Sam Adams Trivia
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48 free Sam Adams trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
43 free Sam Adams trivia questions with answers. Sam Adams trivia covers two things people search for at once: the Boston revolutionary and the lager that borrowed his name. The first part follows Samuel Adams from Boston Latin School and Harvard through the malthouse he ran into the ground, the tax-collector job he was terrible at, the Sugar Act instructions that made Boston the first body in America to reject Parliament's right to tax, the Circular Letter, the Boston Massacre trials, the Tea Party meeting at Old South and the escape from Lexington in April 1775, then on to Congress, the Massachusetts Constitution, Shays' Rebellion and his years as governor. The second part is the Boston Beer Company: Jim Koch's great-great-grandfather's recipe, the Best Beer in America vote in 1985, the ticker symbol, the ceramic-kettle Utopias that a handful of states will not allow, Twisted Tea, Truly and the Dogfish Head deal. Easy questions open each half; the later ones will test a Revolutionary War buff and a beer nerd alike. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and each question shows its citation.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which school, America's oldest public school, taught both Samuel Adams and Benjamin Franklin?
Boston Latin School
Boston Latin School, founded in 1635, sent Adams on to college; Franklin lasted under a year there before his father, daunted by what a college education would cost, pulled him out.
Q 02Samuel, the Boston patriot, was a second cousin of which future US president?
John Adams
John Adams, Samuel's second cousin, was the future president; when John reached France in 1778 he had to explain that he was not Samuel, 'the famous Adams'.
Q 03Which college did Samuel Adams enter in 1736 at the age of 14?
Harvard
Harvard admitted Samuel Adams in 1736, when he was 14; his devout parents hoped it would make a minister of him, but he came away drawn to public life instead.
Q 04Samuel Adams's 1743 master's thesis asked whether it was lawful to do what to save the Commonwealth?
Resist the Supreme Magistrate
Resist the Supreme Magistrate: Adams argued that it was lawful, at a commencement that the royal governor and other Crown officials customarily attended.
Q 05Samuel Adams is often called a brewer, but the family business he inherited made him what by trade?
A maltster
A maltster: the Adams malthouse supplied malted barley to Boston's brewers, and he may have brewed a little himself; he had no head for business, and it eventually failed.
Q 06Samuel Adams's father was nearly ruined when Parliament shut down which Massachusetts scheme he had helped create?
The Land Bank
The Land Bank, which issued paper currency backed by land, was dissolved by Parliament in 1741; its directors became personally liable, and lawsuits dogged the Adams family for years.
Q 07Boston elected Samuel Adams to which town office in 1756, a job he went on to do notoriously badly?
Tax collector
Tax collector: Adams rarely pressed his neighbours for payment, a laxity that boosted his popularity but eventually left his accounts roughly 8,000 pounds in arrears.
Q 08Which philosopher's ideas ran through Samuel Adams's political essays?
John Locke
John Locke: Adams met his writings as a student, and three decades on his 1772 Rights of the Colonists was still citing 'Mr. Locke' by name.
Q 09Under which of these pen names did Samuel Adams write essays in the Boston Gazette?
Vindex
Vindex was the name Adams signed to Boston Gazette essays attacking the Boston Massacre verdicts, since he thought the soldiers should have been convicted of murder. Candidus was another of his many bylines.
Q 10In 1764, Samuel Adams's instructions led Boston's Town Meeting to declare what about Parliament?
It could not tax the colonists
It could not tax the colonists: answering the Sugar Act, Adams asked whether taxes laid without representation would not reduce them from free subjects 'to the miserable State of tributary Slaves'.
Q 11The Loyal Nine, who organised Boston's 1765 Stamp Act protests, grew into which group often linked to Samuel Adams?
The Sons of Liberty
The Sons of Liberty grew out of the Loyal Nine, nine Boston tradesmen who hung effigies of Stamp Act officials from an elm in August 1765 while working in such secrecy that they left almost no paper trail.
Q 12Which colonial painter made the stern portrait of Samuel Adams, from around 1772, that hangs in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts?
John Singleton Copley
John Singleton Copley painted Boston's patriots, but his father-in-law was one of the merchants the East India tea was consigned to; in June 1774 he sailed for London and never came back.
Q 13Which wealthy young merchant joined Samuel Adams in the Massachusetts House in 1766 as his protege?
Q 21Legend has Samuel Adams signalling the Tea Party, but eyewitnesses say he did what when the war-whoops began?
Asked people to stay
Asked people to stay: one witness heard Adams call the whoops a trick of their enemies to disturb the meeting, but the crowd poured out after the disguised men anyway.
Q 22What set Samuel Adams's 1774 journey to the First Continental Congress apart?
He had never before left Massachusetts
He had never before left Massachusetts: Adams set out for Philadelphia in August 1774 in new clothes his friends had bought him, his expenses paid, on his first trip beyond his home province.
Q 23Who sent Paul Revere riding out of Boston on 18 April 1775 to warn Samuel Adams?
John Hancock
John Hancock later fell out with Adams, who disapproved of his vanity and extravagance, before the pair reconciled in time to back the Constitution together in 1788.
Q 14After the Massachusetts House refused 92 to 17 to rescind Adams's Circular Letter, what did the royal governor do?
Dissolved the assembly
Dissolved the assembly: London had told Governor Francis Bernard to do so if it refused, and the 92 who held firm were honoured on a silver bowl by Paul Revere.
Q 15Which sloop's seizure by customs officials in Boston in June 1768 sparked a riot?
The Liberty
The Liberty, a merchant sloop accused of landing Madeira wine without paying duty, was seized on 10 June 1768; a crowd then attacked the customs officers and burned one of their boats.
Q 16Which Boston lawyer defended the Boston Massacre soldiers while his brother helped prosecute them?
Josiah Quincy
Josiah Quincy took the defence, and six soldiers walked free while two were branded for manslaughter; Samuel Adams then attacked the verdicts in print.
Q 17In November 1772 Samuel Adams created which network so Massachusetts towns could share political news?
Committees of correspondence
Committees of correspondence: the Boston committee Adams formed in November 1772, after the Crown took over paying the governor and judges, circulated a statement of colonial rights and invited every town to reply.
Q 18Whose private letters, saying there must be 'an abridgment of what are called English liberties', did Samuel Adams expose in 1773?
Thomas Hutchinson
Thomas Hutchinson denied meaning what his critics read into it, but the House petitioned the king to recall him; months later his refusal to let the tea ships leave set up the Tea Party.
Q 19The mass gathering Adams called for 29 November 1773 outgrew Faneuil Hall and moved to which building?
The Old South Meeting House
The Old South Meeting House took the overflow crowd; on 16 December thousands were packed there when word came that the governor would not let the tea ships leave.
Q 20Where was the William, a fourth tea ship bound for Boston in December 1773, wrecked before it could arrive?
Cape Cod
Cape Cod: the William ran aground there that December, which is why only the Dartmouth, the Eleanor and the Beaver were lying at the wharf for the Tea Party.
Joseph Warren
Joseph Warren, a Boston physician, dispatched Revere; the British column's written orders never mentioned arresting the patriot leaders, though London papers had reported that Adams would hang if caught.
Q 24In which town was Samuel Adams staying at the minister's parsonage when Paul Revere rode in to warn him?
Lexington
Lexington: Adams and a fellow patriot leader were guests of the town's minister, Jonas Clarke, and slipped away across the fields as the British column came into view at dawn.
Q 25Samuel Adams left the Continental Congress for good in the year of which American victory?
Yorktown
Yorktown: Adams went home to Boston in 1781 after seven years in Congress and won a seat in the Massachusetts Senate; Cornwallis surrendered that October.
Q 26Jefferson called Samuel Adams the Revolution's Palinurus, a figure who was what in Virgil's Aeneid?
Aeneas's helmsman
Aeneas's helmsman: Palinurus steered Aeneas's fleet from Troy until he fell overboard off Italy, so the compliment credits Adams with steering Congress toward independence; Jefferson also called him 'truly the Man of the Revolution'.
Q 27In 1876 Massachusetts sent statues of Samuel Adams and which Puritan governor to the US Capitol?
John Winthrop
John Winthrop went to the Capitol in marble alongside Adams, whom sculptor Anne Whitney showed with arms folded at the moment he demanded that British troops leave Boston after the Massacre.
Q 28Samuel Adams never signed the Constitution, so which founding document carries his name beside the Declaration of Independence?
The Articles of Confederation
The Articles of Confederation: Adams sat on the committee that drafted them and signed in 1778, then stayed away from the 1787 Philadelphia Convention, wary of a stronger central government.
Q 29About which uprising did Samuel Adams say a man who rebels against a republic's laws 'ought to suffer death'?
Shays' Rebellion
Shays' Rebellion, the 1786-87 rising of indebted Massachusetts farmers, reportedly drew the remark; to Adams, rebelling against an unrepresentative king was one thing, taking up arms against a republic of fellow citizens quite another.
Q 30Samuel Adams dropped his doubts and backed the US Constitution in 1788 on the promise of what?
Later amendments
Later amendments: Adams sat through two weeks of debate in silence, then backed ratification once nine 'conciliatory' amendments were proposed, and Massachusetts approved the Constitution narrowly.