How I Built This with Guy Raz - Brewing creativity with Jim Koch of Boston Beer Company

Episode Date: January 25, 2024

When Jim Koch created Samuel Adams Boston Lager in 1984, American craft beer was still in its infancy. But forty years and thousands of new craft breweries later, both the competition and Jim’s drive to innovate are fiercer than ever...This week on How I Built This Lab, Jim reveals how thinking beyond paradigms and exploring aberrations has kept Boston Beer Company a leader in the alcoholic beverage industry. From hard teas to nitrogenated ales to non-alcoholic IPAs, Jim also shares the stories behind his company’s biggest hits — and biggest flops.Also, check out Boston Beer Company’s founding story told by Jim in October 2016.This episode was produced by Sam Paulson with music by Ramtin Arablouei.It was edited by John Isabella with research help from Chris Maccini. Our audio engineer was Neal Rauch.You can follow HIBT on X & Instagram, and email us at [e-mail] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with a place with a all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So back in 2016, one of our very earliest episodes was on the founding of the Boston Beer Company, makers of Sam Adams Beer. Our guest was its founder, Jim Cook.

I know lots of you remember that episode because so many of you have come to talk to me about it when you meet me. It was really funny. It was full of great lessons. And Jim talked about a framework he came up with that gave him the courage to start the company. And that framework was pretty simple. He asked himself, what's worse? Doing something scary or something dangerous. Well, for Jim, leaving his comfortable job as a consultant to start a beer company was certainly going to be scary.

But not doing it, not taking the leap, and staying at a job he really didn't love, well, that was dangerous because one day he might regret not trying and it would be too late to start. Fast forward to today and a lot has changed in the beer industry, even in the time since Jim first joined us. There's been a flood of craft beer brands that have started up, some have prospered, many of them have failed, and American drinking habits have changed as well. well, with more people opting for spirits or even non-alcoholic drinks. None of this has ruffled Jim Cook or stifled his creativity in any way. In fact, it's just made him more innovative, as you will hear. Jim no longer runs the day-to-day operations at Boston Beer Company, but he's still very much involved in a big part of product innovation there. A few weeks ago, I asked him to come back onto the show for an update, and when he sat down in a

studio, he decided to celebrate our conversation with, well, a nice cold beer. And I actually, and you were talking about the last episodes, it reminded me of actually the secret of why that came out so well. And if I may, I'm going to give you the key to that, which is I discovered long ago that I'm really boring when I'm dead sober. Back then, there were about 5,700 craft breweries in the U.S. Boston Beer Company still considered a craft beer company. I think you make about 8.5 million barrels of beer a year. So you're still considered very small compared to the big guys. Not the biggest. I think Yengling is the biggest craft beer, beer number two. But at the time, there are about 5.5,000. To date, there are almost 10,000 by 20,000. By 2.000. Byroning number two. But at the time, there are almost 10,000. By 20,000. 2022, almost 10,000 craft breweries in America. You, Jim, are widely considered to be like the guy who reinvigorated craft brewing in the U.S. Like you're like called the Godfather of craft brewing. But I wonder whether you think that there's too many. I mean, is there market

saturation now? You know, what do you think? You're asking a brewer. Is there too many beers? I mean, a brewer always wants another beer. Yeah. I'm very happy that there are 10,000 craft brewers. And in all seriousness, this is sort of what success looks like. Yeah. You know, when I started Sam Adams, it'll be 40 years ago, that was kind of what we dreamed about. That someday everybody was, you know, 10 minutes away from a craft brewer.

and that there would be great beer everywhere. And, you know, the downside to that is there is so much competition. Yes. Everybody's innovating. Everybody's trying to make the next new thing. But that's wonderful. Yes, it's a much harder business to be in. But on the other hand, it's stable.

It's not going anywhere. It has totally changed the landscape of beer in the United States. And today, the place where brewers from all over the world look for inspiration and innovation is not Germany. It's not Belgium. It's not England. It's America. We are teaching the rest of the world how to make great beer. And when I started Sam Adams, American beer was a joke.

Yeah. And, you know, I come from a brewing family with a deep history of brewing in America, and it bothered me. And today nobody makes that joke anymore. Right, because things like IPAs really, you know, with what you see in Europe and it's amazing. I mean, those are really influenced by American brewers. But I'm just curious because I've been reading things like, you know, craft brewing we know is more competitive. And the market share is slightly decreasing. I mean, the market share of spirits has really jumped from 2000 to today.

and it's now a greater share of the overall alcohol market than beer slightly. You know, beer is still big, I'm 40, 40, 41 percent. But spirits now outselling beer a little bit. Do you think that it's sort of foreshadows what is going to happen over time? It doesn't mean that, you know, Boston beer company and other companies won't come up with other products. But, I mean, do you think that in 20 years from now it's possible that, you know, beer consumption accounts for, let's say, 50. 15% of all alcohol consumption in the U.S.? Well, lots of things are possible.

And there's a country western song called The Hardway, and one of the lines in there is, we've got two lives, one we're given, and the other one we make. Yeah. And maybe 15% is the life we're given, but it's not the one we make. I want a different future. And I'm willing to take the challenge of creating that different future. And to me, as a brewer, there are great beers that have not been made yet. Right. And they may take a form that we can't imagine today. And to me, that's the opportunity.

That's what's exciting. You know, I've been making beer for 40 years. And I wake up excited every day by the possibilities. And we make things that are almost beyond imagination. We make a special beer. We release it every two years. It's called Samuel Adams Utopias. It weighs in at about 60 proof. It's the strongest naturally fermented beer in history.

And we sell it for $250 a bottle. and we sell out. We have to ration it. And to me, a beer like that easily stands next to, you know, a vintage port or a fine cognac, an old sherry. We've moved into a flavor space where beer has never been. Yeah. You know, and then on the other hand, you know, we've made canned cocktails that are just flat out

delicious and it's not technically a beer but it leverages our culinary skills, our flavor innovation. And, you know, it's in a can. You make it in a brewery, goes through beer, wholesalers, and so forth. Whether you call that spirits or beer, to me, it's just part of this wonderful universe of beautiful things you can do with. the fermentation of grain. How do you begin to think about, you know, innovating? So you start as a beer company, right, and then you make different kinds of beers. But now Boston Beer Company makes hard ciders. It makes seltzers. It sells a hard iced tea. So let's kind of break this

down. How do you decide what to do next? I mean, is it based on market research and looking at like where, you know, where younger consumers are going, what they're drinking. Do you sort of follow the consumer, essentially? No. No. There are plenty of people who are very good at that. Big companies have lots of research and they buy reports and, you know, they get all this quantitative stuff and so forth. So we can't really compete with these big companies.

They've got all these feelers out there. We have to be successful. we have to be different. And so for me, this starts with ideas that are, if you will, paradigm shifts. You know, we approach the world in paradigms. Yeah. And we are prisoners of those paradigms. And I've always tried to take those blinders and that structure away

because it forces you to think in the same way that everybody else is thinking. and so it inhibits innovation and new ways of adding value. Yeah. For, you know, our whole time in alcohol, last few centuries, alcohol is basically divided into three realms. There's beer, there's wine, and there's hard liquor or spirits. Yeah. And those are three lanes.

Okay. And an insight about that is, you know, they're all acquired tastes. They all have a flavor structure that it's human beings. We're not actually evolved to like. Wine is tanic and acidic. You know, beer is bitter and has that tongue sting of carbonic acid on the palate. And, of course, hard liquor has that ferocious ethanol attack up front. Yeah.

So they all are acquired tastes. Which is why kids don't like them. Kids, you know, drink a sip of beer, wine. No. No, you have to evolve your taste to like them, and that's fine. But you're fighting something. So the term I use is a fourth category. And that's kind of our blue ocean where we can innovate because nobody's really there.

And the fourth category is, what do you call it? I call it the fourth category. The fourth category. I love it. It doesn't have a name, but it is the space of intersection of all of them, things that are not traditional wine, traditional beer, traditional liquor. I mean, there's a place for all these wonderful things, but there was this unexplored territory of wonderful beverages that had not yet been made, but were, to me, I think of them,

they exist. They're just unrecognized and lying dormant. And my job is to kind of dust them off and find them in this junkyard of bad ideas. We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, how Boston Beer Company brought an alcoholic twist to some of our favorite non-alcoholic beverages. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So Jim Cook loves thinking outside traditional paradigms. A great drink doesn't need to be a big.

beer or wine. It can be something totally different. So, for example, we've developed an ability to ferment grain and then clean it and take out a lot of the less pleasant notes. We're essentially making this beautiful, clean, clear, 20% alcohol liquid that then can form a base for other flavors. It's like the pizza dough on the counter and you can put anything on it you want. And you can turn that into several other products? I can turn that into an unlimited number of products. One of the first things that we developed, it was over 20 years ago, was hard tea.

And it was very appealing to me because tea has. You know, like beer and hops and so for tea has a couple of thousand years of tradition. It's got big flavor variations between different teas. You've got black teas, green tea, red tea, white tea. And, you know, it's a flavor I know that people are familiar with, but I can introduce it to them in a new way. And so we came out with a hard tea called Bodhings. Chuck that one up. That was another failure.

But it didn't do that well. And then there was a band that sued us. So that was a fiasco. So just to clarify, you're talking about as a twisted tea brand. Yes. And already 20 years ago, Boston Beer Company released a hard tea, but that didn't work. It failed initially? Well, yeah, and then it failed again.

So what happened? How did that turn around? Well, it failed the second time as twisted tea. but it had little pockets. Okay, and we're, you know, we're not a big company. Big companies, if something fails, they shoot it in the head and they move on. Yeah. But this was like our baby, and it had these little pockets where it actually was doing reasonably well.

Huh. What it was was states that start with them but weren't Mississippi. So it was doing well in Maine. It was doing well in Massachusetts. It was doing well in Maryland, in Montana, in Michigan. That does not explain anything, though. That explains nothing to me. There has to be a reason why people...

Exactly. Why? Well, that's the question you have to ask yourself. You know, and that's part of this paradigm thinking. People focus on the paradigm and what works within the paradigm. And what you really have to do is focus on the aberrations, and things that are outside the paradigm. That's how Copernicus were.

That's how Einstein work. A lot of great scientists, they look at the aberrations. So we went to these aberrations. And I started with Maine. And I just went to Maine and I stood in convenience stores, which was the main place that it was selling. And I stood in one of them all day long. And there were like five people that came in and bought Twisted Tea.

ask them why they were buying twisted tea. And what I was told, well, I like the way it tastes, and it's not carbonated, so I don't get bloated. And it makes me feel good. And it had a very familiar taste. It had the modicum of caffeine in from the natural tea, not a lot, but enough to just kind of change the contours of the buzz that you got. from it. And it was very flavorful, so you didn't chug it. You'd have one or two.

And it tastes like a, kind of like a regular iced tea, a little bit. Yeah, it's actually a bigger tea flavor profile because a lot of the non-alc teas, the snapples and Arizona's, there's no much tea flavor. There's powder, right? They use powder. Yeah, and the tea isn't that. I mean, they're very successful. They sell a lot because the tea flavor is sort of recessive and the sweetness and

the fruit, the lemon and things that get added are essential elements to it. And it was very tea forward, but it was very high quality tea. And the core drinker was a blue-collar drinker, but a kind of educated blue-collar drinker because it wasn't cheap. You know, this was selling for basically craft beer pricing. I mean, the first guy I talked to in Maine, he was a mason, and he was building a stone wall. And the next guy was a sheet rocker.

He put up the plaster board in a construction site. And so, and these were people who were very sort of clever with doing odd things. And they started sending us pictures of them drinking twisted tea. The first one was this guy who looked like he was in a pool. But then when you opened the aperture, he put a plastic sheet in the back of his pickup truck, filled it with water and was sitting there in his bathing suit having a twisted tea and it made me smile. This is our drinker. This is great.

So it started to get traction. Bikers adopted it. It's like the official drink of Sturgis, the big bike rally in North Dakota. And it's just grown over 20-some years. It started with that base. It's still the base for it. And then it sort of spread out now. There's college campuses.

I remember moving my daughter out from her dormant Harvard. And she was on the top floor. So I walked down all the five floors. And on two of them, there was an empty case of twisted tea. Wow. All right. So let's dig into this a bit more because obviously the tea sort of gamble worked. One thing that you introduced, this is.

back in, I think, 2016 was hard seltzer. And initially, hard seltzer also didn't take off. Exactly. It was seen as a gimmick. Well, no, it was actually, I mean, I'll tell you story of it. We misconceived it. You know, 25 years ago, we developed this clear malt base. This was before Coors released Zima?

This, it was after Coors released Zima, but the base that Coors had was not clean. Okay. It had some off notes of sulfur that came out of the fermentation. They didn't know how to get those molecules out of there. So we had to, I mean, it's a little complicated, but we had to develop this ion separation technology. And I'm not a scientist, but I know it tastes good. And we actually did that in partnership with Brown-Forten,

with the people who make Jack Daniels. And they had some chemical engineers, and it was a very fruitful partnership. And out of that came this, Clear malt base that the Jack Daniels country cocktails are built on. And we kept thinking about, well, what else could we do with it? And it took 20 years to come to this idea, which was hard seltzer. Truly was the first hard seltzer here.

And it just came from just thinking, pushing, what could we do with this? And it was a very simple idea. You know, LaCroix was taking off. Seltzer water was taking off. And we said, you know, what if we made an alcoholic version of that? So you were you were paying attention to LaCroix? Because LaCroix really just exploded. I mean, even though it's been around for a long time, it really started to explode in the 2010s.

Yeah. And, you know, to me, when I'd go into a store, you know, everybody stays in the beer aisle and they look and they try to copy other people's ideas. You know, I'm walking the rest of the store. I'm looking in the non-alc section. and just drawing stimulation from that. And so this idea of an alcoholic hard seltzer and the parameters, the framework form was, what if we made something that had 100 calories, you know, we were going to do no sugar, no artificial sweetness.

So we put relatively complex fruit flavors. And, I mean, again, we were totally wrong. when we formulated, we thought, Who's going to drink this? Well, our drinker is going to be a white blouse woman who didn't want sugar and starches, and she's going to drink it after she plays tennis, and it's going to be a substitute for like Chardonnay on the Rocks or vodka soda with a lime. This is going to be a better version of that,

and we're going to sell a million cases a year, which is not a whole lot in a business, you know, with, and it's like three billion cases or some huge number. Right. And what we've learned is make a beautiful flavor profile, make a beautiful product, and it will find its way to the right drinkers. We learned that from twisted tea.

We thought that was going to be for, like, urban, yuppies, snapple drinkers, and we were totally wrong. So we put this out. And we had it in a market a couple of months, and we had our wholesalers, our beer wholesalers on a, they got an incentive trip, and we take them to the Caribbean. And one of the days is this booze cruise on a trawler. And these are beer wholesalers. They're like professional world-class drinkers. Sure.

Yeah. So, you know, this is a 10, 12-hour booze cruise. We go to some famous, you know, Caribbean bars, Foxies, and Salty Dollar and things like that. but the boat is stocked with all of our things. And there were four of our wholesalers sitting on the back bench of this trawler boat, and they started drinking truly. The hard sales are designed for the white blouse women. And these are like big guys.

Yeah. There were four of them. There's probably 1,200 pounds of wholesaler on that bench. And I said, guys, do me a favor. Just count the truilies. Because we're going to be on this boat for like 10 hours. I'm curious because I said, I'm only going to drink truly because I'm going to understand what kind of buzz I get. Do I get a hangover?

I'm like using my body to experiment. And at the end of the day, those wholesalers had like 64 of them. So 16 apiece. And I realized, oh, this is different. And I ask, why are you drinking all this truly, your beer drinker? Yeah. And he said, well, Jim, I got. to watch my girlish figure too.

This, it tastes great and it doesn't fill me up. And I thought, oh, that sounds like tastes great, less filling. So I realized, hmm, this is different than I anticipated. Let me explore that. And after that, we changed the packaging to make it less feminine. And a great product that's really delicious will find its way to its natural drink. So I don't try to anticipate that. It's so interesting because you start out by sort of marketing and packaging it for a specific consumer only to discover that actually, you know, it appeals to very different types of consumers.

And I know lots of big burly dudes who love truly and prefer it because in part because they go to the gym and they, you know, they don't want to consume all the carbs. So all right. So it's about sort of experimenting. But they're also failures, right? I mean, you come up with products that are going to fail. Dozens and dozens and dozens, guy. And that's part of it, right? Because any of these things, like the things we've talked about, you know, Twisted Tea or truly,

we haven't talked about Angry Orchard, which is a hard cider. But even those products have, by and large, been huge successes for the brand. But in order to have the successes, you have to take risks, right? and presumably taking risks means you're going to have some dogs there that just fail. Oh, yeah. I mean, they were all births as failures. Angry Orchard Hard Cider began life as hardcore. In 1996, we revived a very traditional beverage.

Beer was not always the number one alcoholic beverage in the United States. So before the Civil War, the number one alcoholic beverage was hard cider. And beer just placed it, you know, after the Civil War for a bunch of reasons. Hard cider, even in the U.S. Yeah. And so I thought, let's do that. And we called it hardcore. And it failed.

But the same kind of thing. It had a few pockets. And we were about to kill it, but it started growing. And we went and see who was drinking it. And we realized we had to clean up the flavor profile because our original hard hardcore was based on traditional English cider. It had some sulfur, some sort of rough notes that, you know, was made it a rural drink. And let's clean this up.

Let's make it nicer. Let's bring forth the apple flavor. Let's use great ingredients. So we still bring in apples from Normandy and from Northern Italy because true cider apples are not grown in the U.S. anymore. And we wanted to make this from true cider apples, not grocery store apples. It's very much like wine. You're not going to make great wine from grocery store grapes. And so that, again, it just took some time. Yes, it did. It took 14 years. Yeah. So we are patient if we believe in something and it finds a niche. You know, we grow it from

that niche. And we ended up, we changed the name from hardcore because everybody associated with which was not a good idea. And we changed it to Angry Orchard, which was kind of a weird name, but it was a nice juxtaposition. And the orchard is a very primal image

of childhood simplicity. You know, four quartets, the T.S. Eliot's poem, there's a line in there. The children in the apple tree, an image of complete simplicity. And that was to me this beautiful metaphor of you have an angry orchard and it takes you into the orchard. And that's a place that we would love to return. We're going to take another

quick break, but when we come back, why Jim started brewing non-alcoholic beer, a drink that for a long time was notorious for how bad it tastes. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy. So Jim has boozified all kinds of drinks, but he's also done the opposite as he's gotten into the very complex art of brewing non-alcoholic beer. For a long time, non-alcoholic beer didn't taste good. It was terrible. It was pretty crappy. And for 35 years, people would say, you know, I've used up my quota, but I loved Sam Adams, you know, when I was still drinking, can you make a non-alcoholic beer?

Why don't you make a non-acolic beer? And I'd say, well, the reason I don't is because non-alcoholic beers taste like crap. And pretty much all of them, because they're basically an unfurmented beer that they carbonate. So you don't get any of that yeast complexity in it. Or, you know, they make a beer and then they strip it. And it ends up being unpleasant. And that was true for 30 years. And then I was at a beer conference, and I tasted the first non-alcoholic.

alcoholic beer that was really good. And that was actually Heineken Zero Zero. And I remember to this day, it was like six years ago in San Diego. And I poured it to see, well, I'll see if this one's as bad as their previous one, which was called Buckler. And it was night and day. It was a revelation. It's like, this tastes like good beer. And I don't know how they did it, but I'm going to figure this out, because they have opened the door. And we, started rethinking it. There was technology that didn't exist before. It was a vacuum distillation, so you could essentially draw the alcohol out of the beer at almost room temperature. And then, and it got a little complicated, and then take the distillate and redistill it, throw away the

alcohol and put the flavor elements back in the beer, and then build some complexity with some hop character, blah, blah, blah. At the end of the day, we, got a hazy IPA that was non-alcoholic and had the same taste scores as the alcoholic version of it. When people tasted it blind, they could not identify it as a non-alcoholic beer. And the scores on it that we were getting were equal to the alcoholic variation. And I thought, all right, this is something we can be proud of. This is something we can put out there.

I mean, there's times when I want a beer, but I really don't want the alcohol. Yeah. Like summer long bike ride. Sure. A hike. Four hours later. You know, I'm a little, I'm depleted. I need the hydration.

But if I have a couple of beers, I'm going to go to sleep. Yeah. That's a beautiful time for it. My most fun time is in summer, you're blasting down the highway at 70, 75 miles an hour, and you're drinking a beer. That's an experience we've been deprived of, rightfully so. So let's talk about a failure. What is something that you've introduced in the last 20 years that you maybe hung on to a little too long that just didn't work?

Well, there was Sam Adams' nitro. Again, the conventional idea for beer is it's carbonated. Yeah. Right? We drink beer. You get that tongue sting of carbonic acid. It's part of the overall flavor profile. But the counter idea is, what if we nitrogenated it?

What if it wasn't CO2 with that really sharp sting to it? What if it was nitrogen? And nitrogen has this velvety smoothness. Like a creaminess, right? Yeah, exactly. And very small, tight bubbles instead of the bigger CO2 bubbles. And it gives it that beautiful head, that creamy, luscious. Yes, and everybody thought about, you know, that's Guinness.

Yeah. So that was our idea was let's nitrogenate other beer styles. Let's do it for a white ale. And we'll put some coriander and some orange in it. Like a saison. Yeah, a variation of a saizan. We're sort of riffing on that. And let's try that with a red ale that has this sweet, multi, smooth.

that will just rides along with that creamy nitrogenation. So it's just, you know, once you get the idea, you can riff on it. A lot of times the ideas also require not just culinary and aesthetic innovation, but there, as a brewer, we're in some ways as an aspect of what I do or the brewers do. It's like Cristo. Christo, the artist. Yeah. Giant installations of a fabric.

And yeah, and crazy things, wrapping a building, things like that. And when he talks about his art, he will point out there's two forms of innovation that are totally different. One is the art itself and the other is making it exist in the real world. That is physical elements, governmental elements, social elements, and both of them require creativity. I mean, you want to wrap a building. You know, you've got to get permits. You've got to get people who will go along with your crazy idea. You've got to figure out engineering things of how do you fasten it to the building,

how do you keep a win from doing this and that. And that was the same sort of dichotomy of creativity that we needed in order to make this beautiful idea. So we had to go to England and find a can maker that could put a small capsule in the bottom of the cans that was filled with nitrogen, pressurized to a level where once you opened it, you changed the pressure balance inside the can, released pressure, which then allowed this little capsule in the bottom to rupture through tiny little pinholes. spew out all this nitrogen that created all those beautiful gushing bubbles. So creativity comes in many forms, and I enjoy all of them. So what happened? I mean, why did you guys give up on that? Because nobody bought it.

So I've learned except the verdict of the drinker. It was more expensive because the cans were quite expensive. It was a wonderful beer, but it just could not find a place. And I'm okay with that. I mean, if I make something really wonderful, beautiful that I believe in, I'm done. I mean, that's okay. People don't have to enjoy the same things I enjoy. As long as, you know, once in a while, I can create something that changes the beer landscape.

That's enough. Sam Adams is a product that will, I have no doubt, will be around in 50, 100 years maybe beyond. It's like an enduring brand of beer, right? There you go. I hope so. Now, but my question to you is, aside from Sam Adams is an enduring brand, an enduring product, does it matter if, let's say, truly, is just a successful brand for, you know, seven or ten years and then fizzles out? Like, is it important, in your view, to build enduring products and brands? Or is it okay if something is really successful for a couple years and then just kind of fizzles out?

The answer is no. I do want to build enduring products and brands. And I believe that if you're making something really good, it's not a flash in a pan. It will grow. People will acquire a tail. taste for what you're giving them. So I don't want things that are sort of boom, splat. Yeah.

I want things that are slow builds. I mean, like we were talking, you know, Hard Cider is now 27 years. And it's now an enduring success, but it took it 27 years to get to where it is today. And to me, that's all built on the quality. quality of the product and the delightfulness of the taste experience. And those are enduring characteristics. That's Jim Cook, co-founder and chairman of Boston Beer Company. Jim, thank you so much for coming on again. It's been great at having you.

Well, this has been a great pleasure. I got to finish my first beer and I'm halfway through my second. So that tells me this was a great time. And thank you for bringing us together. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. This episode was produced by Sam Paulson with music composed by Rumtine Arablewe. It was edited by John Isabella with research help from Chris Messini. Our audio engineer was Neil Rouch.

Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Carla Estevez, Carrie Thompson, J.C. Howard, Malia Agadello, Neva Grant, Catherine Seifer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to how I built this lab.