Every
year (well at least the last two) I try to blind taste as many Bokbiers
as possible. It's not generally as much fun as it sounds.The 2004 vintage follows a familiar pattern: a couple of excellent Boks, half a dozen OK ones and a lot of undrinkable rubbish. The most notable changes from last year are:
- a dramatic improvement in Heineken Tarwebok and Bavaria Hooghe Bock
- an equally dramatic drop in the quality of Drie Horne, Jopen and 't IJ
- no general increase in sweetness (though, admittedly, that would have been difficult)
Because the characteristics of Dutch Bok are fairly well established, it's quite easy to spot beers which are not as the brewer intended. Sadly, I would say that these make up more than 50% of the examples I've tasted.
A bottom-fermenting brewery should be able to knock off a reasonable Bok without too much trouble. Yet most of them can't. Their attempts taste like a pils with a bit more alcohol and added caramel. Hertog Jan (owned by Belgian giant Interbrew) has this year released a beer that is obviously infected and unfit to drink.
I
hope that this page will be helpful for visitors to the 2004 Bokbierfestival
in Amsterdam. Far too often my enjoyment of the Bockbierfestival been ruined
by sampling nothing but Sarson's (that's a brand of vinegar for those from
outside the UK) all day. These notes should save you from this sad fate.
I'm brutally honest: if a bok is rubbish, I say so. Avoid anything with a score of less than 40.
How
do I perform the tastings?Here's my usual tasting procedure:
- 5 or 6 beers in one set
- beers served in identical, numbered glasses
- beers served at cellar temperature
- I note down my opinionated tripe on a form
| What do my scores mean? | |
| < 20 | cut out the middleman and pour straight down the sink |
| 21 - 30 | pretty nasty, gulp down quickly or hold your nose |
| 31 - 40 | chill heavilly and pray |
| 41 - 50 | can be drunk unchilled without evoking nausea |
| 51 - 60 | safe to drink |
| 61 - 70 | you might actually enjoy this |
| 71 - 80 | can survive a serious examination |
| 81 - 90 | don't swallow too quickly |
| 91 - 100 | treat like 50 year-old Islay |
The tale with which discussions of bock usually start, is the one of how beer from the North German town of Einbeck, or Einbecker beer, was exported to Bavaria. They got a taste for the strong dark beer, corrupted the name to 'Ein Bock' and started brewing it themselves. I must say that this story has always sounded a bit dodgy to me and doesn't seem to be backed by much in the way of contemporary documentary evidence. It strikes me that a goat ('Bock' in German) is also a pretty obvious symbol for strength and virility, so why look for any more complicated explanation of the name?
Whatever the origin of the term, from the 16th century bockbier was well-established in Bavaria as a seasonal strong beer. In fact the seasonal nature of bock is one of the few consistent characteristics it displays across the various countries where it's brewed. In Bavaria, the season is in March. Christmas and Easter are when bocks usually appear in Austria. Holland plumps for October and November, though I'm not sure of the precise reason for the choice.
Though perhaps Autumn hasn't always been the Dutch Bokbier season....
Dutch Bokbier around 1900
Bokbier was originally announced at the end of February. The release date gradually became earlier and by 1913 it was the middle of January. The wholesale price for Bok was 15 cents a litre, compared to 13 cents for Pilsener. (Source: "Korte Geschiedenis der Heineken's Bierbouwerij Maatschappij N.V. 1873 - 1948" p.218)
It seems that Dutch Bok was once served in March, just like Bavarian Bock.
Between 1988 and 1995 production of bockbier increased from just under 30,000 hl to a little over 85,000 hl. Increased interest in beer in general and the European-wide fashion for seasonal beers were no doubt both factors in bock's success. No brewery can afford to miss out on the extra publicity and attention the annual release of the new season's bocks generates. All the established lager brewers have had a bock in their porfolios for a good few years. Not wishing to miss out on the fun, the small micros soon followed with bocks of their own.
Now this was all very well, but the small breweries had a problem: bock is a bottom-fermenting style but they only had the equipment to top-ferment. No problem, just brew a top-fermenting version then. Well, it isn't quite that simple, as the often bizarre results have demonstrated. As time has gone by, microbreweries have made less and less effort to mimic the traditional style. Which leaves us in the current situation, where these beers bear almost no resemblance to the classic bock. Dark and 6.5% alcohol are about as much as most can manage - and not always even that.
The lager breweries, who had had a fairly good grip on the basics of the style started to lose the plot in a different way. No doubt encouraged by the success of the (once) untypically sugary Grolsch Bokbier, they began to increase the sweetness of their own beers. Where once achieving a bitter-sweet balance had been the objective, now producing a beer version of Pepsi was the aim. Same colour, just as sweet and without any of that nasty bitternes that makes beer so unpleasant.
Let's continue with the specific qualities which a Dutch bock should demonstrate. These are what I would consider its defining characteristics:
- dark in colour (red-brown to black)
- strong in alcohol (6.5 - 8%)
- sweet on the tongue (but not ridiculously so), with optionally a little bitterness, too
- a mixture of bittersweet flavours - toffee, raisin, coffee, chocolate, burnt, liquorice - but with the bitterness deriving from dark malts rather than hops
- be balanced between bitterness and sweetness so that neither predominates
- have a mouth-filling rich texture
