Saranac Pumpkin Ale

The gold standard of pumpkin beers so far in this young autumn. Saranac has long been held near and dear to our hearts for being the closest thing to our hometown pumpkin beer. Brewed right down the thruway in Utica, New York, and available by the six pack, twelve pack, case, or as part of Saranac's fall seasonal sampler, this is a truly exceptional pumpkin beer for a reasonable price ($6.99 for 6, $11.99 for 12-- at Wegman's). But, truth to tell, in past years regional loyalty kept us coming back to Saranac more than the quality of the taste. We bought in bulk, in large part, to support an Upstate New York  neighbor. In 2010 and 2009 Saranac pumpkin was middle of the road, not too sweet, not too dark, but not too flavorful, either; the pumpkin was there, along with a light patina of spice, but the more you drank down the bottle the less you could taste either. It wasn't a bad beer (it didn't grate, for example, like Wolaver's), just a mildly pedestrian one.


No longer. Saranac has stepped up their pumpkin game, and we applaud them. The 2011 recipe ushers in a new, more robust era. Welcome to flavor country. The pumpkin taste is stronger than ever (not obnoxiously so, as if they simply dumped loads of canned pumpkin into the vats, but carefully measured to produce a perfect amount of our favorite gourd), complimented with a good mixture of spices. Indeed, the best thing about this beer may be it's spicing. It boasts a subtle, and curious, blend of sweetness and bitterness, mixed to perfection that simultaneously allows the brew to play to both of the usual crowds of pumpkin beer consumers: sweet-toothy I-want-pumpkin-pie-types and their malty give-me-the-natural-pumpkin-or-give-me-death counterparts. The name of the Saranac pumpkin game remains balance, though at much higher level than past batches. This is the Goldilocks of pumpkin beers, then. Not too dark, not too light, but just right for all comers. 

We give it a solid A.

Wolaver's Pumpkin Ale

A disappointing start to the season. Wolaver's Pumpkin, a Vermont organic beer, now packaged with a much prettier label than the bottle shown here-- think Grant Wood meets your average WPA muralist-- is about as pricey as it gets for Pumpkin craft beer. I paid almost ten bucks for a six pack at Wegman's yesterday. Now, while it gets credit for being one of the very first Pumpkin beers on the shelf, and for further outshining its (so far) weak competition of early arrivals, namely Post Road (a post for which shall follow), these virtues alone cannot save Wolaver's. Sadly, the beer is hardly worthy of the pumpkin name. The Pumpking and I split a six pack, and struggled mightily with the task; in truth, we were ready to quit on it after the first few sips, but that is not in our nature. 

There is hardly any pumpkin taste at all; one has to strain and use the imagination to even begin to detect the desired flavor, and who wants to do that much work? The brew is bitter and malty-- not in themselves necessarily bad traits for a pumpkin ale, which can be wonderful if done in this fashion with the right admixture of spices (one wouldn't want all of one's pumpkin beer to taste like pie filling; the best pumpkin beers walk a fine, balanced, line between sweet and bitter... but I digress)-- but not in a good, hoppy, pale ale way. More like a dark brown ale that's had cloves liberally applied to it. Organic beer, huh? I don't really want to taste the earth the pumpkins grew in, and that's what this most closely approximates.

I am generally considered an easy grader, so what follows is meaningful. I give Wolaver's a C-, and wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless they were attempting the same beer journey as us.    

The First Blog: An Introduction

Most people who start blogs have some sort of noble purpose in mind: to share their scholarly reflections, to enter the political dialogue of our country in an attempt to contribute to the debates surrounding democracy (or oligarchy, or whatever we have-- neither here nor there as far as this venture is concerned), to share stories of how they are healing sick or injured animals back to good health. Well, I've tried my hand in the first two of these areas before, and my resolve never stuck. Perhaps my heart wasn't truly in it. Perhaps I didn't love history or political thought sufficiently enough to pry the ideas from my lazy, resistant mind. Maybe I'm just not clever enough. Or maybe those old blog subjects were a little close to home, a little too much like the "intellectual work" that already consumes the life of a graduate student, er, Duke... yes, a Pumpkin Duke. And of course, as Max Weber famously put it, "Politics [and history] means slow, strong drilling through hard boards, with a combination of passion and a sense of judgment." I'm more of a sense of whimsy kind of guy. So, thought I, why not turn to something more frivolous, if only slightly. 

Try, try again. Welcome to my latest effort to slough off the doldrums and join the 21st century. On this page you will find (I hope) the delightful musings, thoughtful criticisms, incessant mutterings, and self-indulgent ramblings of two pumpkin beer connoisseurs. The PumKing and I love pumpkin beer absolutely.  The spice, the crispness, the hints of brown sugar, nutmeg, or cinnamon (depending on the brand), along with the crunch of fallen leaves on the walk to the bar, the smell of autumn air, and the palpable feel of Halloween that accompany drinking these beers combine to make them a magical part of autumn.   Every year, as fall creeps closer, we nearly bankrupt ourselves on the stuff. We begin buying in mid-August, when the first label usually appears, and keep doing so until the last of it runs out in wintertime. In no small part, of course, the joy of drinking pumpkin beer lies in the social enterprise of the experience. It would be far less fun to drink them alone, and so we drink them together as often as we can, waxing as eloquently as possible about the virtues of the pumpkin. This is where you-- the reader-- come in. We invite you to listen in as we discuss a subject about which we know only as much as our lay tastes impart in the moment of imbibing, but about which we expound upon with as much eloquence and elan as we can muster. We try to use words like "elan" as much as possible as a form of puffery.  

To wit, we'll try to bring that same to style to bear on this blog. We'll be sampling as many pumpkin beers this season as possible, a staggering task that will surely cause us to stagger home often, if all goes well. The number of pumpkin beers available on the market has grown incredibly in the last few years, commensurate with the rising popularity (and dare I say, respectability) of the brew. We shall try as many as we can, and, as we do, we'll evaluate them all on a completely unscientific scale that is remarkable for having no discernible metric or consistent internal logic whatsoever.  So, sit back and prepare for the journey. Stayed tuned for my next posting, "A Word on Our Names," to be followed by our first reviews, which we'll get around to whenever we feel like it.