Long Trail Pumpkin Ale

I'll admit it: I've never been a big fan of the Long Trail Brewery, and I've visited the place. The facility, located in beautiful central Vermont, is attractive enough-- requiring a windy drive through mountainous country roads and a constellation of homespun Rockwellian small towns-- which is good because the product would not have been worth the trip otherwise. Like the meal served to me in the Long Trail Brewery Pub, a bland porridge of a cheddar ale soup and undercooked chicken wings, all the beers I've ever sampled from this company have been underwhelming. Perhaps that's because they try to do too much: they regularly pump out 18 different types of beer, from such constants as their Blackberry Wheat (my favorite of theirs, because it's decent rather than merely inoffensive), seasonals like the Pollenator (as portended by the name, it's like drinking weak honeysuckle water), and premium bombers like their Imperial Porter and Coffee Stout (meh). What I'm getting at here is my suspicion that, like so many others (Rochester's Custom Brewcrafters comes to mind), in their efforts to saturate the microbrew market with variety, Long Trail has sacrificed attempting to brew a few good beers in favor of pumping out a surfeit of mediocre ones. 

This was the baggage I brought with me when I saw a six pack of Long Trail Pumpkin Ale on the shelf at Wegman's last week. Here we go again, thought I, snarkily, as I nonetheless put the beer in my cart, preparing to absorb the $7.99 in the name of science and the name of this blog.

I could not have been more surprised. This is an excellent little Pumpkin beer, an unpretentious (as suggested by the blatant Papa-Bear-esque ripoff adorning the label-- think Berenstain not Bill O'Reilly), unassuming, pleasant drink. Kudos to you, Long Trail, you've given my assumptions a good shake up. Don't get me wrong, this beer isn't going to win any top-ten competitions; Saranac Pumpkin is also back in town (review forthcoming) and has picked it's game up to an even higher level than last year's standard of excellence. But, and this is important, the 2012 model is Long Trail's first attempt at pumpkin beer after years of going nowhere with an Octoberfest Fall seasonal. Brewing pumpkin beer is difficult for veteran brewers-- see the inglorious descent of Southern Tier's Pumpking as exhibit A on that score-- let alone newbies. Long Trail Pumpkin is doubly impressive for being good, if not exactly great, on its inaugural run.

A few words on the beer itself. Balance is the name of its game-- not too sweet, not overly spiced, but lightly flavored to enhance the natural taste of pumpkin. The coloring of the beer is on the light side, faintly orange shading toward dark yellow, with a pleasant aroma on the pour. After some initial bitterness upon the first taste, Long Trail Pumpkin opens up with hints of sweetness; not overpowering, not sugary, but semi-sweet-- definitely not for strict pumpkin pie beer seekers, nor for those who exclusively favor a heavy hand with nutmeg and spice. The more one drinks, at least at first, the more one appreciates the Goldilocks virtue of the beer. Just right, with a little something to please everyone, a nod to the sweet and spice camps. That's what, in our opinion, great pumpkin beers do. Saranac and Blue Point, last year's favorites, both thrived by hitting an absolutely perfect balance of sweetness and spice, pumpkin pie filling and clove, vanilla and nutmeg.

Long Trail doesn't quite work on all these levels.  It leaves something to be desired, falls short of the mastery of Saranac and Blue Point; where those beers explode with flavor throughout, tantalizing the senses and leaving one wanting more after the last drop, one Long Trail Pumpkin Ale is enough for this drinker. The beer is a little heavy and flattens out noticeably during consumption, almost as if it flowers too quickly after the first sip, peaks during the second, third, and fourth, and then begins its precipitous decline at the half-way point of the pint. By the end, it's dropped even below pedestrian beer. That's a shame, because sips 2-4 were almost a trip to the Great Pumpkin's moonlit patch on gossamer wings.

Welcome to the world of pumpkin beer, Long Trail. Very nice debut, solid if not spectacular, in a field where solid isn't easy. Grade: B+