The fourth type from this sampler 12’er, the Pale Bock Lager. Yes it has a cartoon character, a dancing goat in his town suit who is so dancy that he’s spilling his beer. And there’s a catchphrase: “Big and Malty” and that wouldn’t be a bad idea for one’s tombstone, in case you were in the market for an epitaph.
But i do have a wonder about the beer’s name. Shouldn’t it be Pale Lager Bock, as in a bock beer made from lager leftovers? Well, then again, the rest of this 12-pack makes me wonder if this is actually a bock beer at all, or if they’re just trading on the word since Dundee = Genesee and Genny’s best effort is their annual bock?
But “pale” is right, this is far paler than any bock should be, and the taste is much lighter than a bock ought to be. But it’s nice. As usual for Dundee, it’s sweet, but that’s one thing that’s at home in a bock, so in this beer the sweetness is somewhat forgiven, where with the others of the Dundee flock it’s ugh.
It calls itself big on the malt side of things, and well, that’s a relative thing. The pale ale and IPA really lacked any trustworthy malt taste, so the mere fact that this one has a beer body makes it big. It’s like saying your hog farm is the best one in Fallujah. In some cases, “only” can also mean “best”.
I wish it were more sour, like a bock should be, but it is what it is. And what is it? A good beer for drinking on its own, this and the Pale Ale are the good ones out of the sampler. As a bock, this is not pedigreed, so really don’t know if i can rate this alongside other real bock beers. If so, it would score pretty low.
But as a beer that just happens to have the b-word, word along with “lager” and “pale”, this is not too shabbed. An odd topsy-turvy case, where if this turned out to be real bock beer, then the rating would go down. Considered as a lager, it fares much better: a 5.9 (brought down by the sweetness).
Pricey stuff, the Troeg brews are. So rarely have a chance to try them unless they go on sale, and that’s just what happened so finally got a chance to pick up a sixer of their flagship mind-melter, the Troegenator Doublebock. You know i love bock beers, and doppelbocks are simply a higher plane of bock existence. With a menacing portrait of a goatman with bushy eyebrows on the label, i just knew i would like this, once i could afford it.
Label calls the color “bronze” but i’d say it’s brown, and it’s see-through, unlike some at this end of the bock spectrum. The label is plenty helpful with everything else i want to know too: 8.2% alk; 25 IBU’s; and the hops used: Brewers, Magnum, and German Northern. There’s a blurb mentioning “caramel, chocolate and dried stone fruit.” Well, that middle attribute can be taken with a grain of something, coming as this does out of Hershey, Pennsylvania, the home of some other company you might have heard of.
The nice thing is that everything on the label is true. This does have that “chewy” character and it is a liquid meal. The one thing i want to know is this: where is the regular Troegs bock? To make doppelbock, you need to make a bunch of regular bock beer. I have not seen that on the shelf. Maybe they only sell it local in Hershey?
The smell at the glass rim is heavenly, a mix of foreboding meal grains perverted from their original nature, a sour mash of cannibal yeasts eating their own dead, and velvety charcoal. The taste is the same, no deception allowed in a doppelbock. Sweet and sour like a Chinese restaurant wishes they could replicate, this tastes like a drop of vinegar on a caramel cube wrapped in soggy pumpernickel bread. That sounds gross, but try it before you deny it.
Light carbonation and high alk, and these would be be detractions if this was not a double-bock beer because, you see, 2x bock is the pinnacle of beer flavor. The only step up from doppelbock would be beer schnapps, and that’s been tried, only to be discontinued after someone realized that nobody drinks schnapps without a fruit or menth in it. So this is flat and buzzy, but the sheer joy of concentrated beer flavor is well worth it.
I don’t know about “dried stone fruit” but there’s a wild array of other tastes in Troegenator. Walnuts, venison jerky, limed mushrooms, crushed oat chaff, a tizzy of flavor in every sip. It’s like you left Black Forest bread in a pan of water and let the fruitflies and wild airborne yeasts attack it to the point of fermenting. Disgusting, but wow what a result!
Ooof, just in joy here. My god, what a great beer. Every time i drink a stout, i wish it was a doppelbock. Even Guinness is a shadow of what beer can become once you concentrate it like this. When i am emperor, there will be no small beers, and every beer will have to go through 3 years of brewing and then re-brewing to make doppelbock. Honestly, every time i have a doppelbock, i wonder “why bother with single-run fermentations at all?”
Now, back to Earth a tiny bit. How to rate this? Obviously it’s high, high, high. Spaten’s Optimator Doppelbock is one of my highest rated beers. The Celebrator Doppelbock will come up for review here before long. How to rank the Troegenator among its peers?
Well, it doesn’t have that genuine German twang to it, that odd backthroat gotcha which is the hallmark of real German beer. But it does have some other flavors inside, which you don’t get in Europe. And like a good doppelbock, i can’t have any other beers tasted for review any longer today, because the Troegenator, like a doppelbock will, has seized my tastebuds and will not let go for several hours.
Doesn’t have the absolute sublime beauty of Optimator, but for an American 2x-bock it’s a wizard. This is a really tough call, but 9.3 seems about right. That’s a very high rating, and there’s room to move above, because Celebrator is coming soon to a tongue near me.
The bock beer that made Shiner, Texas famou… err, well, there’s a nice goat on the label as all bock beers should have. Only this one is NOT a goat. It’s a bighorn ram, which is a sheep. Cripes, leave it to Texas. “It’s got four legs and horns, and golly the critter’s got the word ‘big’ right in the name! Yee Hawww!”
In any case, it’s a bock beer and i love bocks, goat or no goat. Great caramelly color up there near porterland, rich and extra beery aroma, and we have light bubbling. Label calls this 1913 recipe “lightly hopped” but i’d say it’s normally hopped. No mention of the alcohol content, but they do call this an “ale” and in Texas that matters, for taxation purposes.
The taste is very, very nice. The slight sweet of under-fermented malt-sludge, mixed with the sour of the sludge itself, add in some hops and you’ve got a shiner, and i don’t mean someone knocked you on the cheekbone. Carbonation is higher than it looked from the outside of the glass, and i’m all in favor of that, after some nasty flat beer yesterday.
This is a really good bock, better than Genesee’s, which is my staple bock. Still not as complex and hip-deep of flavor like a doppelbock, but this one is knee-deep in goodness. I could drink this a lot… if it was cheap. Very smooth and polished, which is not always the case with a bock beer, but i suppose they’ve had 107 years to get it right, minus some dry years back in the 1920’s.
Mid January, that’s the last part of the Holiday Season for me, since that’s when Genny releases their annual bock beer. The beloved weed-chewing jumping goat on the garish green can makes the beer looks like it’s the cheapest nastiest thing in the world, but in fact this is the best thing Genesee makes, and it’s only on sale in Janauary and it sells until it’s gone. For another year. This time, the bock lasted until early March. I usually stock up and it lasts me through May.
Last year i had a few tucked away until November. This year there were three goatbeers hiding in the far corner of the fridge until July. Why the love? Bock is made from the unfermented sugary grainsludge which they scrape out of the vats once a year, and if there’s sugars, then you can enslave yeasts to make beer out of it.
Talk about a hearty beer body. This bock is thick and chewy, color dark and brooding, the sweet syrupy malt-mud concentrates dozens of runs of Genny’s standard beer, which is undrinkable on its own, into a fine melange of flavors which you just can’t achieve by freshly malted grains on their own. Sour, from the over-complete fermentation and some normal hopping. It’s really a masterpiece and anyone who tries it for the first time is shocked that a beer this tasty came from Genny.
The limited run certainly lends extra appreciation via anticipation, but it actually is good beer. I rate it a steady 8.0 for the weight and taste, and because it’s Genny most people won’t buy it, so the price remains pleasingly low.
Caramel in the heaviest way, a true German beer with soul built in by law. It has that backmouth sour as it goes down like many German beers, and a squeaky feel on the tongue. Don’t know why, but many German beers remind me of shoelaces. But in a good way. Even i don’t know what that means.
Being a doppelbock (double bock), this is brewed from the leavings of other Spaten bocks, which were themselves brewed from the leavings from Spaten’s regular beers. The silt and scum from a brewing run is high in unconverted sugars, locked away in the dead bodies of little yeast bugs who gave their lives and fortunes for alcohol. Thus, a scoop of double-brewed silt has even more sugars. Enter more unwitting yeasties, and there’s a lot of sugar… they can’t help but turn it all into alcohol, making this double-bock beer a serious 7.6% alcohol.
Worlds of taste from the multifarious malts which went into the constituent beers, and they were all compliant with the strict German Beer Purity Law. German beer is what beer really is, and this third-level brewing is not cheap, but it is the pinnacle of what German brewers are allowed to do under the Rheinheitsgebot of 1516 Anno Domini.
Still mostly in effect after an even 500 years, the Rheinheitsgebot law is constantly under attack by, simply put, jackasses. Both within and outside Germany, people keep trying to claim that gluten-free beer is real beer (it is not), and self-important Euro-zone bureaucrats keep trying to chip away at Germany’s Beer Purity Law on the grounds that it’s “protectionist”. What a bunch of turds.
Five centuries of pure beer have developed German brewers into the world’s experts at making real beer, using only: water, yeast, hops and barley. Nothing else. This forces Germans to make the best of it, and they’ve done just that… they make the best. Some inside Germany want to repeal the Purity Law so they can make all sorts of abominations, like cherry flavors and adding sugars and colorings. Jackasses. All the Rheinheitsgebot says is that they can’t do that and still label it “beer (bier)”. Doesn’t prevent them from making all sorts of abominations, they just can’t call it beer. Because cherry beer isn’t real German beer, it is, in fact, an abomination.
I hereby call on American brewers to support the Rheinheitsgebot, and to abide by it voluntarily. There should be a little ‘R’ inside a square, a small and unobtrusive mark on the label, to alert knowing consumers that the beer inside is absolutely real beer. Water, barley, hops and yeast. Only those ingredients. If you do that, put the (R) mark on the label. If you can’t abide, then no problem. But if you do, then let us know. I would whole-heartedly gear my purchases towards beers that bear an (R) mark. We don’t need a law to enforce beer purity, but we sure as hell need a way to tell what’s real beer and what is carrying additives.
But off the rant for now, back to Spaten’s Optimator…
Knowing what it took to make this beer, and acknowledging the unqualified success in flavor, the rating has to be 9.7 for excellence. A great “last beer of the night” to send you off with that toasty roasty flavor lingering for a long time, and the high proof lending an extra depth to your sleep and extra oddness to your dreams. I dreamt that there was a girl who slept on her ceiling every night. She’d start out in bed but over the course of tossing and turning she ended up on the ceiling, so her folks wouldn’t let her move out on her own even though she was in her 20s, for fear a strange bedroom would end up with her falling 10 feet onto the floor in the morning.
Wow, what a weird/awesome dream. And it came after drinking real German doppel-bock. Thanks, Spaten!
