They’re everywhere now, clogging the endcaps at your grocery store, pushing regular beers out of the way with gaudy orange and black signage: pumpkin beers. Most are regular beers with some fake pumpkin flavoring added. And let’s really dig into that–what does pumpkin taste like? If you’d had squash recently you know that it tastes like nothing. Okay, that’s not fair, it tastes like watery nothing. Squash and pumpkins need to be tarted up with brown sugar, spices, and then slow-roasted to come close to tasting like anything and so what we think pumpkin tastes like is actually the stuff we put in a pumpkin pie to make it taste good: brown sugar, cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon. Which brings us back to pumpkin beer, which tastes like spices, not pumpkin.
But periodically you have a really good beer which gets it right. Hangar 24 makes some great beer and maybe I’m a sucker for the beautiful label art and aeronautical theme but this has been my go-to micro-brew recently. Start with a strong dark imperial porter that can stand on its own, then put in just enough spice to warm the throat. Put it this way: if you were eating pumpkin pie and then sipped on a beer afterward this is what you’d get. Is it dark? Let’s see:
I drank it all then became so sleepy that I couldn’t do any chores. Thanks A LOT, Hangar 24! Now everyone go get this Local Field Gourdgeous by Hangar 24 and pour all that Budweiser pumpkin syrup crap down the drain.
Writer, architect, father, husband.
Wow, I’ve never seen nor heard of pumpkin beer, not sure I fancy it though. If they are spiced I guess they’ll be similar to mulled wine which we very occasionally have at Christmas, a small glass being the limit of what I can tolerate 🙂
I do however take issue with the lack of taste of pumpkin or squash. My wife grows some butternut squash that we roast up and serve the scooped out contents with our roast dinners. We don’t add any extra flavouring and yet they taste gorgeous, rich, creamy and a flavour similar to sweet potato. You mustn’t have tasted a decent one is all I can say!!! 😉
I don’t think I’ve had a great squash, just as I don’t think I’ve had a great zucchini. Both taste, to me, like stringy fiber and water and nothing else. Maybe it’s in the roasting? Though I have my doubts that zucchini can be saved by any preparation method short of embalming it in mercury and firing it into the sun.