The Guy Who Brews Sam Adams Is Officially A Billionaire

[jmowreader]

21. The Reinheitsgebot is pretty easy to understand

"Thou shalt not make beer from anything but barley malt, hops, water, salt and brewer's yeast." Sam Adams is a pure-malt beer, one of the few made in the US at that time.

In Germany, the US Army bases hold annual German-American Volksfests. I assume they all have casinos; the casino at the Berlin Volksfest was run by Field Station Berlin. The command decided that if we could be trusted with classified information we could also be trusted with that much money. In the casino was a bar; we assigned soldiers to work the table games the entire run of the Fest but the bar was run by volunteers who came in on our break days to sell beer and, of course, drink for free. There was the extra bonus of seeing the looks on the Germans' faces when they learned Budweiser comes in bottles with twist-off caps. German beer does not. The German Phrase of the Day ist "abschrauben, mein Herr!" - "twist it off, sir."

I was told repeatedly by old Germans who'd put away quite a few that Samuel Adams was mislabeled - "there's no way this is American beer." Sam Adams sells for shit at German-American Volksfests; Germans who go to them to drink American beer want it to TASTE like stereotypical American beer, which Sam Adams doesn't. (You have not lived until you've seen a German come to a Volksfest with a hand truck to buy and haul off cases and cases of Bud, and we had enough of them we tried to get the Army to send us a beer truck so we could sell cases out of it instead of depleting our bar stock. Turns out US Army Europe doesn't own a beer truck and they couldn't find anyone who'd rent us one.)