Fall, Part 3

So I'm definitely a little behind. I love drinking beer and I love talking about beer, but there are a few times at which I'm not wild about picking up my laptop to write about it. My bad. There's also a TON of beer in my fridge that I'm also a little behind in terms of drinking. Trust me though - I'm working on it.

So there's a lot of beer in here. Hmm...

So my distaste for pumpkin beers is well known. I'm not wild about pumpkin as an ingredient, and I do not like it in beer. I do not like pumpkin in bread, I do not like pumpkin in pie, I barely enjoy pumpkins in catapults. I'm terrified of them when they're drenched in glitter.

But damn if suddenly come Labor Day, the liquor stores aren't flooded by pumpkin beers of every kind. It's rare to fine one that I like. Well, it's rare to find one I'll buy, which means it's even that much harder to find one that I like. I am a huge fan of the Sam Adams variety packs (see the Spring pack - I bought the Summer one, but didn't review much from it). So hooray for the Fall pack, which I started off on two posts ago. I ended up having to take home two of the Harvest Pumpkin beers as a result. And I have to say, they weren't horrible.

Nice copper color.

11 pounds of pumpkin go into each barrel, they say. At least it's actual pumpkin, and not 11 pounds of pumpkin pie spice. I appreciated that it wasn't too sweet, wasn't too heavily spiced, and wasn't frankly, an average pumpkin beer. I couldn't smell a lot of fruit on the nose - the aroma was bready and yeasty instead. The body was smooth, the mouthfeel was pretty nice. And then at the very end there might have been some cinnamon and other spice on the finish. It wasn't candy-like, but there was enough caramel malt sweetness to remind me that this was a fall beer. Really, not bad.