Is Bock the G.O.A.T.?
This question has been nagging me since Jimmy Carter was in office.
All I knew for sure at the time was that Bock beers were dark, and they appeared each year in spring.
It was the 1970s, the decade when America’s beer scene reached its very nadir, increasingly awash in ever-lighter oceans of Pilsner pretenders, and with fewer than 100 independent breweries still operational in the entire country.
On the coasts and in a handful of other places nationally, the stage was being set for a revival, although it took a while for this future hope to become evident—and for us to get a bit older to properly appreciate it.
But even as an underaged beer scrounger (until 3 August 1981), I was well aware of the customary springtime Bock release schedule, as upheld by a few of the remaining breweries of German descent. Only two of these brands stick in my palate: Huber (Wisconsin) and Stroh’s (Detroit). There were others, but my beer recall isn’t total.
The old guys referred to Bock as a tradition, which seemed plausible, even if the exact reason largely eluded beer drinkers in my neck of the Hoosier woods. Knowledge about beer styles and seasonal brewing already was scant, and Bock’s coppery brown color engendered even more confusion, because most beers were golden, pale as Bunny Bread, canned, ice-cold, and available year-round for plucking from the cooler at the nearest package store.
Bock was different. Why was that, anyway?
Just as ancient cultures conjured supernatural explanations for otherwise inexplicable natural phenomena, our befuddled elders labored to explain why Bock beer was dark when “regular” beer wasn’t, eventually contriving a satisfactory mythology to the effect that Bock took on the color of the grimy residue produced during annual scrubbings of the brewery’s vats.
Although I’d moved past the point of believing in the stork as bearer of newly minted babies, there remained gullible innocence in fermentable affairs, and I blithely accepted these flailing assertions—until, blessedly, the Beer Hunter intervened.
The late, great beer writer Michael Jackson’s seminal beer books began washing ashore on the banks of the Ohio, and the conceptual fog finally was dissipated. I subsequently grew to beer-turity clutching these dog-eared guides, exactly like so many others who were accepting Jackson as their preferred chaperone in pursuit of the perfect pint.
He didn’t let us down.
Significantly, Jackson provided far more than photos and raw facts about beer....Read more