Samuel Adams Triple Bock

Review Date 10/26/2000 By John Staradumsky

  Style: Strong Ale   Brewery: Boston Beer   Country: USA   State: Massachusetts   $ Per OZ: $.54 (B)   ABV: 17.5%

Triple Bock is not your average beer. You’ll realize this when you first glance at the elegant cobalt blue bottle embossed with “Sam Adams Triple Bock” in gold print. Then you’ll see the price: $4.75 or so for an 8.75 ounce bottle. No, this is certainly not your average beer. Intrigued, you buy a bottle and take it home.

To get at your Triple Bock, you must first peel away the black plastic shrink-wrap that holds the cruet-capped cork in place. From there it’s an easy pull to extract the cork, and the beer can then be decanted into a glass. I prefer a small stemmed pilsner glass for my Triple bock. It should be drunk at room temperature. OK, enough waiting. You pour it. The beer itself is deep black in color with absolutely no carbonation. It is completely flat. The nose is rich and strong with notes of prune and port. The palate is rich and sweet, cloying, liqueur-like. Notes of chocolate are apparent. Maple syrup and vanilla too. The finish is the real story here, however. It’s incredibly warming with alcohol, probably more so than any beer you have ever tasted.

There’s a good reason for this. Samuel Adams Triple Bock weighs in at a whopping (drumroll please) seventeen and one half percent by volume. Now you know why it comes in small bottles. At that strength, Triple Bock is one of the most potent beers on Earth, and pushes the envelope as to what beer can be. The average lager is about five percent alcohol by volume, Triple Bock is more than three times as alcoholic. You may not want to drink the entire bottle in one sitting. That’s fine though, since the cork can be replaced on the bottle. The beer will keep at room temperature even after opening due to the high alcohol content.

So what is a Triple Bock? It’s not a bock at all, actually. Boston Beer wanted to denote strength in the brew, and to create a new style. Bock, double bock, and eisbock grow stronger in the order I listed them. Triple Bock is stronger still. Brewed with four times as much malt as the flagship Boston Lager, Triple Bock also uses maple syrup as an ingredient (a rich source of fermentable sugars). The beer is top fermented like an ale and aged in whiskey barrels for six months. Prior to fermentation the brew has an amazing original gravity of about 1.7.

Triple Bock was introduced in 1991, and I can remember how difficult it was to obtain at first. Everyone wanted to try it. To this day, I can recall a beer festival I attended in the mid nineties at which beer lovers surrounded the Boston Beer booth and chanted, “TRIPLE BOCK! TRIPLE BOCK!” until some of that magical elixir was produced and decanted into their tasting glasses. Today, the mystique surrounding Triple Bock has died down a bit. Most people either love it or hate it. I happen to love it, especially by a roaring fire on a cold winter evening. It may not fit into the traditional notion of what beer is, but it’s a wonderful treat all the same.

Glad I tried it?  T

Would I rebuy it??