Summer Will Be a Lot More Fun if You Poke Your Beer
This old German tradition is the ultimate campfire party trick.
Photo Courtesy of August Schell Brewing Co.
A couple months ago, my friend hosted a backyard bonfire inspired by German traditions: eating brats and poking bocks. This was my introduction to bock poking, the practice of sticking a red-hot iron into a dark lager until it foams up and the sugars caramelize, leaving you with a warmer, campfire-ready drink.
Hundreds of years ago, German blacksmiths would stick pokers into their beers to warm them up in the winter. This worked well with bocks, a style of beer traditionally brewed in the winter and drunk during spring festivals like Lent. Today, bock poking has become a beloved end-of-winter ritual at many American breweries, especially in parts of the Midwest with German roots.
“Bock beer is just a really great pairing with the time of year where it’s kind of cold outside. You’ve got this amber, beautiful beer, and then you poke it with this red-hot poker and it turns into a delicious dessert,” Ben Hugus, founder of Ursa Minor Brewing in Duluth, Minnesota, tells Food Network.
Photo Courtesy of August Schell Brewing Co.
When you poke a beer, the heat reacts with the enzymes to make the flavor sweeter and toastier.
“It gives the beer a real nice caramelly marshmallow taste, so it’s almost like you’re drinking a s’more on that first sip,” says Johnny Germscheid, Digital Marketing Specialist at August Schell Brewing Co. in New Ulm, Minnesota. “Bock beer is good on its own but once you get that poked beer, you’re always gonna crave it.”
Bock poking has been a tradition at New Ulm bars since the 1800s. Schell’s, the second-oldest family-run brewery in the U.S., opened there in 1860 and started hosting its annual Bockfest, an all-out celebration of spring, in 1986. But thanks to its dramatic visual flair, bock poking is now spreading, partly due to social media, to other parts of the country. It’s a natural draw for beer drinkers eager to try something fun.
Stone Corral Brewery & Pub in Richmond, Vermont started poking beers this year. Brewer Ryan McKeon saw a video of it online and immediately sent it to his coworker, Brett Seymour. They knew they had to try it.
“We loved the romance of the fire pit,” Seymour says.
Photo Courtesy of August Schell Brewing Co.
McKeon bought stainless steel to mold into homemade pokers. Another employee brought in a fire pit she never used, McKeon got wood from a neighbor and Stone Corral hosted its first beer poking event on a freezing January day. Despite the single-digits temperature, it was an unexpected success.
“I walked into the tap room to warm up for a minute and our front-of-house manager looked like she wanted to strangle me because they weren’t prepared for the volume of people that were coming in on a random Monday,” McKeon recounts. “We were packed. We were pulling boxes down to get extra glasses out because we couldn’t keep up with it. It was awesome. We knew we had something.”
While experimenting, McKeon and brewer Brett Seymour also found that poking works on other beer styles, including fruity ones.
“We have a blackberry sour, our Bramble, and that actually was awesome poked. It was like a warm berry pie,” Seymour says. “We also do a raspberry schwarzbier, so like a black lager with raspberries, and again, it really brought the fruit forward.”
Though it’s a cold-weather tradition, beer poking would fit right in with hot dogs and s’mores at summer gatherings. All you need is a poker.
You can use just about any container, but a glass with a wide mouth will let you see the foam clearly and give you more room to maneuver. (Be careful not to touch the sides of the glass with your poker or it will shatter!) Oh, and while there are no real rules here, the experts say to steer clear of IPAs. Poking a hoppy beer “takes something that’s really good and just completely ruins it,” according to Hugus.
To try it out for yourself, start by drinking your beer about halfway down — otherwise, it’ll overflow when you poke it. Meanwhile, get the fire as hot as you can before heating up the poker. You want the iron so hot it glows. When you poke the beer, give the iron a little swirl for a few seconds, and you should see the foam start to rise.
Beer poking is a conversation starter and a show. Everyone can get in on the fun — McKeon and Seymour poked root beers for kids, and while it didn’t change the flavor much, they loved watching it bubble up. In the case of my friend’s party, it also made for a very classic “hold my beer while I try something” kind of evening. But, as Hugus put it, the learning curve is part of the experience.
“You have to end up drinking a few beers learning how to do it,” he says. “There are worse problems.”
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