Are Pumpkin Beers losing popularity?

i went to two beer stores this weekend that both have a relatively decent beer selection and both only had one pumpkin beer left

 

You could drink maybe one, but it wrecks the palate and the sweetness nearly knocks you off your feet... But sugar has never phased most American and their drinking.... so probably not.

 

Plenty of Pumking over here in MA!

 

The Early American Colonists brewed ale with pumpkins. Pumpkin Beer is a true American style.

 

Pretty much only picked up one pumpkin beer this year and it was whole hog pumpkin from Stevens point. Can't say that I enjoy pumking anymore it's a shadow of what it formerly was years ago now a hoppy mess.

Schlafly Pumpkin Ale will always be my favorite and best one but I haven't seen it in years.

 

There were brewers on the Mayflower. Colonists in Massachusetts were introduced to pumpkins by the native population. Pumpkin ale may have been the first beer/ale style developed in North America.

 

It is definitely a style should be celebrated more. I think true beer geeks do, but the trendy people move onto the next best thing. Which usually lasts 2 months. Pumpkin Ale is older than the USA.

 

According to Baron's Brewed in America [1962] one of the few surviving references to a pumpkin ale is a "Receipt for Pompion Ale" dated 1771, which originated in Buckingham County VA, now in the papers of the American Philosophical Society:

The pumpkin was used as the fermentable ingredient, replacing the malt (making it what today would legally be wine), not a flavoring. The only "spices" used were hops. Baron also later notes that "Brewing from pumpkins...had never been popular...".

"Buffalo" Bill Owens who created the first "craft era" pumpkin ale claimed he based his originally (before he found it to be bland, and dumped the pumpkin pie spices in it and, later, even dropped the actual pumpkin as an ingredient) on a recipe of George Washington's but it does not exist - only a reference by Washington about it.

Pre-revolutionary America's most popular alcoholic beverage was cider. The book Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition [1979] estimated the "drinking age" (+15) per capita consumption of cider was 34 gallons in 1710-1770. The first stat available for beer consumption isn't until 1810, when it was 1.3 gallons/person.

The mythology of pumpkin beer is craft's equivalent of AB's "Adolphus Busch got the centuries old recipe for Budweiser from Bohemian Monks" (at least they admitted it was nonsense by mid-20th century).

OK...

 

They've never been particularly popular with me personally but a couple of observations -

1. I don't see it as much in the stores as maybe in the past but I'm also not really looking and keeping a tally.

2. I went to a beer festival about 2 weeks. Maybe 1500 people there (per a brewery owner friend) with quite a few breweries represented. I don't remember a single pumpkin beer being offered. Not saying they weren't there but in my group of 3 - zero of us tried any and I don't remember seeing any there at all. Given this was the start of October - prime Pumpkin beer season, if it was still a big hit - they would have had some there.

3. The big thing seemed to be coffee at this particular fest. Almost every brewery had a coffee beer available with coffee being added to many styles. Ciders and fruit beers followed. Last year at the same fest it was Gose all over the place.

4. It used to be quite the running joke here that as soon as the 4th of July was over it seemed like pumpkin/winter seasonals hit the shelf and that was wrong. I haven't seen that with pumpkin this year.