Beer aficionados love to heap scorn upon, mock, sneer at and otherwise treat with contempt most mass-produced American lagers.
We’d agree that much most just about all of that scorn has been earned and is well-deserved.
That said, there are a few smaller, regional breweries around that have garnered national reputations for their respectable arrays of brews, brews that have garnered loyal customers who appreciate (among other things) beer that’s not brewed in some city-bound factory the size of a small mountain ski-town and that doesn’t cost more than the rib-eye you’re about to toss on the grill tonight.
Knocking about Texas for a few weeks with She Who Must Be Obeyed it’s been a pleasure to see the yellow sixers of Spoetzl Brewery’s Shiner Bock showing up everywhere from the most humble, small-town convenience stores to the best BBQ joints to even the menus of several more high-brow eateries.
Brewed in Shiner, Texas, population 2000 and change, Shiner Bock remains (I’m guessing here) their most popular and has been the choice of locals since 1913, at first as a seasonal and now brewed year round.
This is a porch sitting, working in the woodshop, horseshoe throwin’ beer, pretty mild stuff when compared with some of the hopped up microbrews these days, with an ABV of 4.4% and scoring 13 on the International Bittering Units (IBU) scale.
No doubt you wouldn’t have to look very far to find a beer snob (or snobbette) who would gladly tell all that’s wrong with this one, though we’ve found that food and drink snobbery tends to be present in an inverse relationship with how much fun people tend to have. We’d rather fish and hunt with the fun kids, but I digress….
This would also make a fine late summer Missouri or Yellowstone river float beer for the cooler and a fine beverage for a hot day chasing redfish on the Laguna Madre, which is where we’re headed in a few days. I can hear the ice rumbling in the cooler now….
Cheers.
