Pumpkin Beer Trend

Image: Annabelle Breakey

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There’s a new trend in the craft segment; let me pour you a glass of it. If you can’t tell by the orange color or the homey aroma of pie wafting out of the mug, it’s pumpkin beer. It smells like pumpkin pie or the pumpkin muffins you see in bakeries this time of year. Don’t get hooked on it, though; just like the pie and the muffins, pumpkin beer will be gone by December. Get it while you can, or wait for next fall.

“Pumpkin beer” may seem bizarre to the uninitiated. Why would you want to stuff a squash into an innocent beer? I happen to know the first guy who did it in modern times, so I asked him.

In 1986, Bill Owens, who is currently wrapped up in the birth of microdistilling as president of the American Distilling Institute, was involved in the dawn of microbrewing, running one of the country’s first brewpubs, Buffalo Bill’s, in Hayward, California. Owens, along with being a brewer and a photographer, was then an enthusiastic gardener. He had a 70-pound pumpkin growing in his backyard and didn’t know what to do with it. “I had read that George Washington made beer and used pumpkins in the process,” he said. “So I decided to do the same.”

Owens cut up the pumpkin, baked it, then mashed it right in the malt with a batch of beer. The effect was disappointing: “The gourd family has a neutral flavor,” as he put it. Inspiration struck. He got a jar of pumpkin-pie spices at the supermarket—nutmeg, clove, ginger, cinnamon, allspice—made a tea with them, and put it in the finished beer. “Instant pumpkin ale!” Owens said.

Instant pumpkin-pie ale might be more accurate, although it begs an explanation of the missing crust. Still, Owens had learned the secret to cooking with pumpkin: It’s what you add to it that creates the flavor.

Owens sold the beer in his brewpub and made an annual tradition of it. Pumpkin beers were a novelty for years, merely a fun ale for brewpubs to offer each fall. Owens contracted with a microbrewer to bottle some for him, but no one thought this would ever rise above gimmick status.

The first inkling I got that something more was going on was five or six years back when I was talking to a brewer at a now-defunct Philadelphia brewpub. It was summer, and he mentioned that he only had a month or two until the “pumpkin zombies” showed up: “They show up in August asking, ‘Is the pumpkin beer out yet?’ ”

Dan Weirback makes one of my favorite pumpkin beers, Imperial Pumpkin Ale, at his Weyerbacher brewery in Easton, Pennsylvania. Around 2001, his wholesalers started asking him for a pumpkin beer for their customers, but he didn’t want to get involved in another fast-fading fad. After four years of hearing the same requests, he figured he had to listen.

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