Pumpkin Ales Are Fun — And They’re Making a Quiet Return
A few weeks back, I started noticing them. They were tucked into taplists along with other seasonal offerings, almost as if trying not to call attention. A toasted-seed pumpkin ale here, a no-spice amber lager there, as if to say, “to anyone who’s tiring of festbiers and fresh hops, hi! 👋”
They seemed to be purpose-built to avoid opprobrium. They weren’t those treacly grocery-store spice bombs released in early August, long before any pumpkin had ripened on the vine. Instead, I noticed them among the offerings of some of my finer local breweries. Like, the posh ones. After one, I chalked it up to chance. But by the third sighting I was beginning to wonder: are pumpkin ales back?
The Joy of Pumpkins
There is no doubt that the beer industry went through its own “tulip mania” moment with pumpkin ales. Once a fun little seasonal, pumpkin beers got hot in the middle-teens as breweries were seeing massive grocery-store sales. A speculative bubble formed, and soon we were awash in the damned things—and a lot of them were really bad. Soon a backlash developed and pumpkin ales became a metaphor for mass market excess with a hint of gross and a dash of grift for good measure. Respectable people spurned them and the market crashed.
Before we move on talk about the current crop, however, I’d like to make the positive case for pumpkin ales. They were never developed to impress with their subtlety and accomplishment; they were developed because pumpkin is our native gourd and the signature vegetable of October and who doesn’t like a mildly spiced amber ale to mix things up? People who don’t merely abjure but loudly denounce them are making a category error. Pumpkin ales shouldn’t be compared to lambics or double IPAs or gravity cask kellerbier. They should be compared to Peeps and cranberry sauce and potato salad—those gastronomic rituals of a season. Nobody really adores Peeps or cranberry sauce or potato salad, either, but mostly they don’t melt down in rage when they see them. The proper orientation one should adopt upon catching sight of the season’s first pumpkin ale is mild affection and the recognition of the end of summer. That’s it. You drink a couple while watching a football game and you’ve done something ritually autumnal.
Reclaiming Pumpkins
Enough time has passed since the pumpkin ale bubble that brewers do seem to be creeping back to the style not as a cash cow, but a new canvas for experimentation. Last week I was invited to join The New School on a tasting of nine local pumpkin ales. I don’t want to step on our findings—in fact, click through and read about them. However, they offer a nice example of the notable shift in both which breweries are making these beers, and how they’re making them.
Have a look at some of the names of breweries making the beers we sampled: pFriem, Wayfinder, Fort George, Cloudburst. These are prestigious breweries with glittery award cases. Of the beers we tried, just two were brewed to the pumpkin-pie specs popular six plus years ago. One was a cage-and-cork saison, another a kettle sour. Two were dark beers. Two used gourds but no spice. Pumpkin beers are indeed quietly returning, and they’re actually pretty interesting.
I suspect that a big part of the backlash came not because pumpkin ales were frivolous little spiced beers, but because they were bad. When a market bubble forms, no one is paying attention to quality. I remember the moment when I washed my hands of them back in the day. It was a regular pumpkin ale of the orange hue and pie-spice variety, but it was such a sad little thing. Faded orange and thin as water, it was saturated in artificial-tasting spice flavor. It had the character of expired, off-brand candy. (I’m not being vague to protect the innocent, either—I honestly can’t remember who made it.)
That was the brewery’s fault, of course, not the style’s. In our sample, we found breweries working with ancho chiles, saison yeast, and heirloom pumpkins. Threshold’s kettle sour was especially interesting—a vanilla-y, lightly spiced beer with just enough acid to pull the sweet notes into balance. Not that a brewery needs to reinvent the wheel: StormBreaker’s pumpkin beer was 100% classic, but it was made well and it really satisfied.
So, does anyone want a fridge full of pumpkin ales? Probably not. But a few as seasonal treats to spice things up? You have to be an ogre not to enjoy them. Don’t fear the pumpkin. Find a local brewery making something that looks interesting and give it a try. Celebrate the season. Enjoy yourself.