beauty and the brew

This was my other pumpkin beer for my personal flight night 2013 at Shakespeares in Kalamazoo.

Totally different approach to pumpkin beer than Pumking for sure.

This is Shipyard's Smashed Pumpkin (9% abv).

This is a darker orange than Pumking, but still very vibrant. Same small head, but with slightly less retention, leaving only a thin ring around the edge.

The aroma is deceving! There are lots of seasonal spices in here with warm, bready notes. There is no actual pumpkin in the recipe, so I anticipated it to be more spiced and sweet, and would simply allude to pumpkin flavor.

However. This beer was quite different. It actually was very earthy, almost peat-like. It has a vegetal quality that I anticipated moreso from a beer with actual pumpkin. There was some spicy ginger in the finish, but otherwise I found that there wasn't much in terms of cinnamon, nutmeg, or cloves. Definitely not the pumpkin pie flavors you get from a lot of pumpkin beers, so I appreciated trying something so distinctly different. I'm also getting some herbal notes and a little bit of maple syrup (oh god, not Mrs. Butterworth, the real stuff. From Michigan). There was a touch of bitter hops at the finish.

The mouthfeel, again, was unexcepted. For somethig less sweet than other pumpkin beers, I anticipated a lighter mouthfeel. Instead, it was quite sticky but carbonated, like a cola. Definitely had some warmth from the high alcohol percentage.

This beer really leaves me baffled, considering it claims to have no actual pumpkin in it (same goes for their Pumpkinhead). I think it's a little bit less balanced than I expected, but I love the direction it's going in. Much more tailored to those looking for something with classic beer elements  mixed with fresh pumpkin flavor.