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.