Autumn Bock Adds Cinnamon and Nutmeg to a Traditional Bock

Fat Hill has put cinnamon and nutmeg into a traditional Bock lager, in a dash small enough that the brewery still calls the beer true-to-style. At 18 IBU, there is very little hop bitterness standing between the spices and the malt.

• Style: Bock
• Release Date: 2026-09-22
• ABV: 5.7%
• Fat Hill Brewing (Mason City, IA)

Spiced beer and traditional German lager do not usually occupy the same glass. Fat Hill Brewing has put them there anyway, carefully.

Autumn Bock is back on tap at the Mason City brewery at 5.7 percent ABV and 18 IBU. Fat Hill describes it as a traditional Bock lager brewed with a dash of seasonal spices, cinnamon and nutmeg among them.

The quantity is the part the brewery keeps emphasizing. A dash, in its telling, is enough for the spices to provide what it calls a slight punch through the malty flavor and aroma, without displacing the beer underneath. Fat Hill says the result stays true-to-style while celebrating fall.

That balance is a real constraint rather than a marketing line. A Bock is a malt-forward lager, dark and full-bodied, and the 18 IBU figure confirms how little hop bitterness is in play. Bitterness is the usual counterweight to sweetness in beer, so in its near-absence the malt has the floor almost entirely to itself. Cinnamon and nutmeg are assertive enough that a heavier hand would take the beer somewhere else, which the brewery seems to know.

It is also a style with a season attached. Bock has long-standing associations with the brewing calendar in Germany, where strong lagers were laid down to mature and drunk when the weather turned. Fat Hill is working in that tradition while nodding at an American autumn flavour convention, and the phrase it uses for the beer's colour is brown beauty.

Autumn Bock is pouring now at Fat Hill Brewing on North Federal Avenue in Mason City.