EP5 Boston Beer Co. founder, Jim Koch

What does it take to create the perfect beer? Join us as we share a cold one with Jim Koch, founder of the Boston Beer Company and the brains behind the iconic Samuel Adams Boston Lager. In this heart-to-heart, Jim takes us through his 40-year pursuit of brewing excellence, the innovations and changes that have shaped the flagship beer, and a shared tasting of the new, brighter Boston Lager.

But there's more to the Boston Beer Company than just great beer. Jim also sheds light on their hop sharing program, which has been a lifeline for hundreds of craft breweries during a worldwide hop shortage. Furthermore, we delve into their philanthropic endeavor, the Brewing the American Dream program, which has provided microloans and business counseling to thousands of small businesses across the United States.

As we sip our way through this conversation, Jim shares invaluable business lessons he's learned along the way, including his String Theory and its application to small businesses and aspiring brewers. We also discuss the current state of the craft brewing industry and the role that the Boston Beer Company has played in its growth and maturation. So grab yourself a new, brighter Sam Adams Boston Lager, and let's raise a toast to the incredible journey of Jim Koch!

Cheers!


https://www.samueladams.com/

https://www.brewingtheamericandream.com/

https://beerandbrewing.com/dictionary/kTgG7blfwp/

Finnleigh would like to remind everyone that a 5-star rating from each of you would be a huge push for the podcast in the algorithms that suggest podcast to listeners.  Please take a second to give us a 5-star rating when you get the chance!  Thanks so much!

Transcript

Scott: 1:24

Jim Cook is the founder of the Boston Beer Company, brewer of Sam Adams, he founded the company in 1984 when he brewed the first batch of Boston Lager in his kitchen, a recipe belonging to his great-great grandfather that he founded as father's attic back in the early 1980s.

Scott: 1:37

In spite of the challenge, conventional thinking about beer, jim brought the recipe to life with the hope that drinkers would appreciate his complex, full-flavored beers and started sampling that beer in Boston. He named the flagship brew Samuel Adams Boston Lager in recognition of one of our nation's founding fathers, a revolutionary man of independent and pioneering spirit. In 2016, jim wrote his first book Quench Your Own Thirst Business Lessons Learned Over a Beer or Two, a national bestseller and named 2016 best book of the year by Inc, business Insider, forbes and Amazon. Today, sam Adams is one of the most awarded brewers and remains focused on crafting the highest quality beers through innovation and experimentation in the relentless pursuit of better beer. Samuel Adams Boston Lager has led the American craft beer revolution for more than 40 years, bringing full-flavored beer to the American beer landscape. Jim Cook, welcome to Carney Saves the World.

Jim Koch: 2:22

Well, it's an honor to be here. I'm going to try to help you save the world, one beer at a time.

Scott: 2:28

That's all we can ask. That's all we can ask. How are you, my friend? I'm great. How are you Great? Where are you? I'm in Wilmington, north Carolina, now, okay.

Jim Koch: 2:38

Not a bad place to be. Yeah, actually, i once looked at a map a long time ago and said where is it on the east coast that doesn't have bad weather? And you end up on coastal North Carolina, new Bern, wilmington.

Scott: 2:56

Right down down in Wilmington. We moved six years ago when we had my daughter, a mid-family, down here, and it was before COVID, so there's no working from home Wow.

Jim Koch: 3:05

You're ahead of the curve, as usual, yeah, right.

Scott: 3:19

One of the things I wanted to do today is taste new lager with you. I'm really excited to do it. Good Making sure I got some nice fresh lager from the store. We're good to go.

Jim Koch: 3:27

Perfect, hold mine off of the Kagerator.

Scott: 3:29

Nice, when the new Boston lager came out, i said, well, i tasted every single bear with Jim Cook during orientation 25 years ago. I need to try this one with him today, so I'm psyched.

Jim Koch: 3:41

Me too. I got to get the carny seal of approval before we can really roll the barrels.

Scott: 3:48

I don't think you'll have a problem with it, but let's give it a shot. So what was the genesis of making this newer, brighter Boston lager?

Jim Koch: 3:55

Well, it's really started at the very beginning. You know I'm one of those believers that you can always improve things, and you know I started with this great recipe. It got picked as the best beer in America four years running And everybody says it's a great beer. But I thought, well, there's still things you can do. And, along with fellow co-worker who you know well, david Grinnell, we agreed that there was such a thing as a perfect Boston lager. We just hadn't made it yet.

Jim Koch: 4:30

So over the 39 years since I first brewed it, we've made lots of little tweaks and changes to it. I mean stuff that's well below the radar screen of even, you know, beer geeks. Stuff like changing the harvest timing of the hops that come from Bavaria They were being harvested too early for the last 300 years And we realized that, and you know. But harvest them later got more aroma, better flavor. Things like making sure there was enough copper piping in the brew kettles to get copper ions into the beer, which is a yeast nutrient. So having a custom malt that gave us a smoother Boston lager. I could go on, but we've made probably a dozen little tweaks over the years, all in search of the perfect Boston lager, and the latest one. We decided well, let's just, we're going to make this latest change Again. It's not a huge revolutionary change in the flavor, it's a minor tweak but it's enough to be tasteable And it's a traditional German brewing process that meets the Reinhardt'skibote, the German beer purity law, and it's called biological acidification And I won't go into all of it. But it replaces some water treatment that brings, you know, basically, limes, that brings calcium into the beer, which makes for a different, easier, louder ring, and it drops some things out of the beer that you don't want in there. We replaced that with biological acidification, which is a parallel fermentation that creates, you know, lactic acid, which is a very soft acid which you'd get in like, you know, yogurt, for example, or milk, and that the end of the day, all that geeky stuff makes a brighter, cleaner tasting Boston Lager.

Jim Koch: 6:50

There were just like a few kind of rough spots in the taste that it sanded down. You know, david Grinnell, our head brewer for 35 years, my partner in all of this is a woodworker. In its spare time He uses that analogy. You make a piece of furniture, but you can always make it a little smoother. You know, you get a smaller and smaller grid of sandpaper you get a finer steel. You can always make it a little smoother, and that's what we did. Smoother and brighter Boston Lager. So here's to the perfect Boston Lager, which we have not yet made, but, god willing, i will live to see it. Cheers, cheers, cheers. Does it get the carny seal of approval? Clean, bright, smooth.

Scott: 7:39

Yeah, I think you got a winner here. I think you got a winner here. You guys are going with this one.

Jim Koch: 7:44

All right, the barrels are rolling, the trucks are on their way.

Scott: 7:48

Send it out.

Jim Koch: 7:50

Send it out.

Scott: 7:50

Yes, this is fantastic, jim. I'm really a.

Jim Koch: 7:54

Well, it's nothing like drinking a Boston lager in the morning with an old friend.

Scott: 7:59

I know absolutely. I had to take the day out of work to do this. Ah, me too. We're just playing hooky today. We're just playing hooky and hanging out.

Jim Koch: 8:24

Well, I play hooky every day.

Scott: 8:28

I see you got a little gray now So I haven't seen you in like six years. I like it.

Jim Koch: 8:31

Yeah, good, it makes me distinguish.

Scott: 8:35

Like me, you're like me?

Jim Koch: 8:36

Yeah well, that's exactly right. You've always been my role model.

Scott: 8:43

I've been everybody's gray role model. I've been gray since I was like 17.

Jim Koch: 8:45

Well, you know it's funny. You got a little whack in the mustache. unless you're thinking that, No, that's the only.

Scott: 8:50

That's the reason why I grow the beard, just so I could show off the mustache.

Jim Koch: 8:55

Nice, nice.

Scott: 8:56

When I interviewed the job at the Boss Beer Company, i remember I was like I've got to darken up my hair.

Scott: 9:00

I got to look professional and younger And I remember doing some Just for Men and then I didn't realize I left a little on my ear. My entire ear, the top of my ear, turns jet black And I had to sit. Everybody I interviewed with I had to sit with that ear to the door so nobody could see me and think I was like what the heck's going on with this guy? He's got jet black ear hair. That was kind of weird.

Jim Koch: 9:22

Well, we thought it was gangrene.

Scott: 9:25

Probably was Just cut it off and start over. One of the coolest things that I experienced while working with you and working at the Boston Beer Company over for so many years was the hop sharing program. Could you talk a little bit about that? I mean, you saved so many companies, you saved so many breweries. You saved had to save the industry to some extent. Could you talk about that a little bit?

Jim Koch: 9:48

Sure The hop sharing program happened. It was a point where there was a worldwide shortage of hops. It was one of those calamities that happens every whatever 50 years where you had a record bad hop crop in Germany and in the United States, And it was at a time when demand for hops was taking off. Ipas, which are very hop intensive, became the principal style of craft beer And people were starting to put more hops in their beers and worldwide inventories were at very low levels. And along comes the double calamity of too bad hop years in the principal growing areas.

Jim Koch: 10:38

So there were breweries that just could not get hops. There were not enough hops to go around, And we've been doing this for quite a long time. My family's been brewing beer for 170 years, something like that. You learn a few things, which is it's a good idea to have as much as a full year of hops in your inventory, So if there's a really bad hop year, you can still make your beer without making any compromises. So we had more than enough hops for ourselves And we were willing to take a chance that we were not going to have another really catastrophic hop year And we could release some of the hops that we had in inventory And we also had kind of first dibs on hops because we as opposed to most of the craft brewers, we actually were contracting with the farmers.

Jim Koch: 11:49

So we were the first customer whose needs got met And a lot of craft brewers had not been through lean years So they assumed there were always going to be hops to be purchased. So they were on the spot market. So we got most of our contract needs and we delved into our inventory and offered them to craft brewers who were not able to get hops. And we kind of did it on the honor system. We asked brewers only to submit requests for what they really needed And we sold them at our price, which was about five bucks a pound, when on the spot market they were going for 20 or 25 bucks. So there was a real temptation for our fellow craft brewers to buy them and then sell them at a big profit.

Jim Koch: 12:46

And yeah said it was a really great example of the craft brewing community, because I don't think anybody did. People just asked for what they need and we were able to help hundreds and hundreds of very small brewers continue to make their great beers continue to, you know, put the same amount of hops in them, not compromise the quality, and it helped them stay in business as well that was awesome.

Scott: 13:12

I remember that and you know to go back because we didn't do this originally and I apologize, but anybody that's had two beers in their life mostly would know who you are. But for those folks that may not know who you are, could you just kind of give your backstory on your, on your family history and a little bit more in detail about the Boston Beer Company's founding?

Jim Koch: 13:31

Sure, i have to include, you know, the the peak experience of meeting Scott Carney 25 years ago. I appreciate that that comes first. Yeah, there are many lesser experiences. I mean my background, pretty quick, is, you know, i'm six oldest son in a row and my family to be a brewer. I didn't start my career as a brewer. I was a manufacturing consultant and then when I was, like I don't know, 33, 34, i realized I didn't want to do that job so I quit. I thought about what I wanted to do and I kept coming back to brewing beer.

Jim Koch: 14:09

And this was back in the early 80s when there was no craft brewing industry there, the term hadn't even been invented. There were a couple, a handful of like crazy scat at all over the country that were basically scaled up home brewers who, you know, had this crazy idea that you could make a living making high quality American beer on a small scale, competing with imports, you know, hoping that somebody would buy your beer. And there's no real role models for success of those early craft brewers. They're pretty much all gone. None of them really made it, other than Sam Adams and Sierra Nevada. So it was not, you know, the highway to great riches, but it to me it was, you know, something that I thought was just this would be cool if I could actually make a living making the kind of beer that my family has made for a century plus.

Jim Koch: 15:13

At that point and I started in my kitchen I got a recipe from my dad that had come from my great, great grandfather's brewery, so I knew this was a great beer it was. You could tell by the recipe it was big, flavorful, rich, very, you know, using the best ingredients two roast summer barley and sort of heirloom Bavarian hops. And you know I went from bar to bar selling it because I couldn't even get a distributor, and you know it got picked as the best beer in America. The company was two people when that happened. So that was kind of crazy that the best beer in America was made by this guy you never heard of and his partner, a woman named Rhonda, and we, you know, we sold it bar to bar and it got bigger and then it got bigger, and then it got bigger and it just kept getting bigger. And here we are and then we hired Scott Carney and the guy was the limit. I was around for some pretty decent growth.

Scott: 16:21

You were a lot of growth. Yeah, i was there for all the brand's extensions and you know twisted tea and angry orchard and truly all under the umbrella of the Boston beer company actually funny. So my wife was a huge seltzer fan, just in general, and the summer that truly came out. She was pregnant with my daughter and she was so mad she couldn't have any to wait until my daughter was born.

Jim Koch: 16:45

And then all right, we kept making it. We, we were patiently waiting for your wife to come in and give us that push that we needed.

Scott: 16:56

I actually have this funny story. I told it on one of the other episodes of of Cardi saves the world when I was saving the world. So right before we moved to Wilmington, my wife had come to the office and she brought my dog. She was in the foyer and you would come right around the corner and I said, hey, jim, how's it going? I said you remember my wife, katie? and you said hi, katie, and then you looked at my dog and my dog is a pugilier. She's the strangest looking dog on the planet. And you looked at her and you were like what are her breeds? and I said, all right, i mean, she's a half pug, half Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. You said oh wow. And you looked at her and you she said out loud what was the shelf life on those breeds?

Jim Koch: 17:29

Cavalier King Charles Spaniel's, as you know. You know, they do kind of have a poll date yes, yes, they do, yes, they do.

Scott: 17:40

It was funny. So I had kind of just recently looked that up and I was like, oh, it's about eight years on both, and I was like, oh, it's like eight, eight years or something like that. Then you said, well, how old is she? and I said, well, she's seven, you're, so she's got some time. Well, nice to see you, katie. And you walked away and my wife turned to me and said did Jim cook? just ask when our dog is going to die? and I was like, yeah, i think that. I think that was what he said.

Jim Koch: 18:02

I was trying to soften the blow for you.

Scott: 18:04

I'm proud to report she is still kicking awesome yeah 14.

Jim Koch: 18:09

Now you know those life expectancy tables don't include owners like you that give beer to your dog.

Scott: 18:16

Just keep giving her the beer man, we would recycle the bottles and so we'd have you know the cases, and then we'd put the bottles just in the case when they're done, and we'd catch her licking the tops of the bottles my wife's caught me doing the same thing.

Jim Koch: 18:27

Don't worry about it, that's awesome.

Scott: 18:30

I have a question for you. This is a very serious question. One of my favorite beers on the planet not just Sam Adams' beers one of my favorite beers on the planet was Sam Adams' Whitewater IPA. I absolutely love that beer And Nick Goslin and I go back and forth trolling each other on the Sam Adams Facebook page and thinking he likes the original White Ale And I told him I was going to ask you if we could bring that back. You could just say yes and we'll make it look like it's coming back.

Jim Koch: 18:55

Well, i mean, we do bring a lot of them back, but they're in the tap rooms, like at a brewery in Boston and one in Ohio. I love that beer too. That was really I mean, that was a leader in sort of branching the IPA style out, because it was kind of getting generic almost Everybody's making the same type of IPA. So we kept trying to, you know, to add to the style with a white IPA. If you remember, we had like latitude 48 and we've had different kinds of IPAs over the years.

Scott: 19:35

You can't see my shirt, but I actually wore my Rebel IPA. Oh, I saw you shirt It said Rebel IPA. Yeah.

Jim Koch: 19:40

Yeah, you remember Rebel. We're working on a new one too. Oh good, like a simplified, you know, juicy IPA. So you know, we're always making new beers. I get bored, if you remember. I have like the attention span of a gerbil. So what'd we say? What were we talking about?

Scott: 20:00

Yeah, something shiny, what? So? I definitely wanted to talk about Bring the American Dream program that you started, which has helped so many people and so many businesses get off the ground. Could you tell us, you know, what was the reason for the start of that one?

Jim Koch: 20:13

Yeah, that's got its own story. And the Bring American Dream program is primary philanthropic activity. What it is is supporting startups and small businesses in the food and beverage space through micro loans and coaching and counseling, and we started it, i think, in 2008. We've supported it for 15 years Jen Glanville, who, you know, is running it now And in those 15 years we've now reached $100 million in loans to small businesses all across the United States And we've done counseling and coaching And, if you remember, it was kind of speed dating type stuff for 10,000 small businesses in food and beverage.

Jim Koch: 21:22

So it's something that is our way of giving back in a meaningful fashion. Because what I remember from when I started, there were two things that I wish I'd been able to have available to me. One was loan money, because nobody would lend me money to do this stupid thing to start a brewery when nobody had started a brewery for years. And the other was like just nuts and bolts, business advice Because, you know, i mean I had.

Jim Koch: 22:00

You'd think I had the educational background to start a business. I had a MBA, i had a JD, i had six and a half years of management consulting. You thought I had no business. Well, i sort of knew it at the high level, but as a small business person, it's all nuts and bolts. It's just all these things that you're doing that you've never done before, You know, and if you screw them up, it's really damaging. So I didn't know.

Jim Koch: 22:29

I didn't negotiate a real estate lease. I didn't know how to get publicity for the company. I didn't know how to design a label. I didn't know how to even pay people. I mean, how do you withhold and social security and unemployment, all this? you know bureaucracy. You got to just to pay one person. I didn't know any of that stuff And if you've done it before, it's all you know. It's all pretty simple. So we wanted to give startup companies and small businesses trying to expand to the next level, you know access to good nuts and bolts business advice, to small business loans, and I'm happy to say that the repayment rate on our loans is like 98%, which is way above what banks get you know when they're, and banks don't make risky loans like we do. So we've helped, you know, thousands and thousands of small business entrepreneurs all around the country. Yeah, that's awesome.

Jim Koch: 23:39

Basically, food and beverage which is a broad category, but it's the category that you know. We know because we're not in biotech, we're not in fintech, we're not in any kind of tech. Otherwise I would have been able to get into your application and we could have recorded it on your studio program.

Scott: 24:00

It's been amazing.

Jim Koch: 24:01

Yeah, but we made this work. So we're not, you know, super sophisticated, but we know how to make things that taste good. We know, you know, what matters in food and beverage. We know how to, you know, get a product to market. We know how to maintain quality. So we have those things left that can help lots of small businesses, because there's a lot of entrepreneurs in the food and beverage space.

Scott: 24:30

Yeah, i love the, and this was your mantra and it was something that you said every national meeting. You said it whenever you could, but you're, you know, restlessly challenging the status quo. We appreciated that fact and it really made us, you know, strive for more in our jobs and even in our, you know, in personal life. I mean, i have interviewed a few people that I'm friends with that have done some crazy things, and one of them is Roy Milner. He was two episodes ago. He was a sales rep from Tennessee before her boss to beer and he Basically they kind of did this very similar thing to you. It was, you know, you were kind of an inspiration. He went out and he owns Brewery out in Tennessee now and they're making amazing beers, awesome, that's great.

Jim Koch: 25:11

Yeah, there's been a lot of people who left Boston beer, you know, and started breweries, and I'm very proud of them. They've all made really great beers.

Scott: 25:21

Remember Grant Wood.

Jim Koch: 25:22

Yeah, yeah, grant went down to Texas and started. Revolver Made you know blood and honey, blood orange and honey beer. It was delicious.

Scott: 25:33

Yeah, It was fantastic, I had it. It was phenomenal. How does it feel to be like that inspiration, or that level of inspiring to those people you know, knowing that they listened to your message. at some point something clicked and they went out and did it.

Jim Koch: 25:46

Well, you know, in my mind they would have done it anyway. I mean, we've had let's face it, we've had some really, really talented people at Boston Beer Company And I've been privileged to work with them, yourself included. I mean, who would have thought that this crazy kid with a black ear would be doing podcasts and being really professional about it? So you know, we just had really, really talented people. You know, you got a lot of talents, man, so we've got a lot of people like Scott Carney. I wish my wife knew that.

Jim Koch: 26:24

No, I'm just kidding, Don't worry my wife still thinks I'm a loser too. That's why they marry us, you'll never, you know, reach their standards. It's just way too high.

Scott: 26:34

Bull post booths constantly.

Jim Koch: 26:35

Yeah, exactly, but we can at least have a beer in the morning.

Scott: 26:39

Yeah right, the book is just was a huge hit And another piece of inspiration for a lot of people, and one of the things that you mentioned in the book that you also mentioned in all of our national meetings was your string theory version. Could you talk about that, because I think that's such a cool concept And I think for people who have never gotten the chance to listen in order to read about it, this chance to hear it would be really cool.

Jim Koch: 27:01

Sure, Sure, the book is called Quench Your Own Thirst. Business lessons learned over a beer or two. The chapter on the string theory is something that I learned when I was an outweigh bound instructor, and the string was actually technically alpine cord. But I learned that if you gave your group plenty of string at the beginning, they ended up with not enough at the end. So I tried giving them not enough at the beginning And, lo and behold, they ended up with plenty at the end And the string was stuff you used to like lash things on your pack and set up your tarps and tie things together, and if people had too much of it, they wasted it And they'd leave scraps on trees.

Jim Koch: 27:56

They'd forget it. They never learned to use it efficiently. If they had too little, they actually would conserve it and learn to use it really efficiently. So that's an important lesson for a small business, because you never have enough resources And if you apply this string theory, force yourself to use everything very efficiently, don't waste anything, and if you do that, you're generally gonna have enough. I mean, it's kind of a repackaging of necessity as the mother of invention If people need to stretch the resources, which is constantly the case in a small business. Even today, as successful as Boston Beer Company has been, we still compete against people who are 10 times our size, and if we're not more efficient, they'll kill us. So we keep this string theory in the front of our minds And you may not think you've got enough, but you actually do if you use it right.

Scott: 29:04

Yeah, that's great. You mentioned that. The business is just. It's changing. It's constantly evolving. Where do you see the I mean the poor little breweries getting bought up by the big guys? Where do you see the business in in the next five or 10 years going?

Jim Koch: 29:18

Well, kraft Beer has basically done what we all hoped and prayed that it might someday do and become. My vision, when things started going and I realized that this was a bigger idea than I thought was that someday America would make the best beer in the world, would teach the rest of the world how to innovate and make great beer, and we would have a significant cultural impact as Kraft Brewers and be a stable and mature industry. And that was 35 years ago and it happened. Kraft beer is like 10 or 15% of the beer in the United States. There's 10,000 Kraft Brewers And the rest of the world looks to the small independent brewers like Sam Adams to teach them how to innovate and make great beer. Our prayers have been answered And it's now a mature industry.

Jim Koch: 30:32

I mean, it was never gonna grow and be 100% of beer in the United States, but it's 10 or 15% of a big market And there's incredible diversity of beers. America today is the best place in history to be a beer drinker. So we've accomplished that. It's now a mature industry. So you can't just open a brewery and think if you brew it, they will come. You gotta have something special, something good, and it's not. I mean, this industry was never one that promised great wealth. This was not, even though some people thought, oh, i'll start a craft brewery, i'll get rich. Odds were always very, very tiny that that would happen. And now it's a mature industry and people who don't have a little good luck and a really good beer and the right people involved with them. There's people coming into the business and people going out of the business but it's here to stay.

Scott: 31:47

Yeah, we see, wilminton is a huge, huge craft beer market. I mean, we've got I could even maybe 15 brews in and around the county that I'm in And it's interesting because you'll see these little brews pop up. But then you'll see a little brewery pop up with a gigantic building And it just seems like I mean, i don't know their business model, it just seems like they may be overshooting a bit with the gigantic tap room and the four garage doors that lead out to the brew house And I'm like, yeah, Well, you remember where we started, You know, in that rundown space in a bad neighborhood of Boston I had a thousand square feet and my rent was a dollar a year.

Jim Koch: 32:29

So my monthly rent check was like eighty eight dollars.

Scott: 32:34

That's amazing. We haven't been back home, but I've seen online all the additions and you know, you know changes and upgrades that the brewery's gone through. It looks beautiful Yeah.

Jim Koch: 32:44

Well, we're still doing it, We're still growing in that crazy site.

Scott: 32:49

I remember that there used to be a crust from the brewery. It was the other, one of the other big buildings in the complex where all the records were kept And myself and Ty Rickman had to go get some records one day. We it was like catacombs. Yeah, these records were stored. Yeah, we're going in here because the complex was so old and Yeah, It's 150 years old now It's.

Jim Koch: 33:12

you know it's one of the few places in the United States that's never been anything but a brewery since the 1860s. So yeah, it's like catacombs. I hope you didn't trip over any skeletons.

Scott: 33:25

We randomly heard a dog barking where like that can't be possible. We're pretty sure it was a dog ghost, so it took off. Here's one of my favorite quotes from the book. It's the chapter about welcome the dude with the bold painted toenails And you say final. Final quote here is remember that most of us came into the world as screaming messy blobs of bad plumbing. But with a little love and attention and faith in our future, we managed to grow it to fully functioning, successful human beings. Very well put, yeah.

Jim Koch: 33:58

Miracle of miracles.

Scott: 33:59

Yeah, Like bad plumbing. Oh right, Well you had a kid.

Jim Koch: 34:04

you know what it's like, I mean.

Scott: 34:06

Oh, i, absolutely, absolutely So. Your kids, your kids, were kids, kids. They were my daughter's age. When you're two youngest daughters, when, when I first started, all the kids grown up now.

Jim Koch: 34:17

Well, i mean, they're older, that's for sure. You're their father, so I mean they are fully functioning, successful human beings. So, yes, i mean, yeah, i have four children, as you know, and yeah, they're, they're all out on their own. Actually, my the youngest one just graduated from college last year.

Scott: 34:41

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim Koch: 34:44

So her graduation was my 50th reunion.

Scott: 34:47

Oh wow, that's good Yeah, when I was when I was graduating.

Jim Koch: 34:51

If somebody said, yeah, and your 50th reunion, you're going to be watching your daughter graduate. I don't like shooting.

Scott: 34:58

They're right.

Jim Koch: 35:01

They're all in great in a great situation. I'm real very lucky that they're all pretty much grownups and they've navigated, you know, childhood and young adulthood, and they're functioning just like you and me man.

Scott: 35:15

Well, i mean me functioning is. We'll see.

Jim Koch: 35:19

It doesn't have to be conventional. It can just be what a human being is, which kind of you know might be a screaming messy blob of bad neuroses, but we're making it Wait a minute.

Scott: 35:33

Who told you that? No, I'm just kidding. I've got, so I'm 49. I've got a six year old and it's, I feel you. I know what you're watching, Yeah a blessing.

Jim Koch: 35:43

I'm sorry.

Scott: 35:43

It's amazing. But there are times where it's just I can't even keep up with her. But she's crazy. That's a good thing.

Jim Koch: 35:51

She's amazing and life changing Yeah. Well, like I said, my last one just graduated. I miss them. You know, i see people with, like you know, three or four, you know young kids and they can't like you, they can't keep up. And I was like, don't worry, when you know when you can keep up, you're going to miss these days. Yeah, yeah, that's definitely.

Scott: 36:12

She's like a little mini me, So it's kind of scaring my wife.

Jim Koch: 36:18

So she's a little spacey like me and yeah Well the world needs more of you, Scott, So don't worry about it. Tell your wife she married you, you know, if she doesn't like it, then that's all. It's on her, Exactly.

Scott: 36:34

I keep trying to tell her that she's married you and propagated one That's on her.

Jim Koch: 36:37

Maybe that's why it's only one.

Scott: 36:40

She was like no, we're done, no more. Well, jim, this has been absolutely amazing. Thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with me and to go through this little blast from the past trip and to also just discuss. You know your beginning And how the company's growing and how the company has done just numerous things for businesses out there And obviously I wish you continued success. It's interesting to watch from a distance. You know your baby because it's kind of like you know, like my kids kind of grow it up too. Yeah.

Jim Koch: 37:11

It's all good, isn't it?

Scott: 37:13

The company was so 80, i started in 98. Yeah.

Jim Koch: 37:16

So, what?

Scott: 37:17

14 years old? I mean, it was relatively young compared to now, so yeah, A lot of changes and a lot of good changes. It's good to see. Yeah, it's never boring Never, especially with you running the show.

Jim Koch: 37:30

Well, you've been a part of it, scott, so thank you for all those years.

Scott: 37:34

Cheers, cheers. I really appreciate it And take care.

Jim Koch: 37:37

Been a pleasure. Bye now.

Scott: 37:40

I just want to thank you so much for doing this. Don't thank me until.

Jim Koch: 37:43

I'm done. You know this is to be a total waste of your time. It's like why did I want to talk to this fuckwit?

Scott: 37:51

Never.

Jim Koch: 37:51

It's like I thought he was pretty smart, but no.