Posted on 10/10/2012 3:53:50 PM PDT by nickcarraway
With Halloween right around the corner, the season of the pumpkin is upon us. Pumpkin patches have popped up overnight, cute sugar pie pumpkins sit alongside their strictly ornamental gourd brethren at the Farmers Markets, and pictures of your kids playing in corn mazes and on hay bales clog our Instagram feed. All of this is just swell our opinion, as pumpkins are delicious. Pumpkin pie, pumpkin bread, toasted pumpkin seeds... if it touched a pumpkin, we'll eat it. And quite possibly the best way to enjoy their squashy splendor is as a glass of hearty pumpkin beer.
Pumpkin beer is, and always will be the perfect, albeit elusive, once-a-year treat to bring to the pumpkin carving potluck, backyard bonfire, or Halloween party. Six-packs of the stuff are available at most bodegas and specialty beer shops around the city by now, but none of the varieties you will find on the shelves are brewed and bottled within San Francisco's borders. After days of toil and trouble (aka using the internet and the phone) surprisingly we found that just two breweries in the city are making their own pumpkin beers:
21st Amendment Brewery
Pumpkin Schmunkin ale at 21st Amendment.
This SOMA spot is brewing a little something they like to call Pumpkin Shmunckin: their take on a pumpkin ale made with local, organic pumpkins that are roasted in house and mixed in with the mash. It's a darker ale with some welcome notes of cloves and nutmeg, not too sweet, and is a refreshing take on a sometimes overly saccharine concoction. It's a fine, drinkable pumpkin that will give you a bit of a buzz at 7.1% ABV. We like the warm spices, hint of hops at the end, and obviously, saying the word shmunckin.
Magnolia Brewery Magnolia's Barking Pumpkin is a dark, smooth, almost copper colored brew made with a bounty of Winter Luxury pumpkin flesh and seeds. It's a bit sweeter than the Shmunckin, but we are certainly still far away from pumpkin pie territory. The pumpkin flavor is subtle with some hints of coffee, like a porter. We like the rich and robust aroma this one brings to the duo and predict it will keep us warm on a windy night in Upper Haight.
And if pumpkin beer doesn't do it for, perhaps apples will, as both breweries also have locally made hard ciders on tap. Cheers!
Ping.
I was given a 6 pack of pumpkin beer.
I took a few sips and poured it down the drain.
Blechhh!!
Pinging the Homebrewers List!
Autumn is great for Hard Cider.
I had a pumpkin beer that on a technical level was amazing, tasted like pumpkin pie... turns out I don’t like drinking pumpkin pie. But that’s OK, I’ve learned beer bread is the ultimate repository for beer you don’t like.
The description certainly sounds delicious, but I’m not sure I’d be interested. On the other hand, Rogue Ales (over in Newport, OR) made a chocolate brew that’s to die for. I couldn’t imagine that chocolate beer would be good.
I think I had the same one: skip the pie and just drink the beer!
Not actually a connoisseur of fine beer, but I drink some occasionally (particularly when I'm seeing the Irish band I like at an old tavern down on Stone Street . . . )
Was it the spices? I don’t like wheat beers or any flavored beer. Same with coffee.
I am headed to a Local Home Brew Store tomorrow. Just to see what they have in stock as supplies. They are supposed to have an extensive collection of beers not normally stocked by local stores for sale also.
Yuck and YUCK!
I have some homemade Hard Cider just bottled and one still fermenting very nicely the one fermenting has a very nice apple aroma. I hope the aroma will still be there when finished and bottled.
It was the pumpkin.
Yom!
This is sick. Some might like it, but please, for the love of all good things, please, brothers and sisters, please refrain from referring to this concoction as beer. Maybe thinned pumpkin spoilage juice, but not, by any definition is this beer.
At a recent ‘intro to home brewing’ class that I took, the instructor went to great lengths to explain that when a pumpkin beer is brewed, it gets no ‘pumpkin taste’ from the pumpkin, rather any taste that it has is due to other ingredients that have been added to the brew.
Our homebrew club has a blind pumpkin tasting every year. We have about a dozen different pumpkin ales, including a few homebrews. They are all over the cchart in tste!
Most people like the pumpkin ale with a bit of vanilla in it best of all.
I like some of the New England microbrews, Shipyard being one of my favorites. Their Pumpkinhead beer is something I look forward to every year.
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