The Spirits of ’76

Since 1860 the Koch family had run its own brewery in St. Louis. Every eldest son had become a brewmaster. Then the big breweries began driving out the little ones. After the family business withered in the shadow of Budweiser across town, the Koch men continued to brew at other large companies. But by the time Jim Koch went to college in the 1970s the nation's breweries were run by huge national firms. “The romance was gone,” says Jim, great-great-grandson of the founder of the Louis Koch Brewery. It looked as if there was no place left in the world for a Koch master brewer. Jim earned Harvard law and business degrees, and rapidly rose to a high-paying position in a Boston consulting company.

So when he decided in 1985 to suddenly start a brewery, his father thought he was crazy. “My father said, ‘We've spent 20 years trying to get the smell of a brewery out of our clothes,'” Jim recalls. “But at some level he must have liked the idea, because he became my first investor.”

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