Southern Tier Warlock Pumpkin Stout

Now is the time of year when people start drinking the pumpkin beers.  Though typically a brownish-amber beer ranging in alcohol from 5% to 7% with little hop character, brewers pretty much do anything they want with this loosely-defined "style."  The only constants are pumpkins and a variety of pumpkin pie spices, usually some combination of cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, brown sugar, and allspice.  This particular beer is an imperial stout, to go along with the rest of the brewery's large collection of insanely spiced stouts.

And for the life of me I struggle to think of a more inhospitably repellent pumpkin beer. 

Warlock does not look any different from a thousand other imperial stouts; I love the style, but jet-black gets boring right quick.  The foam that rises to half a finger in height retains poorly.  Predictably for a stout, Warlock is completely opaque.

As is the case with its cousin, Pumking, Warlock smells like bottled pumpkin pie.  Cinnamon and clove are the easiest to pick out.  There is only a subtle hint of dark chocolate to indicate the base beer is a stout; I didn't expect much stout aroma, but was still hoping for more.  Predictably, hops make no appearance here; hops in a Southern Tier stout?  Never.

Everything goes from bad to worse at this point.

The banality of evil: Warlock looks just like any other stout

 
I recall one time, when I was a child, raiding the kitchen spice cabinet and adding just about everything to...some food item or another.  I cannot remember exactly what it was because by the time I was done using teaspoons of literally dozens of spices, the food item no longer remotely tasted like whatever it started out as.  I imagine many others have a similar experience.

Warlock is pretty much the beer equivalent of that childish experience, except presumably the brewery doesn't employ child laborers at their production facility.  This was made by a professional brewery.  I am not sure what they were thinking.  The beer contains no semblance of any beer flavor of any type.  No barley flavors.  No hop flavors.  No yeast esters, phenols or any other byproducts of fermentation.  It tastes like a child secretly snuck his favorite spices into his mother's gingerbread cookies/pumpkin pie/apple pie/whatever---seriously, it doesn't matter at this point---while she wasn't looking, but having the mind of a child thought he could dump a jar of nutmeg and two jars of cinnamon into it to make it taste better.  No, it doesn't work that way. 

If Warlock was as sweet and sugary as the other stouts from this brewery, there might be some reason to drink this.  Unfortunately it is not to be, for Warlock possesses a bewildering dryness utterly at odds with both its cousins in the Southern Tier lineup and with what this style of beer always entails: the taste of pumpkin pie.  Has anyone ever consumed or created a pumpkin pie made without any sugar, honey, molasses, or any other sweetener?  Why would you commit such a crime?  IT'S PIE.  You aren't supposed to make a pumpkin beer this dry.  The spices, most egregiously the nutmeg, coat the mouth and parch the throat with no relief from maltose, sucrose, fructose or any other sugar.


Warlock is only available in 22oz bottles, or roughly 650ml.  Since I cannot stand the site of pouring even a bad beer down the drain, I decided to recap this after drinking half of it, buy a bottle of Southern Tier Creme Brulee (an imperial cream stout brewed with vanilla beans), and mix the two together the following night.  For those readers who have never tried Creme Brulee, you need to know three things: a) it tastes like a carbonated chocolate vanilla milkshake, b) it is so sweet that science has proven you can acquire every type of diabetes from drinking a case of it, and c) it contains so much lactose that instead of getting sick from drinking it, those with lactose intolerance simply die.  It is the sweetest beer you can get off the shelf.

Even my 50-50 mixture of Warlock and Creme Brulee tasted mostly like Warlock: stupid amounts of holiday spices with no beer.   Don't even try this beer to laugh at it.  Not unless someone gives it to you for free.  I want Southern Tier to lose money on this beer so they just brew more Pumking instead.