Gee, is it almost October all ready?

Oktoberfests.

As many as I can my hands on, particularly the imports.

 

Sorry, that was the name of another thread.

But me too.

 

Actually think this COVID mess has slowed it a fraction.

 

Excited to see Atomic Pumpkin in cans. Picked up two 6 packs Monday. My favorite pumpkin ale below 7%.

 

Beer is not important.

 

This reminds me that this is the first year I'll miss Sam Adams Octoberfest in almost a decade , since they don't distribute here

 

Surely the German heritage down in Chile will offer up some festbier though, no?

 

There will be some available for sure, but here in Santiago not as many as in the south (the region where Germans colonized in the 1860s).

Craft breweries in Santiago (there are many actually) for the most part are mostly concerned with making IPAs (they are pretty good at it too) and don't care much for traditional styles. We get some imports though, so they will be heavily featured in my rotation

 

Have never read anything about it being used as an adjunct, only as the primary fermentable - but, as I noted in this version of my standard (anti-) pumpkin ale rant, there is very little actual source material about colonial era pumpkin "ale" (sic).

 

As I stated in the Best Euro beers thread, seasonal creep is world-wide. When I was in Osaka a year ago, they were coming out with the Autumn beers (the big Japanese breweries versions of Festbiers/Marzens) in August.

FWIW, they were as good as most of the widely available American craft versions of the style.

I was drinking damn near every beer I could get my hands on when I was over there, most didn't get reviews because I couldn't read the labels and the beers didn't have a picture I could be sure of on the site.

 

The Japanese have nothing on Bavarian early 19th century brewers:

"Serving of beer"

"Before May first the Märzenbier is not allowed to be served."

"The beer brewers are allowed to sell their self brewed Märzenbier at their own Märzen cellars in the months of June, July, August and September, and to provide their guests with beer and bread; the serving of meals and other drinks is forbidden."

 

Maybe the 'gubmint' should step in and decide when seasonal beers are released. (Nah, that'd never happen in the freedom-lovin' US of A).

 

The beverage that would result from that linked recipe is a Pumpkin Wine since it is just fermented fruit juice.

On a somewhat related note below is something I posted in the past:

I attended the 2013 National Homebrewers Conference that was conducted in Philadelphia. There were two excellent beer history presentations:

· Beers of our Founding Fathers - Frank Clark

· Colonial Brewing Practices – Bob Grossman

Bob Grossman also had 6 homebrewed Colonial era beers available for sampling. From memory: Spruce Ale, Sage Ale, Pumpkin, Parsnip & Walnut Ale, George Washington Small Ale, 1750 Porter, and a Braggot.

One of the beers brewed by Bob Grossman was a small beer (during the Colonial times this would have been from the second runnings). The 1750 Porter was of moderate strength (5-6% ABV IIRC) and the Braggot was of high strength (8% ABV IIRC).

It was common for the beers to be made with (or augmented) with ingredients other than malted barley since malted barley was expensive (most of the malted barley was imported from England).

Cheers!

 

Yup.

As I wrote, I've just never come across any suggestion that pumpkin and all the other "fermentables" used in Colonial America (which, like another era we discuss often, "pre-Prohibition America" covers a long time period) were commonly used as adjuncts by commercial brewers. And, from what I've seen, those commercial breweries often did their own malting in that period once barley was being grown in the colonies. Still there is evidence of many colonial regulations about what was allowed in commercial beer. As Gregg Smith (Beer in America - The Early Years 1587 - 1840) noted:

(But that doesn't mean it didn't happen.)

I agree that once one opens the discussion to "home/farm/personal" brewing, all sorts of things were likely used to substitute or supplement malt - but still (as we've discussed re: Spuce Beer) a lot of the recipes for the "beers" brewed with those "other" ingredients often did not use any malt, usually relying on molasses or other sugars as the primary fermentable. I wonder if a private brewer, once he got a hold of enough malt to brew a batch of beer, would simply do so? Why "ruin" the batch with "persimmons, pumpkins and the Jerusalem artichoke" (ingredients mentioned by Stanley Baron, Brewed in America).

Not that malting didn't eventually catch on in the US:

Which was a pretty long-lived business (they sold their Buffalo NY malthouse to a subsidiary of Carling in 1962) - but, of course, John Adam's brother Samuel is today the better known colonial era maltster (though, according to some sources, not a very good one - ran his old man's business into the ground).

 

When do we see commercial examples of "pumpkin beer" start showing up.then? And if it wasn't based on some historical tradition, where did the idea come from?

 

But...

Well, pumpkin and other squashes were used as fermentables to make alcoholic beverages - but the "pumpkin pie spice-flavored" beer is a 20th century "craft innovation".

A couple of quotes from the books cited above:

 

Such a shame, a local brewer makes a porter every year brewed with pumpkins that he roasts in his malt kiln and it's one of my favorite fall beers every year. Seems an opportunity missed

Gotta love the american instinct to ascribe any weird impulse we have to our founding father's though

 

JK, we are both in agreement here and for the situation of farm/household brewing there is a significant chance there would be no written record since folks of the 1600's and 1700's were sometimes (often?) illiterate.

Cheers!

 

Fresh Hop season is upon us!

http://www.washingtonbeerblog.com/t...the-first-fresh-hop-beer-of-the-year-kind-of/

The actual best beers of late summer/early autumn.

 

Hmmm...I need to pick up some Warlock this season...