Explain to me the allure of Shiner Bock

Cafe Society
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These guys enter the Australian International Beer Awards. In 2008 the Shiner Bohemian Black Lager and Shiner 99 Helles won medals but the Bock finished without one.

But in 2005 3 US beers won medals in that class Shiner Bock, Samuel Adams Winter Lager and Samuel Adams Black Lager.

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Shiner Bock is a decent lower-end beer, fairly cheap and entirely drinkable.

Don’t make the mistake of drinking their hefeweizen though. That stuff is disgusting.

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Shiner is definitely not a micro-brew. The Spoetzl brewery pretty much is Shiner, Tx.

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FYI, I know the current manager at Valhalla. They still have the occasional 50 cent special on Shiner when the brewery is offering a special, but it’s now usually 95 cents, when it’s on tap (tends to be about every other week or so). They’ve added a few taps, and there’s almost always a few good beers on tap, usually for well under $2 and often representing area microbrews.

Shiner is, more or less, a traditional bock. Is it the best example of it? No, but it’s pretty good as traditional bocks go.

So, I’m not sure what the controversy is. It sounds like there’s a lot of quasi-beer snobs talking about double bocks, instead. If it’s extremely “chewy”, it’s certainly not the bock style beer originally developed in Germany.

Part of the problem may be the travel distance. I’m in Houston and you can definitely find skunky St Arnold’s or Shiner in the city, despite the proximity of the breweries. The problem is that some stores don’t properly transport or store the beer, allowing it to experience several extreme changes in temperature in a short period of time.

That’s less of a problem with Shiner, but it’s noticeable with the St Arnold’s. That stuff needs to be stored and transported at refrigerator temperatures, and it’s often not. I imagine Shiner Bock also doesn’t handle travel all that well. As generic as it is, the major breweries have local centers to avoid these problems.

You see the same thing with imported German beers. That’s one of the reasons for IPAs, right? Imported Weissbeers just don’t taste as good here after transportation as fresh in Bavaria.