Pumpkin Lager

End of year rate-a-thon, and this gets included (what can I say my lady love pumpkin beers). 12oz bottle poured into Melbourne Bros glass. Its a beautiful glowing, hazy, orange/amber color with a small head that quickly fades. With this glass there is some visible carbonation, very nice looking. Aroma is all pumpkin spice, very vegetal and gourde-like. Taste is lightly biscuit malt sweet with a vegetal aftertaste. Goes down easy and comes off as a Lakefront brew but on the better end of their regular stuff. An average carbonation and mouthfeel round it all off. I am surprised this is a lager, no actual lager characteristics come through.

Spicey aroma. Pie spice. Amber color with essentially no head. Medium body with near creamy carbonation. Flavor is cinnamon and clove and pumpkin? It’s really good. Best pumpkin ale I think I’ve had. The finish is sort of astringent, maybe a hint of sweet, but definitely spices. That’s how to turn squash into something drinkable. Spice it!

Bottle. Huge aroma, pumpkin (obviously) spices. Pumpkin taste fairly mild, though the spice combination is huge. Keep an eye on the alcohol in this one, its big!

2005 bottle from Liquor mart drunk on 9/29/2005. A clear, filtered amber-to-light-mahogany colored beer, with a quickly dissipating off-white head, no lacing. Rather bubbly. Aroma of raw pumpkin meat, brown sugar and cinnamon. Very sweet, with some buttercream qualities, don’t get any of the hops, definitely not any lager yeast. Pretty much a sweet cream and pumpkin pie aroma. Flavor is more of the same; very sweet, brown sugar-meets-heavy cream flavor, moderately carbonated, with a raw pumpkin meatiness, that may be authentic, but seems to overpower the otherwise lighter characteristics of the mouthfeel, especially being that this is quite filtered. Looking for the lager qualities, I find none. Cinnamon/nutmeg and light allspice on the end, some plant-like, vegetal notes and more buttercream. I appreciate that it’s not overspiced, and there is a definite sweetness to it that at least gives it some body, but the mouthfeel is weak. I’m not so sure a creamy-sweet pumpkin beer works well with a lager, I’d prefer to stick to an ale. I did have this only chilled (and the first half straight from the bottle), however, so that may be a problem.

I was surprised to find this at Frog Bear Wild Boar, a bar/club not really known for the beer selection. Amber color with an off-white head. Aroma is almost spicy enough to make your eyes water. Ginger absolutely dominates, with a little pumpkin and malt crying for attention. This was a little hard to drink because of how robust the spicy flavor was. I would have welcomed more hops or malt to balance out the spice assault. Dry finish. An interesting attempt but not something I am going to search out again.