American craft beer would look very different without Samuel Adams. Long before every city seemed to contain three breweries and a taproom built inside an old warehouse, Jim Koch was helping revive styles that had largely disappeared from mainstream American brewing.

Launched in Boston during the 1980s, Samuel Adams became one of the defining names of the American craft movement. Boston Lager remains the flagship. Amber in colour, balanced between malt richness and noble hop bitterness, and still surprisingly relevant despite the endless waves of IPA that followed.

The brewery eventually expanded into a huge range of styles including wheat beers, seasonal releases, barrel-aged projects and stronger experimental bottlings. Utopias in particular became legendary for pushing beer into spirit-like territory with extreme ageing and alcohol levels.

What keeps Samuel Adams important is not necessarily that it remains the most fashionable brewery. It is that the company helped create space for modern American craft beer to exist at all.

Many drinkers now take brewery diversity for granted. Samuel Adams arrived when that diversity barely existed.