Samuel Adams

From Field to Glass

For us, our protectionism and obsession over the quality of our beer begins long before it reaches you. It starts with the ingredients and follows all the way through to how the beer arrives in your glass. We work with the growers to track the progress of the hops and determine the exact right time to harvest, we hand select the best of the year's crops, and then ship them when the temperatures on the Atlantic are at their coldest to keep the hops fresh.

Once we begin the lengthy process of brewing the quality checks continue. We do hundreds of measures throughout the over five week process to make sure the beer is exactly the way it should be.

It's a Tough Job

There are some perks to being a brewer. Each morning the brewers gather for a taste panel to evaluate the beers at each stage of the process to make sure they are on track. As each batch progresses, they also need to pass one more hurdle before leaving the brewery, Jim Koch. Jim tastes a sample of every batch we brew to make sure it meets his standards.

Freshness Dating

Unlike wine, beer has a shelf life. Beer with natural products and no preservatives, like Samuel Adams beer, begins to change over time. As it oxidizes, the flavors begin to mellow and the hops become more subdued. There are some beers that are meant to age but for the most part the time limit on our beers is about four to five months from when it was brewed. To make sure your beer is as close to what the brewers intended as possible, we helped pioneer easy to read freshness dating.

Some breweries use a "born on date" which shows when the beer was bottled. Knowing when the beer was bottled is like knowing when a cow was milked—it doesn't really help tell you when it's at its best. Instead, our dating marks the month to enjoy the beer until.

Draft Quality

Once the beer leaves our brewery we still keep a watchful eye on it. We go into bars and perform thousands of draft quality checks every year to make sure the beer passes our standards. We check the draft lines for cleanliness, the temperature, glassware, and the conditions where the kegs are stored. Each of these elements can adversely affect the taste of the beer. We want to make sure that each pint of Samuel Adams beer is as good as the last.