GrapeHops Blog

I’m beginning to think I like the idea of pumpkin beer more than the actual application. I know, a few years ago, when I first tasted some, it was wonderful, with a spicy scent of ginger, nutmeg and cinnamon, along with a taste reminiscent of pumpkin pie, but since then … I wish I knew which brand that was.

In the quest to find it again, and in honor of Halloween, I decided to do a pumpkin beer tasting on Saturday night.  We started out with a single bottle of Post Road (from the Brooklyn Brewery) left in our refrigerator from a beer run two weeks ago then we hit the nearby Buy Rite.  There we were able to procure two more pumpkin beers, Harvest Moon (from the Blue Moon Brewing Company) and Saranac (hmm… the website says it was last available fall of 2008 – wonder if we had some really old stuff).

But three beers for a tasting?  My “assistant”, Chris, decided that wasn’t enough, so we got back in the car and headed north, to Joe Canal’s, which has one of the largest selections of microbreweries around.

A while later because the traffic on route 1 is a … we pulled into their lot.  Waylaid for just a moment by a woman giving out Halloween candy or free shots of Dan Akroyd’s new Vodka (cool packaging, in a skull but $49 for a small bottle of vodka? Come on), we headed over to the beer aisle.

There, after some sidetracked discussions on IPA with a JC employee, we selected two more pumpkin ales, Smuttynose (which I always want to call snuttynose), and Weyerbacher (from good old Easton PA), not to mention some coffee stouts, some of the aforementioned IPAs, and not to be caught unprepared, a case of wine.

I never said this beer/wine hobby was cheap.

We returned home with our booty (and a sack of a dozen sliders – White Castle is right down the road from JC’s), and waited for our kids to go to their respective Halloween activities so that we could start our own festivities.  Since we were definitely in the cocktail hour when we finally started, I made some chicken and cilantro won tons to go along with the beer – not a bad choice, especially with the spicy dipping sauce.

Now for the process.

We decided to go with a double blind study, so Chris wrapped all the bottles in brown paper bags, and set out ten tasting glasses, five for me, five for him, then he left the room.   I took the wrapped bottles and laid them out randomly behind each pair of glasses, and numbered them, so that neither he nor I knew what we were drinking at any given point in time.

Double Blind Beers Wrapped in Brown Paper Bags

We poured all five out so we could compare color and head (though I’d just as soon forget the head – and please, wipe the smirks off your faces).  Then we began tasting – coincidentally, I almost perfectly set them up from lightest to darkest.

Three of our five beers

Here’s what we found:

Beer 1 – aka Smuttynose, had a great pumpkin pie scent and a bit of taste, though not the heady flavors of nutmeg, ginger and cinnamon for which I was seeking. It was a bit bitter at the end and had the lightest color.

Beer 2 – aka Postroad, had very little pumpkin scent or taste and I detected a bit of soapiness which could have been more of a function of my dishwasher than the beer.  Though, I have to admit, this was our least favorite.

Beer 3 – aka Wyerbacher, slight pumpkin aroma, definitely some spice on the nose but again, not as much in the taste, though I did get the essence of squash and, I thought, maybe a little caramel. It definitely was the most effervescent of the bunch.

Beer 4 – aka Harvest Moon, this one had no pumpkin smell or real taste – fine beer but just didn’t hit me as a pumpkin beer.

Beer 5 – aka Saranac, this one was the darkest of the bunch, not heavy on pumpkin scent but a good taste, again though, like all of the others, missing that hit of spice for which I was looking.

So in the end, I’d return to the Smuttynose or maybe the Saranac, but overall, I’m still searching for that pumpkin beer that screams fall and even Thanksgiving to me.