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Jim Koch

American businessman and founder of Boston beer company From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jim Koch
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Charles James Koch (/kʊk/ KUUK; born May 27, 1949)[1][2] is an American businessman who is the co-founder and chairman of the Boston Beer Company, the producers of Samuel Adams beer. Koch is widely considered to be a founding father of the American craft brewing movement.[3]

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Early life

Koch was born in Cincinnati, Ohio,[4] to German-American parents Charles and Dorothy (née Kautz) Koch.[1] Charles was a fifth-generation brewer.[4] Koch earned Bachelor of Arts, Master of Business Administration, and Juris Doctor degrees from Harvard University.[5]

Career

Koch is a former consultant with the Boston Consulting Group. He was formerly an Outward Bound instructor. In 1984, Koch co-founded the Boston Beer Company, the producers of Samuel Adams beer.[6]

Koch took Boston Beer company public in 1995 and owns a 19.5% stake in the company, giving him a net-worth of over $1 billion. In 2023 he was ranked #1905 in Forbes Billionaires 2023.[3]

In 2016, Koch published Quench Your Own Thirst: Business Lessons Learned Over a Beer or Two, in which he discussed how he left his career as a management consultant to start his own brewery using his great-great-grandfather's recipe.[7]

At an August 2018 dinner with U.S. President Donald Trump, Koch said the corporate tax cut of 2017 played a major role in making the Boston Beer Company more competitive in regard to foreign competitors: "When I started Sam Adams, American beer was a joke, and it pissed me off. And now, American brewers make the best beer in the world. And the tax reform was a very big deal for all of us, because 85 percent of the beer made in the United States is owned by foreign companies."[8][9]

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Personal life

Koch's marriage to his first wife, Susan, ended around the time he started the Boston Beer Company.[10][11] He remarried to entrepreneur Cynthia Fisher in 1994.[10][5] He has two children from his first marriage and two from his second.[12] They live in Newton, Massachusetts.[13][14]

Koch is unrelated to Stone Brewing Co. cofounder Greg Koch.[15]

References

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