| The Pumpkin Beer Story By Marie Battelli It's fall and that means pumpkin beer. It's a style loved by many and loathed by just as many. The anti-pumpkin feeling however is relatively modern. What isn't modern is the making of pumpkin beer. It has a long history in the USA that reaches back to colonial times. Pumpkin beer first became popular as a major component in coloniall cups of "flip"— a standard drink throughout the colonies that mixed rum, beer, and sugar. The reason for the mix was simple - those items were much more easily found in early America than things needed to produce a more sophisticed brew. But why use pumpkins instead of malt to make beer? Again the answer was one of practicality. Pumpkin was adopted simple because of availability. It is a native American plant. In fact it was completely unknown to most Europeans before the 16th century. On the other hand, good malt was not so readily accessible— fermentable sugars had to be found where they could, and in the first pumpkin beers, the meat of the pumpkin took the place of malt entirely. Pumpkin's great asset in early America was its versatility. It could be used to make good tasting beer, bread, custards, sauce, molasses, vinegar, and, on thanksgiving day, pies, as a substitute for what the Puritans said was the "unholy" minced pie. Here is a method of making pumpkin beer dated to 1771, from the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia:: Receipt for Pompion (Pumpkin) Ale: Let the Pompion be beaten in a Trough and pressed as Apples. The expressed Juice is to be boiled in a Copper a considerable Time and carefully skimmed that there may be no Remains of the fibrous Part of the Pulp. After that Intention is answered let the Liquor be hopped cooled fermented &c. as Malt Beer. NOTE-There is no cinnamon, no nutmeg, no malt; it's getting sugars for yeast to metabolize from the flesh of the fruit. Hard-up colonists used all sorts of ingreients for these sugars, including pumpkin, parsnips, molasses, cornstalks, and more. Pumpkin beer continued to be a staple throughout the 18th century but its popularity began to wane by the early 19th century as the pumpkin itself began to be viewed as something quaint and rustic. Further pushing the pumpkin to the brewer's outhouse was the new easy access to quality malts thanks to more and more local farmers growing it as a cash crop. Pumpkin beer made an aborted entry to brewing as a flavoring agent by the mid 1800s but it failed to catch on with the beer drinking masses. Today's pumpkin beers have little in common with their colonial ancestors. Instead of tasting pumpkins, modern versions give you 'pumpkin pie in a glass. Many seem to use an overbundance of spices such as nutmeg and cloves to cover up the fact that they've brewed a very mediocre beer without any real pumpkin as a main ingredents. Generally speaking, pumpkin ale can be found on store shelves from September through November and the more popular bottles tend to sell out quickly as it does on draft at bars and restaurants throughout the fall. But where did the notion of reviving pumpkin beer originate? The honor is claimed by Buffalo Bill's Brewery, which has been making their America's Original Pumpkin Beer since the late 1980s, using one of George Washington's recipes as an inspiration. Although the experimental batches used pumpkin as an ingredient, the commercial version stuck with pumpkin pie spices instead though they now make an Imperial Pumpkin Ale with some actual pumpkin. |
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