Yuengling Bock

Bock beers are a little more difficult for me to write about because I just don’t have the vocabulary to describe what I taste in them. Bocks are a type of lager, originally brewed in Germany and can be anywhere from dark to pale in color. They tend to have high alcohol content as well.

The Pint Nite special at Tyler’s Taproom in Durham last night was a bock by Yuengling Brewery of Pottsville, PA. Yuengling’s Bock Beer is brown, about the same color as a Newcastle. Like other bocks, it tends toward a sweet, malty flavor with very little hops (in fact, I could only really taste the hops at all when exhaling after a sip). It’s at this point that I am unable to continue to describe a bock in any brewing vocabulary, so here goes with regular language.

Yuengling’s Bock doesn’t have a strong flavor of anything that I can pull out over any of the other flavors. It’s not hoppy at all, not too sweet, and for a higher-gravity style beer, there’s not much of an alcohol taste to it. That said, it’s pleasant tasting, and infinitely easy to drink. Forget all those light beers that advertise themselves as “refreshing”; this is the beer you want to have for a break when you’re laying asphalt on a hot summer day. That doesn’t really jive with the history of bock beer, but it’s perfect nonetheless.

Tyler’s tweet calling the glasses”pretty cool” was right on the money, too. They went with a pilsner (or Pokal, apparently, though I’d never heard that) glass, with a stylized Yuengling logo in black on the back and “Bock Beer” in red on the front. No special design, but it works well on this glass. The Yuengling logo isn’t their usual logo, and is what I think the bastard child of the NASA and Star Wars logos would be if it were born in a typhoon.

Free Glass Score: 7/10
Beer Score: 7/10

The surprise of the night, though, came thanks to none other than Ska Brewing! Mark and I hit the bar at Tyler’s right after work. When I went to get our Pint Nite specials, our buddy at the bar tells me he’s been looking for me. Apparently, someone over at Ska ran across my last post, where I expressed my dissatisfaction (read: blasted) with their Modus Hoperandi, and they called up Tyler’s to see if maybe they’d gotten a bad keg or something.

Ska, I’m shocked you care what a single amateur blogger thinks of your beer, and surprised that on top of if you called up Tyler’s to make sure it wasn’t a bad batch. I can’t retroactively adjust my score of your beer that night. I do, however, hereby award you with two “honor points”, because you cared enough to find out what was up. It’s a new point scale I had to make up just for this, and you have the distinction of being the first brewery to earn any.

Thank you, Ska, for caring. I pledge to do my part and try another Modus Hoperandi when I get a chance, and I’ll post the results. If it does indeed turn out that my first go from that night was a bad batch, I will add an amendment to the post.