I'm like the Johnny Appleseed of beer," says Jim Koch, chief executive of the Boston Beer Company, as he pours the perfect glass of beer in a Bermuda bar.

His beer is exported all over the world, and this week the whole company is celebrating a successful year by having their National company meeting in Bermuda.

Eighteen years ago Mr. Koch took a family recipe for brewing beer and made the first ever batch of it in his kitchen.

Now the chief executive of a New York stock exchange listed company, Mr. Koch still tastes a bottle of every beer produced.

He is surprisingly slim, considering. "I learnt that secret from my father," says Mr. Koch. "There's food in the beer, but there's no beer in food."

Mr. Koch comes from a long line of beer makers - six generations before him were master brewers. Beer making was part of family lore, but he was the first to make a fortune from it.

His father and grandfather did not own a brewery. "They worked for other people; they were like the chefs in other peoples' breweries," he explains

He himself had gone in an entirely different direction at school, taking both a business and law degree at Harvard.

His father was not entirely thrilled when young Jim announced that he wanted to start his own beer business. "I won't give you his exact quote, but he thought it was the dumbest thing he ever heard."

Resolving, however, to follow his passion, Mr. Koch took the recipe which had been his great, great grandfather's in 1870, and started from scratch.

" It took about six months to find the ingredients, find a brewery and figure out how to make the beer in a modern brewery," says Mr. Koch.

As for names, Mr. Koch says he was initially considering about 200 different names. Eventually he was forced to make a decision: "I got a batch that I liked, so I had to pick a name because labels had to go on the bottles."

Mr Koch says the single biggest challenge in building his company was changing perceptions about American beer.

" Everyone thought it had to be watery and bland." he says.

The idea that an American beer could be full of flavour and of comparable quality to the best European lagers, was very hard to sell. "It's very much like the American wine industry in Napa and Sonoma.. we surprised everyone."

In the beginning when Mr. Koch was going around Boston bars with his briefcase and his cold beer samples, most people were very sceptical. But these days, the Boston barmen serve Sam Adams with pride.

The link with a founding father, Sam Adams, has been a successful marketing strategy, which identifies the beer with patriotism, Boston and independence.

"The reason I chose Sam Adams was because he was a revolutionary and he was a brewer .He was a radical, the first of the founding fathers to be committed to independence. My small contribution is to promote beer independence in America," says Mr. Koch.

Did the pilgrim fathers actually like beer, or were they too pious to drink it?

"Actually, the reason why the Mayflower stopped in Plymouth was because they ran out of beer," says Mr Koch.

He goes on, in all seriousness, to explain that the Mayflower was stocked nearly entirely with beer because it was regarded in those days as one of the safest things to drink. The scientific basis for this is sound, says Mr. Koch, explaining that its chemical make-up prevents water-borne diseases. "There is nothing harmful to human beings in beer..."

"They wanted to go to Jamestown, but they ended up in Massachusetts because of beer," he concludes.

He clearly gets a kick out of being a tiny operation up against the "massive behemoths" of the beer business. Being small and independent allows him to indulge brewing projects such as the Sam Adams Utopias beer.

"That's the lunatic fringe of beer, 50 percent proof and $100 per bottle."

Apparently you could hardly tell it was beer. In fact celebrity chef, Julia Child, thought that she was tasting vintage port or cognac when Mr. Koch gave her a glass of Utopias. (His animated impression of Ms Child is a highlight of the interview.)

In terms of corporate sponsorship, Mr. Koch likes to support the independent underdog. The Boston Beer Company were one of the original sponsors of Project Green Light, the HBO competition which sought out independent film script writers and gave them the chance to direct their own movie.

They have also sponsored "Brew your own commercial" and ran the winning commercial on Saturday night live. In their world homebrew competition, they received 3000 entries and picked three winners who were rewarded with making their own beer in the Sam Adams breweries. The company employs a 50//50 split of male and female employees - quite a revolutionary stance in the male-dominated beer industry.

"We try to hire talented dynamic people and it turns out that God made 50 percent of those women," says Mr. Koch.