Tuesday, August 10, 2010

A bit of a Bock

So here goes, my first real attempt at beer blogging, or blogging of any kind come to that. First though, in the manner of all great things, I should start with a thank you. This is to a little shop in Bare called The Wineyard and Delli, and its social networker and head tweeter; Ben.
Now I assume that most people reading this, if anyone can work up the urge to read it, already know the shop and the man, if you don't and you have any interest in food or drink, even if that only stretches to eating, then you need to check it out.
Ben tweets as @thewineyard, and all the relevant info; blog, FB, etc is available from there. This place is like an Aladdin's cave for foodies, in fact I don't know how they get it all in, the wine, beer, spirits, food, its literally crammed to the rafters people.
Right, that said, its time to hit the beer!
The one I'm going to talk about today is fro San Francisco, and is Anchor Brewery's Bock.
Here's a picture I borrowed from their website if your interested,

and just in case you fancied a look, here's their website http://www.anchorbrewing.com/beers/bockbeer.htm.

Now according to the blurb on the bottle, a "bock" is a stronger, darker alternative to a brewery's normal product, and having drunk Anchor Steam on the odd occasion, that's certainly true.
On first pouring, you see a dark, almost syrupy beer, with a deep rich set of flavours, malty and a lovely dark caramel scent.
When you taste it, all those lovely dark flavours remain, but the sweetness goes, and the rich dark malty caramel is balanced by a lovely hit of hops. Now this beer's only 5.5%, which is quite light in terms of alcohol compared to a lot of the craft beers I've drunk recently, but it's still no light weight. It delivers big wonderful flavours, and it's just as good drunk when you're sat in the sun, or inside hiding from the rain

All in a spectacular beer, really drinkable, and great big; well balanced flavours.
I gave it 18/20 when I first drank it, and I'd give it that again today.

2 comments:

  1. Someone just linked me to this. Great tasting note on Bock - It's a gorgeous beer! Thanks ever so much for the nice words about The Wineyard & my tweeting. Glad to hear it's being enjoyed by someone at least. ; )

    Looking forward to seeing more posts!

    Ben
    http://twitter.com/thewineyard

    ReplyDelete