Hey, Prime members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.

Download the app today.

New years is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.

As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.

So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.

Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.

Hey, just quick heads up to let you know that there's a little bit of strong language in about the first minute and a half of the show.

So if you've got any kids around, just cover their ears for about a minute and a half, and then you're good to go.

So you, you call up your dad and like, Dad, guess what? I'm joining the family business. I'm going to make beer with you.

I was worse. I went home.

And was he excited?

Not really. When I told him, I was kind of hoping that he put his arm around me, and because this 150-year-old family tradition was going to be carried on.

No, he looked at me, said, Jim, you've done some really stupid things in your life. This is the stupidest.

From NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

I'm Guy Razz, and on today's show, how Jim Cook started brewing an old family beer recipe called it Samuel Adams, bottled it up, and then helped kickstart the craft beer movement in America.

So, at some point last year, the number of breweries in America passed the 4,000 mark, and most of those breweries make craft beers, things like IPAs, Porter, Stout, Sloggers, you name it.

And this is beer that wins awards all over the world, and a lot of it even gets exported to places like Germany, in Holland, Belgium, where beer brewing is practically a religion.

But if somehow you went back in time to like 1980, and someone handed you a cold bottle of American beer, you might not recognize it, because in Monty Python fans might remember this, American beer used to be a joke.

This is frankly over here, we find your American beer is a little like making love in a canoe. It's fucking close to water.

So, that was what it was like when Jim Cook was a young man, but he knew a lot about beer, because he happened to come from a family of beer makers.

My dad was a Brewmaster, and it's like being the chef in a kitchen. He was responsible for the recipe and the quality of the beer he wasn't the owner.

So, he got out of Brewmaster School in 1948, and there were a thousand breweries all over the US, 36 years later when I started Sam Adams, that thousand had dwindled down to 50.

...