I’ve been thinking about doing a bock for an upcoming brew. I’d like to hear if there are any good traditional recipes in there.
I don't have the Bock entry, it's not a style that appeals to me, but I do have many of the books from that series. I wouldn't look to them for traditional recipes.
When those books were first published in the very early 90's, they were really helpful. Reading them now with the benefit of thirty years of advancement in techniques and ingredients, they're....how do I put this politely, a bit quaint.
Unfortunately, they were written at a time when there wasn't much variety in base malt selection. In N. America, you could reliably get US 2-row and US pils malt. US pale ale malt and Continental or Canadian Pils was available, but not reliable. Munich malt might show up but be gone for months at a time. Vienna malt was a treat to be hoarded and if someone mentioned Marris Otter we would've wracked our brains wondering, which cartoon character was that?
Subsequently, those books rely on C-malts like mass-manufactured food relies on corn syrup. Not Caramalts, but generic C-malt.
With Fall just around the corner, I've been turning my attention to Viennas, so I recently pulled my dog-eared copy of the Fix's entry in the series,
Vienna, Marzen, Oktoberfest off the bookcase for inspiration. All of their recipes call for "Pale Malt (2-row, Pilsner quality)." That's how old that series is. The rest of the recipes are comprised of a pound or more of C-malts to make up the color and approximate the flavors that we would get from base malts.* They're recipes of their time.
That's not to say that it isn't a good series. These were amazing hardcore homebrewing books! They taught you how to make the best possible swill with the garbage ingredients we had available at the time. Now, they're better suited as historical artifacts with the exception of Terry Foster's entries. Foster has done amazing work updating his Porter, Stout, and Pale Ale entries in the series into
Stout and Porter and
Pale Ale. Both are hugely expanded and updated. Both are currently a decade old at this point, so they're not as cutting edge as they once were and are starting to show some frayed edges--especially on the invert sugar front. Nevertheless, they're both excellent.
*This was a later entry in the series, so the Fixes call for both newly available German and English C-malts. They also mention that darker English C-malts were starting to become available and were very helpful in the making of these German beers (!). Earlier entries just specified C-malt, meaning C-40. There were no other widely available C-malts. That's why most early micro beers were 10lbs of Klages and a pound of C-40.