Bock o’clock: The beer that signals spring’s arrival

In pre-industrial days, beer making used to be more beholden to the weather and the seasons. One needed Mother Nature to bestow upon brewers the right temperatures for making beer, and in the days before refrigeration and even thermometers, that meant that brewing was largely dictated by the caprices of the seasons.

As a result, many brewing nations developed rituals and celebrations around beer-making seasons. In Germany, for example, St. George’s Day, April 23, became the traditional day when all brewing stopped for the warm season — a 16th-century Bavarian trade statute made it illegal to brew beer between April 24 and Sept. 29.

That made bock beer culturally important. The first bock beers were most likely brewed by German monks during the winter, then laid down or aged for several months to prepare them for a special time of the year: Lent.

The Christian season of Lent lasts 40 days and runs from Feb. 18 to Easter on April 5 this year. Historically, during Lent, monks and other religious observers fast for each of the 40 days of Lent, a practice still observed by some today. While each group or person had their own way of fasting — some fast only during the day, have one meal after dark, avoid meat and/or candy or abstain from food altogether — drinking beer was generally permitted under monastic fasting rules.

So German monks would make a strong, dark beer, rich in nutrients and higher in alcohol than most beers at the time, in part to help sustain them through Lent. That beer became known as bock beer.

First brewed in the early 1200s in the Lower Saxony town of Einbeck, Germany, it started out as essentially an ale brewed with two-thirds barley and one-third wheat. It was also a dark-colored beer and was stronger, richer and heartier than the regular or standard beer of the day. Over time, it evolved into a lager with similar characteristics, as lager brewing became dominant in most of Germany. It was typically released just in time for Lent so that it could be enjoyed in lieu of food until Easter.

Since then, bock has evolved into several different yet related beer types. In addition to traditional bock (sometime called ur-bock, “ur,” meaning “original”), there are also blonde bocks, helles bocks or maibocks (brewed to be released in May), doppelbocks (or double bocks, which are even stronger), weizenbocks (brewed with more wheat) and even the rare eisbock or ice bock, which is presently illegal to sell as beer in the U.S., because the production process involves a freezing-distillation process that yields a very high alcohol beer.

By the early 20th century, and undoubtedly before that, the sight of an advertisement for bock beer, usually depicting a goat, became as ubiquitous a sign of spring as seeing the first robin.

Historical advertisements of the time confirm that the arrival of spring was synonymous with the seasonal release of bock beer in the U.S. Besides brewery ads, comic strips, editorials and history lessons all leaned into this idea. When Prohibition began in 1920, numerous articles lamented that spring would no longer bring bock beer and claimed that just seeing a goat would be triggering.

In the late 19th century through probably the 1950s, the bock was “the” seasonal beer, far more than Christmas or holiday beers, pumpkin beers or summer ales. Breweries poured money and advertising into promoting bock beer season — which typically ran only several weeks to a couple of months at most. Beautiful posters, usually lithographs or full-color chromolithographs started appearing for bock beer in the late 1800s.

Many communities celebrated Bock Beer Day and had bock beer festivals. But Bock Beer Day appeared to be more of a holiday of convenience, being declared at many different times throughout the spring. Some states even enacted laws stating brewers could not release it before a certain date.

I believe that we should bring back seasonality into our daily lives, observing what’s traditionally in season locally — starting with our beer choices. Bock beer is an ideal beer for spring with its hearty, strong, rich malt flavors and slight kick. Besides, it’s Lent. You may not be giving up three meals a day, but you can still enjoy a bock beer.

Contact Jay R. Brooks at BrooksOnBeer@gmail.com.