All entries claim something to do with pumpkin, but all styles are included.Yes, we tried a fresh bottle from the 2015 batch.įault us for many things, but don’t fault us for consistency. Yes, we know that the recipe changes from year to year. So, before you start firing up a comment about Pumking, at least let us acknowledge that: We’re not sure how there’s such a gulf between the way we perceive it and the tastes of so many drinkers, aside from the fact that we find the beer a mess of cloyingly sweet and chemically artificial “natural flavors,” but it’s probably the single most unpopular beer-related opinion we have on a yearly basis. Not once, with probably dozens of different tasters over the years. This is the fifth year of us tasting it in pumpkin beer rankings, and it’s never performed well. We know how many people adore it, and consider it to be a defining part of their fall holiday season. This beer, to put it bluntly, has quite the reputation in the Paste offices. Cigar City’s Good Gourd is one of these that we wish we could have included, as it’s performed well in our tastings in the past, but we simply didn’t receive any.Īlso-a note on Pumking. Ultimately, we acquired the most we’ve ever had in one place at one time, but there were of course some notable beers missing. Seasonal creep has pushed the release of certain pumpkin beers earlier and earlier, while other breweries have responded by releasing their pumpkin offerings later. Notes on beer acquisition and personal tasteĪs usual with our tastings, most of these beers arrived from breweries around the country who wanted to participate, although determining when exactly to host the tasting was a little difficult. We found the end results fascinating, and we stand by our taste, as I’ll explain in more detail immediately below. In other cases, the exemplary (and the terrible) stand out quite easily. Oftentimes, very little separates one from other. Tasting all of those beers side-by-side in a blind setting is a true test of the taste buds.
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Those changes to process become especially interesting via a style like “pumpkin beer.” Although the definition of those words has greatly broadened to include substyles such as “pumpkin sour,” “pumpkin stout” and so many others, the majority will forever by the classic American pumpkin ale: Amber in color, malty-sweet, chock full of spices, little if anything to do with actual pumpkin. It was a no-brainer to make blind-tasting our standard. The process was helped along by a positive response, as both readers and breweries showed that they appreciated the extra labor that was going into the blind tastings.
We now conduct just about everything blind, and the quality/skill of the tasters participating in these rankings has risen as well. In the last year, roughly coinciding with my own arrival at Paste and constant contributions to Paste Drink, we’ve come to refine that process. We tasted too many beers at one time, and we didn’t conduct our tastings blind. When we ranked pumpkin beer in 2014, we must admit that Paste tastings were significantly more haphazard. So much has changed at Paste since we conducted our pumpkin beer tasting and ranking last year, and yet the beers still remain the same.
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