…Ziegen Bock?!? If you go to their website, Anheuser-Busch can’t stop going on about how ONLY Texas gets this EXTRA SPECIAL beer. All the advertising is trying to give it some kind of Texas “cool factor.”
And it’s awful. I sessioned it the other night because it was $1.50 draft night at Hudson’s and the only other choices were Bud Light and Coors Light. It wasn’t until my third pint that I realized that, no, there wasn’t any soap residue in the glasses, the beer just tasted like that.
Hell, next time I want a watery brown lager, I’ll get a Shiner Bock and at least prop up a real Texas company with my money.
AB has a brewery in Houston. AB regularly lets individual breweries experiment with recipies, and releases some of them as “Special Brews.” Obviously, very few of these experiements ever get to mass market status.
Look at it this way. You got to see a major company’s failed experiment, up close and personal.
This would be true only if the experiment were failing. However, Ziegen seems to be making slow inroads into more and more bars here. It’s pretty obviously intended to shoulder out Shiner Bock; it looks, smells and tastes almost the same. A friend who works at a bar says that a few years ago, AB was selling ZiegenBock at insanely deflated prices in an obvious attempt to puch Shiner out. Whatever I may think of the beer, that’s a pretty shitty tactic.
There’s the problem. Shiner Bock is horrible swill, but enough people drink it to keep the company going. If Texans can support one crappy beer, why not two? Ziegen Bock is AB’s way of cashing in on people’s poor taste in beer. They are very good at it.
Oh, believe me, you’re preaching to the converted.
This particular occasion was a going-away party for a friend of a friend. When I got to the bar, the drafts were Bud Light, Coors Light, Bud and Ziegen. The most interesting bottled beer they had was Bass. My heart sank. In hindsight, I should have just started drinking vodka, but everyone else was clinking beer mugs and I would have felt left out.
