adams was a homebrewer, entrepreneur and, some say, a marketing genius. He recognized that brewing a distinctive and delicious beer was not enough—you had to make it accessible to beer drinkers. In that he succeeded. His name is Jim Koch. His father was in the beer business, and his great-grandfathers were brewers.
There’s a little-known fact about Jim Koch’s family brewing history that he shares with few people. He shared it with me the year before he introduced his first “Sam Adams.”
We met in St. Louis in the fall of 1984. I was attending a Master Brewers Association of the Americas Conference and had taken the afternoon off to rendezvous with Jim and his father, Charles Joseph Koch, Jr. We drove from the conference center to the vicinity of Anheuser-Busch’s brewery. “It’s near here.” Jim said as he sat up with visible excitement in his posture. His father glanced up the side streets, hinting recognition.
We parked the car. After walking several blocks, Jim’s father announced, “We’ve got to be close. I recall that the Anheuser-Busch smokestack was visible from the site.” Coming upon a vacant lot overgrown with weeds and strewn with odd refuse, Jim and his father began examining the remnants of a low-lying stone wall paralleling the sidewalk. “I think this is it!” exclaimed Jim, his father agreeing but with a tone of doubt. We walked slowly onto the lot, avoiding rusty cans, the odd discarded tire and gnarly-looking weeds. We came upon a small indentation at the center and kicked away the loose dirt and rubbish. A smile crossed father and son’s faces as the evidence revealed we had found what they were seeking: the site of the Louis Koch Lager Brewery, the home of the Koch family–owned business that brewed between the 1860s and the 1880s. All that remained were a few stacked stones along the sidewalk and the wooden brick floor on which we were now standing.
On the southeast corner of Sydney and Buel Streeets, St. Louis
Louis Koch’s Brewery. Courtesy Jim Koch.
Well preserved and black with the brewer’s pitch used to line the inside of wooden barrels, the 4 × 6 × 2-inch wooden