One way to understand the American bock—it’s not in most style guidelines—is to think of the classic Shiner Bock as a guidepost in the same way we might think of Guinness as a guidepost for dry Irish stout, or of Anchor Steam as the quintessential California common.
Shiner is the north star—the American bock beer. It started as a seasonal offering in 1913, but it didn’t become a year-rounder until 1973. More than a century and a decade since Shiner’s debut, American bock today can be a malt delivery vehicle, but it can also layer in corn, hops, or fruity yeast character, depending upon a brewer’s intent.
Turning any of those dials can yield a very different beer than what folks in Shiner, Texas, have been drinking for more than 112 years—but there have been many other American bocks over the years, brewed in different ways.
Bock in Time
Shiner Bock may be an archetype, but it wasn’t the first bock brewed in the United States.
In 1876, the Frostburg Mining Journal newspaper in Maryland reported that “novelty in the way of beer is [the] new draught at Yungerman’s. It is a superior article of Bock Beer—a beverage much sought after by lovers of malt.” Similar descriptors can be found in German-language newspapers from other American cities, thanks to the Library of Congress.
To risk stating the obvious to anyone who’s enjoyed both, German and American bocks differ dramatically. Besides a name, a historical link, and lager yeast, the two bocks have virtually nothing in common. From a sensory standpoint, the German article is sweeter up front, has more body, and approaches dryness in the finish; the American one tends to finish dry and quickly, thanks in large part to the use of corn grits as an adjunct.
Besides the malt character—which I usually perceive as caramel, honey, or raisin—commercial American bocks often deliver a quick clip of dried fruit before their finish falls off a cliff and invites you for another sip. On the palate, they’re almost the opposite of the German cliffhanger, that lingering, palate-coating, chewy Bavarian bock.
The gravities are an ocean apart. Consider Shiner Bock and Genesee Bock at 4.4 and 5.2 percent ABV, respectively, compared to the dark German bocks available in the United States. Paulaner Salvator and Andechs Doppelbock Dunkel are 7.9 and 7.2 percent ABV, respectively. Even the paler German bocks that hover around 6 percent ABV have substantially more heft than commercial American bocks.
While a German bock might start at 16°P (1.065) or higher, American bocks historically have started as low as 14° (1.057), 12° (1.048), or even 10°P (1.040).
Besides the higher starting gravity, German bocks are devoid of rice, corn, sugar, and syrups—all forbidden under the Reinheitsgebot. For the past 150 years—a tradition older than many of the European styles we revere—American bocks have had some or all of these adjuncts.
The Contours of American Bock
I’d argue that corn is a hallmark of the style and that adjuncts more broadly are integral—these lagers should use corn, rice, syrups, and/or sugar. All the recipes I reviewed from the 1910s to the 1960s include corn, typically grits, which get a cereal mash in the cooker before joining the main mash. Some recipes also include rice, sugar, and syrups.
Buried in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History archives in Washington, D.C., are three handwritten recipes for American bock, part of the Walter H. Voigt Brewing Industry Collection. Two of those beers have specialty malts—caramel and black—while the third is mashed as a pale beer but gets its dark color in the kettle via syrups made from corn and malt.
Here are a few more details:
- The first bock includes American pale malt, grits, rice, sugar, imported caramel malt, and two kinds of black malt—one American, the other imported. The brewers added hops from Oregon and New York at a rate of 0.9 pounds per barrel (or roughly five grams per liter), divided into two additions.
- The second bock has both American and imported pale malts, sugar, rice, and American caramel and black malts. They added Oregon hops in three additions at the same rate, 0.9 pounds per barrel.
- The third bock includes pale malt, corn sugar No. 20, cane sugar, and malt syrup No. 12. This recipe also mentions “salt,” which was not in the other two. There are four hop additions mentioned—both domestic and imported, adding up to a ratio of 0.54 pounds per barrel (or roughly three grams per liter).
So, what was malt syrup No. 12? According to a student’s notes from the 1948–1949 Siebel course in brewing technology, the “#12” or “12°” refers to the percentage of fermentable sugars. So, malt syrup No. 12 would have been 70 percent less fermentable than malt syrup No. 82. The same notes say that these products—sometimes made from corn, sometimes made from malt—are sold as malt extract, malt syrups, or under various trade names, and “are simply high[ly] concentrated worts, generally unhopped.”
The notes continue: “Where alcohol is the prime objective, a high fermentable sugar containing much dextrose would be chosen, while in a case where a full-mouth beer of high extract content is wanted, a low fermentable sugar containing much dextrin is in order.”
The practice of using syrups to darken pale beers appealed to practical concerns, and manufacturers marketed them directly to brewers. Ads in The American Brewer and Brewers Journal in 1942 say “no special brew necessary” or “simply add … to your beer in [the] finishing tank and save special-brew expense.”
Essentially, these products spoke to the desire to avoid tying up extra tanks with separate specialty batches; instead, a brewery could take its everyday pale lager and turn it bock-colored. The ads make similar claims for adjusting pH, foam stability, and fullness of taste, with the fermentability of syrups ranging from very low to very high. They advertised some syrups as contributing roast and caramel character.
While the brewing industry of 82 years ago looks very different from today, there will always be some overlap of practical considerations. How would you want your American bock to taste today? Do we want it thicker or thinner in body? Should it be closer to amber in color or closer to a porter? Finally, how strong should it be? Closer to 4 percent, or more than 5 percent ABV? Should it have pronounced roast and caramel character, or closer to none?
The answers may depend on your local climate and clientele—it’s pretty hot in Texas—as well as your own preference as a brewer.
The Case of Peoples Bock
Peoples Brewing of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, first brewed its American bock in 1914. (Famously, Peoples would later become the country’s first Black-owned brick-and-mortar brewery, in 1970.)
Peoples Bock was a recipe that would change in strength throughout the brewery’s history. In 1933, once Prohibition ended, the bock was only 4 percent ABV. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, it had risen to 5.5 percent ABV.
As brewers know well, however, differences in strength don’t always correlate to differences in gravity. Consider Milwaukee’s Pabst Bock, analyzed by Wahl and Henius in the 1937 book Beer: From the Expert’s Viewpoint. The table lists Pabst Bock with a strength of 4.25 percent ABV—but it had an original gravity of 14.3°P (1.058)—measured in degrees Balling, at the time—and finished at about 5.9°P (1.023). Given that high finishing gravity, it may be challenging to replicate—and you may not want to. If a higher finishing gravity is your goal, however, a short mash time and higher-than-usual mash temperature could be the way to get there.
One brewer who’s used mash times as short as 35 minutes is Lee Reiherzer, author of The Breweries of Oshkosh: Their Rise and Fall and the writer behind the Oshkosh Beer site since 2010. Reiherzer collected some oral history from a brewer at Peoples—a man named Wilhelm Kohlhoff, who brewed there from 1953 to 1968. In the unique case of Peoples Bock, the adjuncts were corn grits and brown sugar.
When Kohlhoff started working at Peoples in 1953, Peoples Bock was in retirement. The brewery discontinued it from 1940 until 1959, when it made its glorious comeback. Some drinkers remember Peoples Bock as “strong,” though it was only about 1 percent ABV higher than Peoples Beer—the brewery’s flagship pale lager, which was about 4.5 percent ABV.
According to Kohlhoff (in his interviews with Reiherzer), the Bock flew off the shelf. Drinkers in Oshkosh associated the darker beer with a stronger alcoholic kick—which was technically true, even if it was still mainstream by today’s standards. The pale lager Peoples Beer was the majority of the brewery’s production available year-round, while the Bock would appear in late February or early March and be long gone by May.
“Oshkosh was crazy about Bock,” Kohlhoff says. “Everyone saw it as this high-powered beer—strong beer, you know. Dark is associated with strength. So, people would pre-order. … And I heard this from someone else who had worked there: When the Bock would come out, they would just all day long be selling it off that back dock of the brewery in cases, you know. It was an event.”
So, how did Peoples Bock get its color? According to Kohlhoff, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, its color came from brown Munich malt and brown sugar. Reiherzer says Kohlhoff remembered Munich being a dark malt. The six-row pale malt came from Fleischmann Malting in Red Wing, Minnesota.
Thanks to Kohlhoff, we know that Peoples was using the classic American jump mash—sometimes called “double mash.” That means they would first cook a small percentage of barley malt with the corn grits, before conducting a second mash that incorporates the rest of the barley malt. Kohlhoff recalls hauling sacks of Munich malt by hand to add to the second mash. However the Munich was only for that second mash—adding it to the cooker would have made the bock “too rich.”
Reiherzer reports that Peoples brewed its pale lager in a 130-barrel kettle; its grist was 73 percent malted barley (3,200 pounds/1,452 kilograms) and 27 percent corn grits (1,200 pounds/544 kilograms). They hopped it with 50–65 pounds (23–29 kilograms) of American and German hops, or roughly 0.5 to 0.63 pounds (227 to 286 grams) per barrel. From there, we can make some inferences about the Peoples Bock.
When Reiherzer brews his version of Peoples Bock at home, he scales it up accordingly. Since Reiherzer likes his bock to have a bit more color, he adds 1 percent black malt to the grist—that wasn’t in the original Peoples Bock, but it gives him the color he wants. We drink first with our eyes, after all.
More broadly, American bocks varied in color. Some were closer to amber, while others were closer to black—and many did include a bit of black malt. Reiherzer puts Peoples Bock of the 1950s and ’60s at 11 or 12 SRM—we might call it a pale amber. There were many other American bocks between 20 and 30 SRM, going from brown to nearly black.
Based on my own analysis of 19th-century beer ads found at the Library of Congress, some breweries likely rebranded their “bocks” as “porters” in pre-Prohibition saloons.
American Bock, Today
So, how might a modern craft brewer tackle this style? Not surprisingly, several have taken a stab at it.
Schilling Beer, the highly regarded lager brewery in Littleton, New Hampshire, has its own take on the style. Schilling Hoosier Bock pays homage to the American style, getting most of its grains from Indiana’s Sugar Creek Malt. A “French pilsner” base is actually two domestically grown varieties of French parentage. A “pre-Prohibition” malt stands in for Munich and is made from six-row barley.
In a tasting with Schilling Hoosier Bock, Shiner Bock, and Genesee Bock, the brown color of all three was similar—though Hoosier Bock had the longest, densest foam retention.
While neither Hoosier Bock nor Peoples Bock uses syrup, you could make your own dark syrup or invert sugar. (See “Zebulon’s Mike Karnowski Shares Four Ways to Make Invert Sugar,” beerandbrewing.com.)
Conversely, you could use a similar product from a reputable producer. Becker’s Inverted Brewing Sugars—specifically their inverts No. 2 and 3—contribute a really nice flavor in addition to the color, if you aim to brew a pale lager and dye it dark in the kettle or fermentor.
Of course, you could also borrow the same trick from the American bock playbook, if you wanted to brew an American black ale—aka, black IPA—without leaning on dehusked, dark-roasted German malts. What do the Germans know about bock, anyway?
Old-Fashioned Malts
Schilling brewer Justin Slotnick enjoys working with maltsters such as Sugar Creek in Indiana and Valley Malt in Massachusetts. These smaller outfits can get geeky in a way that suits geekier brewers. For example: Valley Malt co-owner and founder Andrea Stanley went to the Czech Republic and got hold of a 1930s book titled Pilsner Malt, written by Eduard Jalowetz. She used a 1929 certificate of analysis to shape Valley’s modern way of making old-school, less-modified pilsner malt—branded as Jalowetz Pilsner. Using that malt, Schilling brewed a Czech-style pilsner named Jalowetz.
“We have this great brewhouse that allows us to use under-modified malts and take advantage of the character that they can have,” Slotnick says, “and not have to worry so much about the potential pitfalls in fermentability that they may have.”
He says he appreciates how smaller maltsters see the demand among some brewers for these old-fashioned malts. “They have that flexibility to kind of shoot for what the brewers are looking for, looking for stuff that’s a little bit more in line with what pilsner malt would have been like historically,” Slotnick says. He also likes the “additional character that you get from an under-modified grain.” —M.S.
