Brookston Beer Bulletin

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Swan Song For Anchor Bock

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Anchor Brewing announced today that his year’s season release of Anchor Bock will be the last. From the press release:

Anchor Brewing Company announces the release and final selling season of Anchor Bock® Beer, a seasonal interpretation of the strong German beers that mark the beginning of spring.

Each year, breweries in Germany celebrate the coming of spring with a strong, flavorful beer. Anchor Bock Beer, a dark satiny brew with rich hints of chocolate, caramel and roasted barley, is Anchor’s interpretation of this long-standing tradition.

Bock beers are believed to have originated in the town of Einbeck, Germany and traditionally feature a goat on the labels. The Germanic term “bock” translates to “billy goat”, but has over time come to mean a beer darker and stronger than a brewery’s “regular” brew. One with, you might say, the kick of a goat.

Anchor Brewing Company will be retiring Anchor Bock Beer in 2014 making room for several new seasonals yet to be announced.

“Anchor Bock has been a beloved seasonal not only by craft beer fans, but by the folks here at Anchor,” said Mark Carpenter, Brewmaster at Anchor Brewing Company. “In an effort to expand and innovate, as we have done for decades, Anchor will be retiring Bock after the 2014 season to allow room for several all-new brews, which we will be sharing with the world very soon.”

Anchor Bock Beer is available nationally from January through March in draught, 12 oz. six-packs, and 22 oz. bottles.

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Check out their short video about Anchor Bock Beer, made last year, featuring Hazel the goat.

Dunedin’s Mobile Brewhouse On Wheels

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My friend and colleague, Gerard Walen, has an interesting story on CraftBeer.com about a mobile brewery that drove from Florida to Oregon. In Collaboration On the FL-ORegon Trail, Walen details the rolling brewery built by the Dunedin Brewery and its journey to Oregon, and then on to Denver for GABF. Check it out. Gerard can normally be found on Road Trips For Beer, and recently finished the Florida Breweries book in the same series as my northern California guidebook, which will be published this April.

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The Mobile Brewhouse.

Archeologists Discover Ancient Brewer’s Tomb In Egypt

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This is pretty cool news. Egypt’s minister of antiquities, Mohammed Ibrahim, is reporting today that a group of archeologists from Japan “have unearthed the tomb of an ancient beer brewer in the city of Luxor that is more than 3,000 years old.” According to Ibrahim, “the tomb dates back to the Ramesside period and belongs to the chief ‘maker of beer for gods of the dead’ who was also the head of a warehouse,” adding “that the walls of the tomb’s chambers contain ‘fabulous designs and colors, reflecting details of daily life … along with their religious rituals.'”

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Inside the brewer’s tomb. [Photo: Supreme Council of Antiquities]

The Luxor tomb “is home to a large and famous temple complex built by Amenhotep III and later by Rameses II. The “Japanese team found the tomb during work on another tomb belonging to a top official under Pharaoh Amenhotep III, who died around 1354 BC.” See the BBC for the full story, though there’s not too much about it yet. Apparently, after it’s fully excavated they plan on opening it to visitors. Now that’s a vacation I’d sign up for.

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A wall inside the brewer’s tomb. [Photo: Supreme Council of Antiquities]

Time-Lapse Bigfoot Fermentation

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Here’s a very cool video of Sierra Nevada’s annual Bigfoot Barleywine Style Ale being brewed in open fermenters. The video shows 12,400 gallons of barley wine fermenting “over six days in four traditional open fermenters.”

First made in 1983, Bigfoot has been released every February since, and will again be much easier to find than the real Bigfoot this coming February, as well.

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