O'Fallon Pumpkin Beer

Last time I reviewed two huge pumpkin beers, each weighing in around a hefty 8.5% alcohol.  I like a good strong beer and drink them fairly often, but sometimes I like it when I can drink several beers in one sitting without needing to lean on something when I stand up.  An 8.5% behemoth like Pumking just won’t do in that case; you need something more reasonable.  Oftentimes this means sacrificing flavor intensity for drinkability; a weaker beer is made with fewer ingredients, and fewer ingredients mean fewer flavors.  This is why, say, Keystone Light tastes like carbonated rice water.

Fortunately, O’Fallon Brewery out of Missouri does not seem to like watery beer.  Prior to trying their Pumpkin Ale a few days ago, the only other beer of theirs I ever drank was Smoke---a porter brewed with smoked barley.  It might be the most intensely smoky beer I have ever tasted, even more than much stronger beers.  I pretty much expected the same treatment with their Pumpkin beer, but they made a very approachable and quaffable beer instead.  I don’t mind.

If I was holding this up to the light, you'd see it is actually a bit brighter.

O’Fallon Pumpkin is a much brighter-colored beer than the previous two pumpkin beers I reviewed, though it is a touch hazier.  Underneath the golden-amber color is a spirited carbonation level chock full of fine bubbles, leaving a film of lacing around the glass edges.  It can never get beyond half a finger in height though.

O’Fallon’s website says they brew this beer with 136 pounds of pumpkins per barrel and then finish it off with a spice mixture of cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves (the label says it is brewed with pureed pumpkin and a “spice tea”).  That much pumpkin sounds like overkill, but it doesn’t smell overpowering.  I can appreciate a more distinct pumpkin aroma than Pumking, but it does not have the rich pumpkin pie spice aroma that Pumking does.  O’Fallon seems content to let the gourd itself shine.  I do smell the cloves though; it gives the beer an almost hefeweizen-esque character (almost),

When I first sip it, the beer drinks the same each time.  There is a balanced, delicious pumpkin flavor right away, followed by a quick dash of cinnamon.  The finish is long, but slightly different with each sip.  One time I taste mostly cloves, and another time I taste a bit more nutmeg.  One sip gave me the only hint of the underlying malt bill, a simple cereal grain flavor that reminded me a bit of a bock actually.  The evolving, kaleidoscopic finish keeps it interesting.  The aggressive carbonation keeps it light and a bit airy, the lack of malt sweetness/underdeveloped body being this beer’s only minor issue.

This is a great beer for both slow sipping and multiple pours.  A solid “B” here.

Pumpkin Combustion

Well, I must apologize for not keeping this more up to date.  Between my brother heading back off to college, a weekend air show and me getting an internship, I have been a bit busy the last few weeks.  The good news is neither has kept me from trying new beers.

When I first had one of these beers (Southern Tier Pumking) three weeks back it was humid and in the nineties—hardly the weather for pumpkin beer.  Breweries put out their seasonal releases earlier and earlier now, and it has been going on long enough to make a mockery of the phrase “seasonal beer.”  Sam Adams Summer Ale came out in March this year, and Sierra Nevada is considering re-branding their seasonal lineup “quarterly releases” for the same reasons.  Now, pretty much all of the pumpkin beers are in stores, but the weather is starting to feel like fall.  I bought two new pumpkin beers today, but I want to review the other ones I’ve tried this year first.  One is the aforementioned Pumking; the other is Sam Adams Fat Jack.

Both of these beers might be thought of as imperial pumpkin beers, or double pumpkin beers (Sam Adams calls Fat Jack a double pumpkin ale).  They are strong ales, each around 8.5% alcohol; minimally hopped; and brewed with a variety of ingredients commonly found in pumpkin pie (examples include cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger).  Beyond that, they are very different.

Southern Tier Pumking pours out a clear pumpkinized gold with a small, thin, off-white head that retains moderately well.  The carbonation is lazy, but the bubbles are nice and small.  A very faint lacing sticks to the sides of the glass.  Sam Adams Fat Jack is just as clear but takes on a darker red hue, and the foam is a bit bigger.  It also leaves more lacing.

The smell sets them apart…immediately.  Fat Jack is fairly tame; too tame.  It has a vague suggestion of the sort of Germanic malt I would expect in a bock, but just barely.  A bit of pumpkin and nutmeg round out a rather boring aroma.  For Pumking, I wrote down the phrase “HOLY PUMPKIN PIE BATMAN” in big letters in my notes.  In true Southern Tier fashion, this is a no-holds-barred approach to brewing a pumpkin beer.  Their chocolate imperial stout smells overwhelmingly of chocolate; their imperial cream stout brewed with vanilla beans smells like a vanilla milkshake; and their pumpkin ale smells more like pumpkin pie than beer. Specifics include pumpkin, cinnamon and bread.

That crystal-clear difference in aroma is replicated on the tongue.  Fat Jack’s bottle proudly proclaims all of the ingredients it is brewed with, to include nutmeg, allspice, ginger, cinnamon, pumpkin, and (weirdly) smoked barley malt.  I can actually taste the smoke a bit (hint of campfire log) and a mild hint of pumpkin and nutmeg; the ginger, cinnamon and allspice are nowhere to be found.  By contrast, the explosion of pumpkin pie flavor in Pumking is almost funny.  The taste focuses more on the spices involved (especially cinnamon) than the actual pumpkin, but both are much stronger individually than all of Fat Jack’s flavors combined.  Fat Jack also has a hint of pure ethanol flavor that Pumking is blessedly devoid of.

The two beers also differ markedly in texture.  Fat Jack is medium-full, edging towards full (sweet).  Southern Tier has a reputation for being the wrong brewery for diabetics; each time I’ve had their vanilla cream stout I feel like I need to buy a glucometer afterwards.  I was bracing for the same thing here, but even though it is a bit juicier than Fat Jack the spices are so strong that it feels dried out a bit.  In any event, I think the final gravity is lower than Fat Jack (which wouldn’t surprise me, Sam Adams’ strong beers are always too damn thick).

I don’t suppose Fat Jack is bad at all.  But for a “double pumpkin” beer that’s 8.5% alcohol I really expected more pumpkin flavor.  With Pumking, Southern Tier somehow exceeded my already-high expectations for pumpkin pie combustion.  I definitely like it better; people who hate pumpkins or pumpkin pies should avoid it at all costs though, as should anyone who hates cinnamon.

People need to stop buying so much of this so I can get more....

Expect more pumpkin beer reviews in the coming weeks.  I'm drinking another new one now (O'Fallon Pumpkin) and I've got a fourth in the fridge for this weekend.  I've also recently tried a new abbey double and two new imperial stouts, so I've got some catching up to do. Cheers!

Bell's The Oracle (on-tap)

Stephen King once wrote that it is okay to drink a six-pack a day as long as you start after 5pm---if you start before, that makes you an alcoholic.  I don't drink anywhere near that volume of beer, but I generally agree with the principle: no beer before for 5 for me.  On Wednesday I decided to break that rule to celebrate getting an internship.  I went to lunch at John's Tavern (Winfield's beer Mecca) and ordered Bell's latest release, The Oracle, on tap.

Bell's is well-acquainted with hoppy India Pale Ales (IPA) like this one.  I imagine their Two Hearted IPA is the second best-selling IPA in the Midwest/Great Lakes region after Goose Island's, and even at $20 a six-pack Hopslam double IPA sells out in less than a week every winter.  This one gets much less press than either of those two, and seems to be more limited.


I had this in a semi-dim restaurant, so I don't know how much I should trust my vision here.  It looks much paler than I expect from an IPA or double IPA, maybe a few shades darker than gold.  Crystal clear too, no haze or sediment.  It was topped by about one finger's worth of white foam that probably would have been higher if it hadn't had so much room to spread out (they served it to me in this wide glass).  The foam retained well and left a lot of lacing on the side.

People don't eat hops, so describing the way a hoppy beer tastes or smells can be amusing.  The most common descriptions seem to fall into four categories, depending on the hop variety: grapefruit/citrus; tropical (mango and pineapple); floral (flowers, grass); and pine-like (pine cones and tree sap/resin).  The Oracle falls firmly in the grapefruit end of the citrus spectrum here.  There is just a hint of pine-like spiciness on the nose, not much else.  Like many IPA's, this one does not really smell all that bitter.

If you go to Bell's website, they say they made "only the slightest concession to malt & balance" when brewing this beer.  Not an exaggeration.  Drinkers used to Hopslam (which has almost the same 10% alcoholic strength but less hops) will be taken aback at how much more intense this is.  The Oracle might not smell bitter, but it definitely tastes bitter.  There is an odd type of orange (I can't think of the name) with a very bitter peel that this sort of tastes like, coupled with grapefruit rind and a bit of pine.  Intensely bitter, the malt contributes almost no sweetness at all.  I like a bitter hop bomb every now and then, and 16 ounces of this pretty much met my weekly quota.  It actually might be a little too dry, but that's not much of a dig against it---Bell's clearly succeeded in letting the hops shine here. 


I like this a lot.  I hadn't had a hoppy beer in almost a month, and I thought the last one was pretty unpleasant (Founders Devil Dancer....that's for another post).  My only regret was trying to have it with a spicy chicken salad....the one-two blitzkrieg of hops and buffalo sauce made the poor glass of Goose Island Green Line I had afterwards taste like water.

I would also like to say the staff and service at John's was excellent, as it usually is.