Boozin’ Blog

Here in my hemisphere spring has arrived. The spring showers have begun, the early flowers are in bloom and I’m looking around for a bock. For me bocks are the ultimate spring-time beer - and not just Maibock. I love a good, rich bock with its strong malt backbone and nice lager smack; something about it just says spring to me. Sadly my local beer store doesn’t stock good German-brewed bock beer but I will surely track some down before the season is ended.

But this is a What’s in a Name entry so let’s get to it. There are a lot of fun little stories that attempt to explain the meaning behind the name of this beer. That could be because so many other German beer style names are starkly utilitarian. Take Hefe Weizen, for instance. The parts of the name of that beer describe exactly what’s in it. Hefe means yeast and weizen means wheat. So this is an unfiltered wheat beer. Bock carries no other meaning besides that it happens to be the same word used for goat. This has naturally created some whimsy as people try to imagine how the beer got its name.

This is why so many bock beer labels feature goats. But where’s the beer-goat connection? One theory suggests that the traditional time to brew bock beer was under the sign of Capricorn, the goat. Another tells the story of a drinking contest between a Bavarian duke and a knight from Brunswick. Each was given a cask of beer from his opponent’s store. After a few drinks the knight found himself on the ground while the Bavarian remained in his seat. The embarrassed knight blamed a goat that had found its way into the courtyard. The Bavarian, who also happened to be a brew master, laughed and told the knight, “The Bock that threw you over was brewed by me.”

But the most adorable stories about such things are often the hardest to believe. The most widely accepted explanation of bock’s christening holds that bock is simply a derivative of Einbeck, the city in north-central German where the beer was first brewed. This makes a lot of sense especially when you consider that to order a bock in German you would say, “Ein Bock.”

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