A Quest for the Great Pumpkin Beer

Pumpkin beers are more comfortable around actual pumpkins.

Introduction
I've always had a special place in my heart for pumpkin-beer. Well, I guess I've only had the special place in my heart for it since I first saw it, about 5 years ago, on some shelf in some store that I've forgotten. The important thing is, I like it.

If you've never had it, you should know that it doesn't taste as much like pumpkin as it does pumpkin-pie, which is probably good because plain pumpkin is sortof like eating a gourd or a squash. Pumpkin beer usually has flavors like nutmeg and cinnamon swirling about in it, but having tried any and every pumpkin-beer that I have been able to find, I have noticed that some were better than others. The way the two flavors (pumpkin vs. beer) were mixed was often very-different from beer-to-beer.


Pumpkins on the roof.

One Man's Personal Quest
In 2005, I'd had some trouble finding any pumpkin beer at all. So, when I went to a large beer outlet in Laurel, Maryland, and found 5 different pumpkin beers being sold, I called my friend Rob to see if he knew which ones were best. While he hadn't had all of them, he knew he liked one and didn't like another. I wanted to know which pumpkin beer was the best, so that in the future I could stock-up on the best and leave the rest. After all, pumpkin-beer comes but once a year, or for one 2-month period a year anyways.

I bought a six-pack of each of the five beers, and decided that a blind-taste-test was the only way to figure out which beer was the best of the pumpkin beers, and which ones were a gimmicky coattail-riding waste of money.

A Plan is Formulated
I've never really thought of myself as a connoisseur, and I am rarely picky about the flavor of what I eat. I am famous for finishing everything placed in front of me, even if it's bland. When I find leftovers in the fridge I have a real hard time determining if something has gone bad. I knew my opinion was rubbish, so I had to get friends to test the beers with me, both to get a wider data-sample and to see how my inferior tastes compared to the rest of the world.


Please continue on to Part 2: Process and Procedures


Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Process and Procedures
Part 3: Tasting Parameters
Part 4: Results by Beer
Part 5: Conclusions