Pumpkin Beer Season

Pumpkin beer. Up until the last few years this was one of those exotic, rarer styles of beer more often found among homebrewers than available commercially. Part of the reason for this is simple: brewing with pumpkin is a pain.

The other reason, I believe, is a simple lack of respect. And no wonder: the historical roots of the style stem from the simple fact that malt shortages in Colonial America led the colonists to brew their beer with whatever was available—meaning essentially, pumpkins were used out of desperation (along with many other adjuncts like molasses, parsnips, cornstalks, and other crazy stuff). Pumpkin beer became one of those quirky historical oddities in brewing footnotes.

As a result, there are many people even now who consider pumpkin beer a strange or ghettoized style.

Not me. I love pumpkin beer, and I’ve loved it (and brewed it) almost since I discovered good beer back in the 90s. Very few commercial examples existed back then that I could get my hands on: Coors’ Blue Moon Pumpkin Ale (now known as Harvest Moon) was the first commercial pumpkin beer I drank, and I loved it. Buffalo Bill’s Pumpkin Ale was also well-received, and that was about it for the pumpkin beers you could buy.

No more; these last several years have seen an explosion in the commercial brewing and availability of pumpkin beers. Right now we are right smack in the middle of pumpkin beer season—October and November are the months for pumpkin beer in my book, though overlap into September and December is typical (and, crazily, you’ll see pumpkin beers show up as early as August these days). You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a pumpkin beer right now; do a quick search on RateBeer for “pumpkin” to get a sense of how many there are.

So let’s break it down and get at the heart of what pumpkin beer is all about.

The Style

Let’s just get this out of the way right up front: there is no official “style” having to do with pumpkin beer. You won’t find a BCJP guideline for it. On RateBeer you’ll find the pumpkin beers relegated to the Spice/Herb/Vegetable category. Pumpkin itself is an ingredient and can (and does!) show up in many different styles.

No matter—I still consider “Pumpkin Beer” to be a style, albeit a mixed one. The prototypical, traditional “style” is basically an American Amber Ale brewed with pumpkin and (usually) spices, and is malty and light on hops. This is 90% of the pumpkin beers you will find on the market.

The other 10% are a mixed bag of styles: Midnight Sun has an Imperial Chocolate Pumpkin Porter; Cape Ann offers a Pumpkin Stout; Elysian Brewing brews a bunch of alt-pumpkin styles each year, like their Dark Sour Pumpkin Ale (yes, a sour/wild beer!).

Elysian Brewing is in fact the current Pumpkin Beer King among brewers. Not only is their Night Owl Pumpkin Ale the best commercial pumpkin beer out there (in my opinion), but every year for the past five years they host their Great Pumpkin Beer Festival—the only such beer fest that I know of.

A whole festival devoted to pumpkin beers! Elysian themselves bring a bunch of pumpkin beers (nine this year) to the party, and they invite a slew of other great breweries to participate too. This is one of those festivals every beer geek should attend at least once, and it’s definitely high on my own list of beer goals.

The Beers

Let’s face it: there are more pumpkin beers out there right now than I could possibly have tasted and listed here. But I’ve been no slouch in this department, either.

• Harvest Moon: As I mentioned, the first commercial pumpkin beer I ever had. Loved it at the time, these days it’s really “pumpkin lite.”
• Buffalo Bill’s Pumpkin Ale: Similar experience as the Harvest Moon. When I first had this, I loved it; these days (with the advent of experience), I find it very light and lacking in body, perhaps over-spiced.
• Jack’s Pumpkin Spice Ale: Anheuser-Busch/Michelob’s answer to Coors’ Harvest Moon. Last year I was actually fairly impressed with it; it was nicely spiced with a sweet malt base accentuating the spices. It’s not the best but yes, I liked an A-B/Michelob product. It happens.
• Smuttynose Pumpkin Ale: Unusual in that they add puréed pumpkin to the secondary, rather than mashing it and fermenting it as almost everyone else does. Hoppy for the style, with nice overtones of spice and earthiness.
• O’Fallon Pumpkin Ale: I found this to be a lovely example of what I look for in pumpkin beers: malty, sweet, chewy body, spicy. Nice roasted pumpkin character. Probably my second-favorite commercial pumpkin beer.
• Lakefront Pumpkin Lager: One of the older pumpkin beers around, this beer is smooth and sweet, with creamy pumpkin pie on the nose and a buttery, subtle pumpkin presence on the tongue. I really enjoyed it.
• Southampton Pumpkin Ale: Spicy aromas, with a lighter toasted malt presence that accentuates more of a raw than roasted squash character. A bit of sweetness overlaying a peppery base.
• Shipyard PumpkinHead Ale: I’ll be honest, I really did not like this beer, and I don’t know if it was because I had a bad bottle (it happens) or it just wasn’t, er, a good pumpkin beer: it’s a wheat beer brewed with spices (no mention of actual pumpkin, as I recall), and while it had a cloyingly spicy nose, the taste was tartly sour and inappropriate. All was not lost with Shipyard, however…
• Shipyard Smashed Pumpkin: Now this is more like it. This “Imperial Pumpkin” is part of the Pugsley’s Signature Series, a 9% ABV big, bold beer. It’s spicy, sweet, and rich, and wouldn’t hurt to cellar a few months—the higher alcohol makes it a bit rummy.
• Dogfish Head Punkin Ale: This one finally made its way to Oregon so I was able to try it for the first time this year. It’s a decent pumpkin beer, though I found it heavy on the spices. (And yes, I’m aware I just committed blasphemy for not fawning over a Dogfish beer!) I liked it, but I would really like to try it on tap sometime; I have a hunch it would really shine.
• Elysian Night Owl Pumpkin Ale: I already told you this is the best pumpkin beer out there; each batch of this beer gets 150 pounds of pumpkin that goes into the mash, the boil, and the fermenter. They use roasted pumpkin seeds as well. It’s deep and rich, full of caramelized sugar and roasted pumpkin and thick and chewy. Go find this beer. You’ll thank me.

Brewing a Pumpkin Beer

There are two different approaches to brewing a pumpkin beer: one camp swears you don’t need pumpkin at all—it’s all in the spices. The other camp swears by the pumpkin; the spices are incidental.

Personally, I’m in the Must-Use-Pumpkin camp; I can definitely tell when a beer is made with pumpkin, both in taste and mouthfeel. And a pumpkin beer should never be clear—it should be hazy or downright cloudy. A clear pumpkin beer means it was either brewed without real pumpkin, or they filtered all the essence out of it. Either way, it doesn’t make for a good experience.

I said at the beginning that brewing with pumpkin is a pain. And it is—for commercial brewers. For homebrewers, it’s a cinch: you simply add roasted pumpkin to your mash (or do a “mini-mash” if you’re extract brewing, like I do), make a beer like you normally would, and add your spices at the very end (five minutes or less) of the boil.

I definitely recommend a secondary fermentation/rest after the primary is complete; depending on how you processed your pumpkin there will be a lot of particulate in the brew. A week in the secondary will give it time to clarify somewhat, as well as give you an opportunity to play with additional spices—or let the spices you already used mellow a bit.

If you want more details, check out my Pumpkin Ale Recipe over on The Brew Site, my other blog—you could search Google for a pumpkin ale recipe, but I already have the top two results for that search.

Yes, I just had to brag about that a little bit.

One more thing: Thanksgiving conveniently fits right in with pumpkin beer season. In my experience a good pumpkin beer will pair very well with, well, the entire Thanksgiving dinner. But you could also save it for dessert… it is a bit like pumpkin pie in a glass, after all.

Leave a Reply

Click here to cancel reply.

Username (required) :
Email (required) :
Web Site :
Comment :

CAPTCHA Code