In June 2008, Jim, inspired by his own experiences starting a business, decided to create a philanthropic program that would provide support to small businesses and budding entrepreneurs in America. The result was Samuel Adams Brewing the American Dream. Through Samuel Adams Brewing the American Dream, Boston Beer offers nuts and bolts business mentoring and micro-loans to small business owners in food, beverage, hospitality and craft brewing. With the help of Accion, the largest nationwide micro- and small business lending network in the U.S., Samuel Adams has distributed more than $4 million dollars in capital to hundreds of small food and beverage businesses enabling them to create or save thousands of jobs. Boston Beer also offers the Brewing and Business Experienceship to one craft brewer annually to receive educational and enrichment experiences from the Samuel Adams brewery and its employees. Food, beverage, and hospitality small business owners, as well as craft brewers, can apply for loans ranging from $500 to $25,000 to be used for a variety of business purposes, with all loan payments recycled back into the fund. In 2014, Boston Beer again expanded the program, making an additional philanthropic investment of $1 million to support small business owners through speed coaching events in more cities and additional microloans. To learn more visit btad.samueladams.com.

As responsible brewers, we educate and encourage responsible drinking throughout our communications. When advertising and marketing our products, we adhere to standards established by the Beer Institute and by the Brewers Association, two trade organizations that set voluntary industry standards. We take all reasonable steps to ensure that visitors to our websites and social media channels are 21 years of age or older. For more information regarding the Beer Institute’s Advertising and Marketing Code, visit: http://www.beerinstitute.org/assets/uploads/BI-AdCode-5-2011.pdf.

We are committed to protecting the environment and continue to look for ways to minimize waste, increase recycling, and maximize the effective use of natural resources throughout our operations. We routinely conduct assessments of our breweries and other facilities to ensure compliance with applicable environmental regulations and best practices. Our employees are a key component of these environmental and sustainability initiatives as well, so we invest in training, education, and awareness programs to support those efforts.

As a company, we recycle and reuse many of our materials. In Massachusetts and New York, Samuel Adams works with its distributors to collect, clean, and refill its glass bottles. All scrap glass generated from our bottling operations is sent to a glass recycler. We collect Samuel Adams beer beyond its freshness date and recycle materials where possible. We recycle packaging materials, including old or defective corrugated paper packaging containers, plastic shrink-wrap and plastic banding, which we send to local recycling facilities. Our breweries refurbish damaged wooden pallets that are returned to us by our wholesalers. Additionally, we also aggressively recycle our brewing byproduct -- our spent grain and yeast is sent to local dairy farmers for use as animal feed or soil fertilizers and we’ve invested in carbon dioxide (CO2) recovery systems that allow us to capture and reuse CO2 for carbonation and other brewery related processes.

We have “Green Teams” at our breweries where we focus on reducing, re-using, and recycling materials, as well as promoting environmental awareness through communications and events. Renovations at our Pennsylvania and Cincinnati breweries have increased our energy efficiency over the years. At our Pennsylvania brewery, we have upgraded energy efficient foam insulation in our beer aging cellars, installed new high-efficiency lighting systems and motion sensors to turn lights on and off when not in use, and replaced existing fittings with energy-saving fixtures on our pumps and motors. We also established processes for recycling other materials, including office paper, batteries, lamps, e-waste, steel, and used oil from equipment maintenance.

Since all of our beer has to leave our breweries to make its way to wholesalers across the country, we have instituted a “no idling” requirement at our breweries for all transportation carriers in order to reduce CO2 emissions and save fuel. We have also increased the load weight efficiencies on our trucks and the use of rail transportation for shipments from our breweries and transport of raw materials.

Disclosure Statement Pursuant to California Transparency in Supply Chains Act of 2010.

We comply with the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act of 2010, which requires retail sellers and manufacturers who conduct business in California to publicly disclose their efforts to eradicate slavery and human trafficking from their direct supply chains for tangible goods. For the full text of our disclosure statement, see link.