Samuel Adams

Samuel Adams failed at business and as a tax collector, then found his real trade: organizing Boston against Parliament. He ran town meetings, wrote the letters that tied the colonies together, and helped found the Sons of Liberty. He signed the Declaration of Independence and later served as governor of Massachusetts. He was a second cousin of John Adams.

The beer carries his name, but the surprise is that he was a maltster, not a brewer: the family business made the malt that brewers used. On the Freedom Trail you meet him again and again. His statue stands outside Faneuil Hall, where the meetings grew too big and moved to the Old South Meeting House, and his grave is in the Granary Burying Ground, the same burial ground as John Hancock's.