Samuel Adams Just Released an America 250 Beer Inspired by How the Founding Fathers Brewed in 1776

Every beer brand in America just slapped a flag on their can and called it patriotism.

Sam Adams went back to 1776 and brought the actual recipes with them.

There's one four-pack dropping this summer with ingredients Washington mixed at Mount Vernon – and most Americans have no idea it exists.

George Washington Porter and the Founding Fathers Beer That History Forgot

The Brewer Patriot Collection is a limited-edition four-pack from Boston Beer Company, available now for $17.76 on GiveThemBeer.com.

The price isn't a coincidence.

The pack includes four beers: the George Washington Porter, the James Madison Dark Wheat Ale, the 1790 Hard Root Beer, and the No. 3 Ginger Honey Ale.

What makes them remarkable isn't the style names – it's what's inside them.

Molasses and licorice root.

Those aren't craft beer ingredients you find in 2026.

They were ingredients the founders had on hand – and in some cases used for their perceived medicinal properties.

The beers also carry a subtle smokiness that no modern brewery deliberately replicates.

Malts in the 1770s were dried over open fire, not in the temperature-controlled kilns used today.

George Washington's brewing notes – tucked into a military notebook from the French and Indian War – called for molasses, bran, and hops boiled into 30-gallon batches.

Thomas Jefferson brewed 15 gallons of beer every two weeks at Monticello.

James Madison championed the creation of a national brewery and once floated a "Secretary of Beer" position for the presidential cabinet.

These weren't hobbyists.

They were the men who built this country, and they took their beer as seriously as their liberty.

Samuel Adams Brewer Patriot Collection vs Every Other America 250 Beer

Every major beer company in America is marking the 250th anniversary.

Yuengling put a patriotic label on their lager.

Budweiser launched throwback packaging tied to their own 150th anniversary.

Narragansett brought back a Liberty Bell can inspired by their 1976 Bicentennial design.

All of it is marketing.

None of it puts history in the bottle.

Sam Adams is the only brand that went back to what Washington, Jefferson, and Madison were actually fermenting – fire-dried malts, colonial-era molasses, licorice root – and made you taste the difference between real tradition and a red-white-and-blue wrapper.

The Colonial Beer Recipe That Started an American Craft Beer Revolution

Jim Koch launched Boston Beer Company in 1984 with one idea: American beer drinkers deserved better than watered-down lagers.

He named the flagship after Samuel Adams – the most independent-minded of the founders, a man born into a malting family whose father supplied barley to Boston's brewers.

That parallel wasn't accidental.

Koch saw himself doing what Adams did: rebelling against the established order, making something better, refusing to accept what the dominant players told him Americans wanted.

The Brewer Patriot Collection was originally released in 2006 and is back now for the 250th anniversary.

Master cicerone Shelley Smith put it plainly: the independent spirit that drove Koch to push different flavor profiles against mass-produced domestic beers is the same spirit the founders brewed with.

The founders didn't ask permission to build something better.

Neither did Koch.

The 250th anniversary has become a contest between brands competing to look patriotic and a handful of people actually connecting Americans to what the founders built.

Sam Adams is in the second group.

Raise one this Fourth of July that tastes like the men who earned it.

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Sources:

• Laurel Deppen, "Sam Adams channels Revolutionary Era with America 250 beer," Food Dive, May 28, 2026.
• "Samuel Adams Unveils 'Patriotic' Beer Collection for America's 250th Anniversary," Parade, May 28, 2026.
• "Samuel Adams Cracks Open the Brewer Patriot Collection," Boston Beer Company press release, May 28, 2026.
• "America's Earliest Presidents Loved Beer," CraftBeer.com, November 15, 2016.
• "George Washington and Beer," MountVernon.org.
• "Re-creating Presidential Beers," All About Beer, July 13, 2016.
• "Celebrate America's 250th Birthday with Beer," Origlio Beverage, March 16, 2026.