GIVE THANKS FOR GREAT BEER

I love Thanksgiving. I fucking LOVE Thanksgiving! It is the epitome of gluttony that all other gluttonous holidays presume to challenge. Halloween is good and gluttonous, but all that candy will make your stomach convulse and cause you to clean up more of the house than you had intended to that night. Christmas, a holiday that is supposed to be a high religious observation, has turned into a materialistic orgy of spending. It's a close cousin to gluttony, but doesn't have that physically revolting aspect to it. Yeah, there's a big feast, but does anyone post Facebook pictures of their plate, overflowing with the Christmas dinner? No. I guarantee I'll see at least a dozen photos where the good china is completely obscured by heaping mounds of potatoes, stuffing and cranberry sauce with a large hunk of turkey on top, the whole thing smothered in gravy. There might even be a vegetable or two poking out from somewhere. For gluttony, Thanksgiving cannot be beat. End of argument.

The day starts off with a parade full of lip-syncing celebrities and high school marching bands from around the country that are just learning how cold New York can get in November. And there's always the wonderful possibility that they'll lose control of one of the balloons, sending it careening into a building's façade, deflating it and smothering the creepy-ass clowns marching underneath. All this while you're drinking your coffee and having a light breakfast to make room for the Gobble Day feast. But in the afternoon, while the cooking is going on, we have football. Most years it's a Dallas Cowboys game and a beat down of the Detroit Lions by anyone and everyone. This year the Lions are supposedly a good team and facing the Packers. That could be the game to watch, at least until dinner is served. Time for food! And the food is epic: birds exceeding twenty pounds, mounds of stuffing with all sorts of mouth-watering ingredients, bowls piled high with mashed potatoes that are soon to be swimming in sinful turkey gravy, cranberry sauce (from the can or freshly made, doesn’t matter), butter-slathered rolls and don't even get me going on the desserts. I wonder if the spike in shopping on Black Friday compares to the spike in visits to the cardiologist.

All this food is awesome, but we need drink to go with the day's schedule. We have coffee for the parade…that is sacrosanct. Besides, I don't drink beer before 11AM, or is it 10AM? Doesn't matter; I need my coffee. But once the games begin it's drink on! Some households have Thanksgiving dinner early so there's no need for lunch. We still have ours close to the traditional dinner time…that's usually because I've underestimated the bird's cooking time…so appy-type snacks during the first game are served in lieu of a true lunch. Football and appies? That screams for a lager of some sort, but nothing that will weigh you down or get you so snookered that you stuff the bird with the sweet potatoes. Think of your beer selections throughout the day just like a beer tasting or sample flight. You start off with the lightest and lowest ABVs first and work your way up in ABV, body, IBU and flavor. No, I am NOT suggesting a "light" beer to start. Just wipe that out of your mind. No NASCAR beers!

I do have one rule on Thanksgiving: every beer I drink will be brewed in the US. Thanksgiving is an American holiday and drinking imports is a slap in the face of those intrepid pilgrims who fled religious oppression in Europe. So for the football games I'll probably go with a pilsner of some sort: lighter-bodied, low-ish ABV, but still flavorful. Possibilities: Full Sail Session Lager, Great Lakes Dortmunder Gold, Victory Prima Pils, Troegs Sunshine Pils, Rogue Dead Guy Ale, Sierra Nevada Glissade, Oskar Blues Mamas Little Yellow Pils. If I could get it where I live I'd go with the Great Lakes Dortmunder Gold, but I'm probably going to settle for the Sierra Nevada Glissade.

I understand that there are so many other beers that could be mentioned for any role within this post, so I attempted to stick to those available in the Garden State.

If you love to cook, like I do, and you grew up watching Julia Child you knew that some of the wine went into the cooking and some of the wine went into Julia. That's perfectly swell when you're doing a television cooking show where a bunch of other cooks are preparing the ingredients and precooking the finished dish. In my opinion, drinking while preparing a big meal is not the best idea. You're going to have a very minor buzz from the football game beer, adding onto that while managing a very sharp chef's knife could ruin the holiday with an emergency room visit. I, for one, don't relish sitting in the emergency room, hand wrapped up in bandages, next to the moron who got his head stuck in the cavity of the turkey because he thought he could wear it as hat. Too much beer can do that and one time when I was marveling at a similar moron, I realized I was sitting next to a mirror. So, I will go well off-form here and suggest that you drink water as you cook. You'll need the hydration for the beer to come as well as to survive the heat of the kitchen as the oven does its job and every burner throws flame. Save your alcohol tolerance for the main attraction.

The cooking is done and the good china is on the table along with the good silverware and crystal ware. You know, all that stuff on your wedding registry that kept you from getting that BBQ set-up that could accommodate two whole pigs and three sides of beef. The bird is out and everything else has been put into serving vessels so that pictures can be taken. Why? I don't really know. Has anyone ever gone back and looked at pictures of the turkey from prior years? The sink and kitchen counter are nowhere to be found under teetering columns of pots, pans, utensils, cutting boards and mixing bowls. They can wait because it's time to eat! And drink, of course. I've made some mistakes in the past with pairing a beer with Thanksgiving dinner. My usual mantra is "drink what you like", but that doesn't really work here. One year I poured a strong Belgian brown. Not only did it overpower much of my dinner in flavor, but the high alcohol content, paired with the tryptophan, made it really hard for me to help with the cleanup…or at least that's what I told the Geisha. Another year I poured a DIPA, which had the same effect: could barely taste the food and it knocked me for a loop.

So this year I need to find something with a flavor that will compliment all the dishes without overpowering them and also allow me to make it to dessert in good enough shape to be able to bring another beer into the mix. I don't want to repeat the beer from the football game, as it would disappear entirely and taste like nothing against the feast, but I've learned my lesson with too much flavor. Right off the bat my mind goes to Bluepoint Toasted Lager. It has a slight nuttiness that should pair well with much of what I serve on Thanksgiving and a light enough body and low enough ABV to get me through dinner. Let's face it, with all the food we eat, one will NOT be enough. Other options would be ambers that don't bring a large hop load to your palate. New Belgium Fat Tire would work as would many of the malt-forward American-brewed Oktoberfests. I'd lean toward Weyerbacher's Autumnfest here as it's a bit lighter and approaches the American Amber Ale style more than a true Oktoberfest, but the Toasted Lager will be my choice this year.

I mentioned getting one more beer in, didn't I? Oh yes, if they can have dessert wines then there HAS to be dessert beers. I could go one of two ways here. I could either choose something that compliments most desserts, like a coffee Stout, or find a beer that is a dessert within itself, like a frambois. What did the girl at the end of Trading Spaces say? "Why can't we have both?" We could, and then we'd sleep really well, but I will probably go with just one, even though I'll discuss both here.

At the end of the Thanksgiving Day Parade, Santa Claus makes his entrance, symbolically ushering in the holiday buying frenzy. Christmas is the next holiday on the radar (along with Hanukah) and it's time to prepare. Trim up the trees, deck the halls, get your gift shopping done and prepare for that upcoming feast. So why not symbolically usher in the holiday season with a holiday beer at the end of the meal? Many of them will be released by that time and they're as varied in execution as summer beers and pumpkin ales. Some will be spiced, some will have fruit, most will be strong, but you can be assured of one thing: with the multitude that are being brewed you will find one to your liking. And you should be able to find one with the correct flavor profile to pair with whatever dessert you're serving. I have a Heavy Seas Yuletide from 2009 set aside for this year, but The Geisha will have me go out and get Harpoon's Winter Warmer (hopefully they won't be as heavy-handed with the spice this year) and I'll more than likely have more in the beer fridge to choose from. Southern Tier Old Man Winter, Weyerbacher Winter Ale, Sam Smith Winter Welcome and Saint Bernardus Christmas Ales tend to be staples and that selection gives me a nice range of beers to choose from.

But then there are those beers that are desserts unto themselves. A well-aged barleywine, an old ale or a bourbon barrel-aged stout can take the role of a snifter of brandy with ease. Belgian-style Quads are like having liquid bread in your chalice. Imperial Stouts deliver chocolate and coffee flavors with each luscious sip. If fruits are more your style then you've got options there as well. Most lambics available in this country are blended with fruit, like frambois, kriek, peche, etc, but there are some fruit beers that don't deliver the sour pucker that many lambics do. Dogfish Head Fort is a strong raspberry ale that would be delicious as a reduction over vanilla ice cream or enjoyed from a snifter. New Glarus also does a raspberry ale and one made with Wisconsin cherries. If you crave that pucker then Allagash Interlude, Ommegang Ommegeddon or Weyerbacher Rapture should do well without having to look to Belgium for the funk.

The point is that you've got many choices when it comes to beer with Thanksgiving and you can do what you want. I for one will be trying to stick the "rules" I outlined here and will now bullet point for quick reference and reminder.

- In the AM, get your coffee on…it will be a long day

- All beer should be domestic to honor this very American holiday

- Start off light-bodied and low alcohol content, especially if you're cooking

- If you're cooking, hydrate, hydrate, hydrate

- Your dinner beer should not overpower the meal or your alcohol tolerance

- For dessert all bets are off…drink what you like

- Give thanks for good health, good fortune, good friends, family (good or otherwise) and great beer

PUMPKIN ALES

An American Beer Classic or a Travesty?

For such a young country we have contributed so much to world culture...good and bad. Jazz first sounded from clubs in the US south, but from the Northwest came the disco beat. To help the children of the world play more safely, we created Nerf balls and Super Soakers, but the Manhattan Project was devised and realized in an American think tank. De Niro and Pacino were native New Yorkers while Keanu grew up in the surf of Hawaii.

This dichotomy of awesomeness and suckiness also pervades the American beer scene. The terroir of the Pacific Northwest imparts wonderful citrus and pine notes to the hops varieties transplanted or developed there and, the argument of which brewery first did it aside, the "black" IPA was first brewed in an American brewery. But then we unleashed onto the beer-drinking world a concoction that, like most other beer geeks, I will seek out every September for some unknown reason. Even though I don't like the style, it am compelled to grab the new seasonals for some reason. Maybe it's to see if a miracle has occurred and they're better this year than last. Maybe I'm just a masochist or I cave to peer pressure too easily. Who knows? I speak, of course, of pumpkin ales.

Necessity to Nostalgia to Nasty

It goes without saying that when British colonists arrived in the new world their first rule was that of survival. A new world brings different climates and soil conditions. Many fruits and vegetables they knew from their homeland would not grow in American soil and no one was sure what was edible, what could kill them and what would merely make them crap and puke out their own body weight for three days straight. Friendship with the natives helped in this manner and larders became filled with indigenous species: among which were turkey, corn, oysters and that massive, orange squash we call the pumpkin. It is TOO a squash...I thought it was a gourd until I looked it up.

Once their needs were fulfilled they would have done as anyone else would have done and turned their eye to the luxuries they missed from home. They would have attempted to make their favorite dishes substituting ingredients from the area and probably would have attempted to make tea from the leaves and roots of the varied flora. And it is certain that they attempted some sort of alcohol, for we know that they did indeed brew beer. But with what ingredients?

Growing barley and malting it would have been difficult, if not impossible at first. Slashing and burning forest to make ariable fields was time-consuming and the first priority for those fields would have been food crops. So the colonists had to find other fermentable sugars to feed the yeast. The easily-grown pumpkin fit the bill nicely and pumpkin ale was born.

But then Manifest Destiny expanded our borders and the farming community increased the number of available products. Ingredients for everything from cosmetics to weapons to snake oil abounded. Barley and wheat became available for brewing from the farms and also from trading. The shipyards began to crank out sailing vessels and trade opened up with Europe, allowing cherished malts and hops from England and Germany to come to American ports. There was no longer a need to use a lowly gourd squash for brewing and the practice was phased out in favor of beers with familiar flavors.

There was a period where you'd probably be hard-pressed to find a pumpkin ale, but we are a nostalgic lot for a country just over 235-years-old. Tragic eighties fashion has made a return in "retro"wear. Disco, while it still sucks, has become nostalgic and is met with enthusiasm in some nightclubs. We have a penchant for looking back on bad stuff that we let die and reviving it. I can't explain this obvious self-destructive behavior, but it's what we do.  

The "Original"

In 1985, Buffalo Bill's Brewery decided to drag the rotting carcass of pumpkin ale out of its well-deserved resting place. All well and fine. Then, tragically, the trend spread and today we face a virtual tsunami of pumpkin ales every Fall. An alarmingly large percentage of the craft brewers now offer a pumpkin ale and I, for one, wish that they'd stop and put this trend back into the grave. But, for a group of people that like to innovate and try things that no one else has, our craft brewers must develop feelings of inadequacy if one brewery is making a style that they don't. One person starts the wave and then everyone grabs their boards and jumps on. It doesn't matter if that wave is made up of a coppery brown, cloudy fluid that has the taste of astringent spices and gourd innards. The brewers follow each other and we, as beer drinkers, snatch up our favorite brewery's seasonal offerings like obedient sheep as if it was cipro and your neighbors were receiving letters filled with a mysterious, white powder.

If you haven't figured it out by now, I am not a fan of these "pumpkin pie in a bottle" brews. If I want pumpkin pie, I'll buy a pumpkin pie. However, I try a good cross-section of them each year to see if anyone is doing anything different and each year I'm largely disappointed. I have given some of them high reviews on Beer Advocate, but that's because I review to the style and some are better than others and there are even a few that are refreshingly different...very few.

There are so many of them that I can't cover all of them here. So I concentrated on a few that are readily available in Northern Jersey each and every year.

 

The Satndard

Dogfish Head's Punkin may be middle-of-the-road for the "pumpkin pie in a bottle" lot, but it is the standard. It's the beer that helped launch DFH and also the one that took pumpkin ales from being done by a few scattered breweries trying to be noncomformists to a national craze of comformity. This beer may be near and dear to Sam Calagione's heart, but I do blame Punkin for this horrid revival. Buffalo Bill's revived the beast; DFH put it in a top hat and tails and made it perform "Puttin' on the Ritz."

Packs a whallop

Weyerbacher Imperial Pumpkin took the typical pumpkin ale and ramped up the sugar load. The ravenous yeast went to town and the ABVs went through the roof. This pumpkin ale will shortly make you forget that you're drinking a pumpkin ale, which is a good thing in my book. But it is also one of the better balanced pumpkin ales, with the malts and spices sharing equal billing.

Nicely different

 

Southern Tier's offering in this category takes a different tack and tastes more of roasted pumpkin seeds than it does of pumpkin pie. The spices are minimal and the flavor of toasted pepita pervades. Perhaps they were inspired by Mexican cooking or maybe they were aiming for something different. Either way, this is one of the few pumpkin ales I enjoy despite the fact that I turn my nose up at the pumpkin seeds The Geisha roasts every year. Maybe that's because I saw the goo they were fished out of.

Where's the pumpkin?

Sixpoint does one called Autumnation. The can says that it is "flavored with spices and pumpkin", so I am lead to believe that the pumpkin is not used primarily for its fermentable sugars, but as a flavoring agent. This one is heavily hopped and the pine and citrus flavors mask any flavor of pumpkin and even quells some of the spices. It would be interesting to taste this done without the pumpkin to see if there's really any difference, but they may have to label it an IPA if they bothered to label it at all.

Astringency Ale

 

Bluepoint usually does pretty well with beers flavored with fruits so I thought it would stand to reason that they'd do a nice job with pumpkin. I was wrong...well sort of. It's not so much the pumpkin that is the killer in this beer it's that their base beer is lighter than most and it can't really stand up to the astringency given off by the spices.

Stop the bourbon barrel madness!

Heavy Seas puts out two pumpkin ales every year. Although I have yet to try Great Pumpkin I have had Great'Er Pumpkin which is the Great Pumpkin aged in bourbon barrels. The pumpkin is very evident in this one and the spices bring pie to mind but this beer clearly illustrated that not all styles are conducive to bourbon barrel-aging.

The best NJ can offer?

I'd be remiss to exclude beers from Jersey in this entry so let's discuss River Horse's Hipp-O-Lantern. It is certainly one of the more cleverly named pumpkin ales, but the product itself is about as run-of-the-mill as DFH's Punkin without the heart-warming history, quality controls and consistency.

Where's the American Ingenuity?

Every year schools, companies, service organizations, magazine, web sites, newspapers and communities hold pumpkin carving competitions. Some of these are broken up into categories like scariest, funniest, most creative, best theme, poltical, company appropriate, etc. If you go to the internet and look up winners of these contests you will see some creative thinking and phenomenal pumpkin carving skills. Sadly there only seem to be three categories in pumpkin ales: 1) sucks, 2) doesn't suck so much and 3) not horrible.

I don't doubt the skills of our craft brewers but the originality seems to be lacking (with noted exceptions). I imagine that will change since, rest assured, groups of homebrewers have come up with pumpkin brews heretofore unheard of. I'd love to see some of these surface and if you homebrew or belong to a club that has come up with a unique pumpkin ale, please brag about it in the comments below.

In the spirit of historical nostalgia, has anyone tried brewing one without hops but with a gruit made of herbs and spices that would have been available to the colonists?

What does lager yeast do with the sugars found in pumpkin? Has a jack-o-lager been brewed yet?

Here's an idea...get some vanilla ice cream and make a float...a pumpkin pie ale-a mode. This could be one good way to dispose of the rest of the four- or six-pack that you may have been forced to purchase.

If we're going to insist on brewing these noxious beers year after year then let's truly hit them with the American stamp of in-your-face! The British developed the IPA, but we took the IBUs into the stratosphere and brought our aggressively flavored hop varietals into the mix. The Germans perfected wheat beer but we went big and brewed the first wheat wine. The Russians clamored for stronger stouts, so the British made them Imperial stouts and then we got our hands on it and added coffee or aged it in bourbon barrels. We took porter and made it with smoked malts. We're not content to EVER leave well enough alone. So I want to see this spirit applied to pumpkin ales. Just because we invented the style it's sacrosant? I can't believe that and I hope that perhaps a few more will come around that I might actually enjoy drinking. Then again, like Linus, I might be waiting for a long time as pumpkin ale fans mock me.

United Feature Syndicate