Saturday, January 5, 2008

Session 11 - Dopplebocks...

For those of you new to this blog, this post is part of the monthly session series -- beer geeks from all over post on the same topic on the first Friday of each month. This week we are focusing on dopplebocks. My thanks to Brewvana for hosting this month.

I had my first dopplebock at age 17. It was really all downhill from there, my first was an Ayinger Celebrator Dopplebock -- they just don't get much better.

While in high school, I worked at a local packie. I was the guy that stocked the six pack shelves in the cooler. Sounds great, but I was also the guy that handled the filthy bottle and can returns -- I could tell you all kinds of cockroach stories. Anyway, one day while stocking the beer cooler, a bottle got caught on the case while removing the six packs and smashed on the floor. As a result, I had to put the other five survivors of this tragic event on the singles shelf. I was devastated, I didn't know much about beer at the time, but I knew the stuff was selling for $48 a case, back in 1988. This seems crazy to me now, but I distinctly remember it being the most expensive beer I had heard of at the time -- maybe it was those little plastic rams on the strings around each bottle!

Well, long story short, a...uhm..colleague at the store suggested that I try one of them. This beer was unlike anything I had tried in the past...hell, Michelob and Heineken were high end beers for a high school kid that didn't know any better. This beer will always have a sentimental place on my beer list as one of the first truly great beers I have ever tasted.

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