Fairgrounds Fall Ale
Feel The Rain Brothers Brew Co

 

12 oz bottle served in a lager glass.
Pours with a hazy copper body topped with a bone-colored head. The head has good retention and coats the glass with a thin layer of foam when tilted.
The aroma has medium malts, cooked squash and light spicing, along with an unfortunate vegetative aspect.
The flavor has good bitter/sweet balance, faint off-notes, and moderate spicing. The spicing includes a well balanced blend of cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice.
Medium body with medium carbonation.

 

Pours a deep amber, almost bronze in color with about two fingers of white head. Leaves a little lacing on top. Smell is toasted malts, cinnamon, cloves, and earth. Taste is rather good, pumpkin pie but milder like a homemade pie gone from pie pumpkin through to finished product versus the artificially flavored mass manufactured ones. Solid spice flavors, mild malty crust like flavor, and a creamy feeling that blends the two together nicely. This is a pumpkin beer without being an in-your-face highly spiced and artificially flavored beer. Would certainly pick up a six pack of this each year.

There is a spot for a packaging date on the label but there is nothing there.

Appearance: The body of the beer is a deep, dark bronze and brown color. It has a large fluffy white head with very good retention and lacing.

Aroma: There is just a little bit of clove and alcohol on the nose.

Taste: It has a good amount of cinnamon with a touch of caramel flavor and a toasted biscuit flavor. It tastes a lot like a cinnamon roll.

Mouthfeel: It feels nice and smooth with a medium-light body and it has a good texture.

Overall: It's a nice tasting beer. It doesn't really taste like pumpkin pie spice but the cinnamon flavor is nice and it really does taste like a cinnamon roll. I would certainly drink it again when I feel like having a spiced beer. It has more flavor and a better mouthfeel than many competing pumpkin beers. I would recommend it.

 

Poured from a bottle into a glass.

Pours an orange/amber brown with a ridiculous 4-FINGER tan head than nearly spilled over.
I smell a tang that makes me wonder if this bottle picked up something unwanted. Not enough to deter me though...
Tastes lightly sweet, caramelized, and spicy, then the malty base comes through. I'm not getting any "off" flavors.
Medium body with some smoothness.

Overall: Aside from its off-smelling pillow head, a nice pumpkin ale. Not too sweet or fake-candy tasting. Nice and caramely/malty. Moderately spiced.

Second-to-last bottle from the six-pack. Bottling date is unfortunately absent... but I'm pretty sure it's this year's, since the store I got it from had already sold out of last year's six-packs by the time I found a single bottle of it there. That, and I don't think Brothers' packaging said "Brothers" yet when this released last year -- they were still "3 Brothers" back then.

The beer is brown, almost orangey in the lighter parts but for the most part more into the brown range. It's also a bit hazy, though not so much that I can't see some bubbles rising around the outer edges of the glass (with the help of a flashlight.) When poured, a decent thin layer of light tan foam forms; it shrinks fairly quickly but at least some sticks around for a while, especially the thicker ring around the inside of the glass.

Smell is a mixture of an earthy, almost fruity sort of thing and the expected "pumpkin spice" smell, with the earthy thing coming in first before the spices take over. A little malty sweetness hanging out in the background too. It's a pretty nice-smelling beer, probably the nicest I've had as far as pumpkin ales go.

The taste is pumpkin spice right away, blending into that earthy fruity thing (I have to wonder if that might have something to do with the pumpkin itself? this one is made with actual pumpkin after all, not just the spices) and the malt afterward. It all comes together in a very pumpkin pie-like way, though not quite like the cheap over-spiced ones you might buy pre-made in a grocery store -- it's leaning more toward a real homemade pumpkin pie with the way that almost creamy-seeming earthy-fruity flavor blends in with the spices. There are definitely multiple spices involved, too; I'm picking out at least one more "spicy" one and another that leans more into the sweet end of things, though I can't quite put names to the flavors off the top of my head. The toasty sweet malt popping in near the end does a decent impression of a crust, too, which adds to the overall "pumpkin pie" feel even more. Aftertaste is primarily coming from that toasty malt, it seems. Basically, this tastes like pretty much exactly what I hoped a pumpkin ale would taste like before I ever tried one!

Mouthfeel doesn't stand out to me quite as much as the smell and taste do, but it does the job well enough. Doesn't seem too thin (I've noticed that thin beers with lots of spices can come across a little harsh), not too fizzy, feels pretty nice overall. Fairly smooth medium-ish sort of feel that works nicely with the flavors but doesn't stand out as a big thing of its own the way some of the "nice soft and bubbly" or "super thick and sticky" beers do.

Overall -- this is the first pumpkin ale I've had that really impressed me when I tried a single bottle around this time last year, and I was looking forward to seeing it on the shelves again this year. At first when I started through the six-pack I was thinking that it wasn't impressing me as much as last year's lone bottle, but now I'm thinking it might have just been my taste buds or something else I'd eaten that day -- this glass was definitely just about as good as I remember it being! Still my favorite pumpkin ale so far; assuming I don't stumble across one even better in the fall months next year, I can see this one continuing to sit on the "only pumpkin beer I buy full six-packs of" throne.

Liquid pumpkin pie. Nice and spicy!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pours a clear deep amber color that is clear. Smell is very interesting because it isn't overwhelmed with pumpkin or spices. Rather balanced between a roasted pumpkin pie with light cinnamon and clove with a bit of sugar. Taste is similar but the difference isn't as pronounced. Much more pumpkin. Body is medium but on the heavier side. Pretty good.