Heineken Bok

Heineken Bok is one of the lost beers of the Heineken archive — a classic Dutch bokbier that predates the better-known Tarwebok by at least four decades. The Heineken Collection Foundation confirms that Gerard Adriaan Heineken began selling bock beer shortly after his breweries were rebuilt for German bottom fermentation in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Dutch bokbier arrived in the Netherlands as a bottom-fermented seasonal lager from Germany in the mid-19th century and was traditionally brewed for autumn consumption — the slack season for lager when a darker, stronger, caramel-rich beer was easier to sell. Ron Pattinson's transcriptions of the Rotterdam pilot brewery records from 1935 confirm that a Bok beer was still in active production at that time. The beer was brewed at both the Amsterdam Steam Brewery on Stadhouderskade and the Rotterdam Crooswijk Brewery. It is believed to have been gradually displaced by the Tarwebok (introduced ~1920) as Heineken's signature autumn seasonal, and was likely discontinued before Rotterdam's closure in 1974. No precise discontinuation date has been established. Note: the bottle image shown is an AI-generated reconstruction of how a Heineken Bok Bier bottle may have looked during the Amsterdam-Rotterdam brewery era.