1250070503 (N) by Jim Koch

Author:Jim Koch [Koch, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250070517
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Published: 2016-04-12T06:00:00+00:00

27

We Take Beer Seriously, but Not Ourselves

COLLEEN KEEGAN WILLIAMS was one of the greatest salespeople we’ve ever had. She was smart, determined, and full of energy—a force of nature. While working full time for us, she had had five kids in six years. Yes, you read that right. I’m told she only slept four hours a night, and I believe it.

After her fifth child was born, Colleen finally packed it in, leaving us with an endless number of funny Colleen stories. Once she pulled a practical joke on a prospective new employee. As part of the interview, he spent a day in the market with her. They were in a convenience store and he asked the manager if he could use the men’s room. Colleen grabbed a Dixie cup and told him she wanted to do an impromptu drug test. He came back with the filled cup and Colleen couldn’t stop laughing.

Another time we were at a company meeting in New Orleans, staying at a Holiday Inn on Bourbon Street that had small balconies. That night, with the streets teeming with people, Colleen and her colleague, Michele Burchfield, stood on one of those balconies and saw other people either mooning folks or throwing beads to the crowds below. Instinctively, they grabbed stacks of cardboard Samuel Adams coasters and started launching them, like little Frisbees, to the eager throng. Strings of beads don’t build awareness for your beer—but flying coasters do.

Colleen was not alone. There was much merriment at that particular company meeting, held the week before the Super Bowl. Across the street from our hotel, a vacant lot was filled with Anheuser-Busch inflatables, dozens of ten-foot-high Bud bottles and cans. The bartender told me they had just taken advantage of an empty lot with an absentee owner and didn’t get permission. Of course, whether or not this was actually the case, this sight bugged us. After midnight, one of our salespeople decided to stage a commando raid. She borrowed a knife from a bartender, and with the knife in her teeth she scaled an eight-foot-high fence. Within minutes she had made mincemeat of the inflatables. Then, she put the knife back between her teeth, climbed the fence again, and dropped back onto the sidewalk just as a police officer rounded the corner. He caught sight of the scene and looked at our pirate. She hid the knife and started to cry. “I can’t believe somebody did that,” she bawled. “I work for the brewery, and I spent so much time working on those!” The officer shook his head, “People can be animals sometimes,” he said, and walked away.

At another company, a little crazy behavior might have gotten you fired. We tolerated it, maybe even relished it. It was part of our culture, what set us apart. As a young and growing company, our culture was about working hard and putting all of ourselves into everything we did so that we could come up with creative, intelligent solutions to problems. It

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