Bock River

There was a liquor store in my university town back when I first got into craft beer. They had beers on hand from probably 5 different craft breweries. It didn't take long for me to try everything they had. Back then, everyone had a red, a brown, a pale, and probably a stout or some variation thereof.

My buddies and I stopped in once and saw a display of mysterious looking corked blue bottles signed in gold. The clerk told us that they had a deep discount, but were actually quite good. So we bought a bottle and took it home. We tried it later that night and thought it was one of the most vile things ever and dumped it out. It was thick with a strong soy sauce flavor that I would later learn was due to oxidation.

We bought some more bottles though, almost as a dare at this point, that we also used as a joke to spring on unsuspecting guests.

Fast forward 10 years or so and I found a bottle in the back of my cellar that had somehow survived all those years and a few moves. I uncorked it to have a taste. Surely, those bad memories were due to an uncultured palate. The few hundred/thousand craft beers I'd had since would prove younger me oh so wrong.

When I tasted it... it tasted exactly how I remembered it. The rest went down the drain.

Don't get me wrong - I have so much respect for that brewery and am a big fan of many of their beers. Just not that one. In their defense, I later found out that those bottles were 8 years old at the time and probably not handled well by the retailer. But I think I know what the brewer was going for.

I tell that story because this beer was created on a whim without much thought to how it would end up. I knew the base recipe was good as it's the same as another beer we make only triple in size. Unlike the base beer, I used lager yeast here. Only until after fermentation did I realize that I had made a similar beer to that one from college. It's not nearly as thick, and there's no soy sauce flavor, but it's a cousin. A cousin with good taste ;)