Pumpkins, Punkins and Pumkings

I had my first new pumpkin beer of the season this weekend. By new, I mean it was a pumpkin beer that I had never tried before. It was Elysian Night Owl Pumpkin Ale. (Note to reader. If you click the link and want to try the beer, you should know that the label does not look like this anymore.) It wasn't my first pumpkin beer of the season though. I had one of my favorites, Southern Tier Pumking, a few weeks ago. "Pumpkin beer comes out in August?", you think. Well some of them do, but you may be shocked that the Pumking was actually available in July along with a couple other pumpkin beer varieties. Each year, it seems that pumpkin beer comes out earlier and earlier. An employee at a liquor store that I frequent in Wilmington, joked that she is waiting for the year that it becomes a spring seasonal beer.

This is one of the most disappointing things going on in the beer industry today. The early release of seasonals. It makes it hard to actually get a beer during the season it was meant to be drank in. For beer geeks like me it's not a problem. I'm always in liquor stores looking for my next beer. Even if I don't buy anything, I check to see what's in. So for me and many others like me. We pick up a bottle of our favorite pumpkin beers to drink in July, August and September and drink it, but we also pick up another one to put away for Halloween or Thanksgiving, because you really should try these beers with caramel candy or pumpkin pie.

The problem comes when we talk, type, chat and blog about these beers and beer drinkers who aren't in the category of beer geek want to try them. These are the people who run into the store and buy the case of beer that they knew they wanted when they left their house and then run home and crack open that favorite beer. They rarely look for something new except at certain times of the year or just every once in a while. So these people here us praising pumpkin beers and then they stop in the liquor store to pick up one of the pumpkin beers before heading to grandma's house for Thanksgiving dinner and they are nowhere to be found. They might be able to find some of the pumpkin beers that no true beer geek wants like Anheuser-Busch In Bev-made Michelob Jacks Pumpkin Spice Ale and they try what tastes like a spice rack and wonder what we're yapping about. Sure. No pumpkin beer is something to be drank often or in mass quantity. You have a few in the fall and you've had your fill for a year, or at least nine months. But a truly well-crafted pumpkin beer is a great treat and the casual beer drinking is missing out because of the early release of these beers.

It's the same thing with winter and Christmas beers. You can get them in November or earlier and then you go to stock up on some red and green bottles for the company coming over between Christmas and New Year's Eve and there is none to be found. I don't know how many people have asked me where they can get a case of the Mad Elf I am serving them in late December and I have to tell them, nowhere, because I and other beer geeks bought our cases in November.

I feel breweries are missing out on a great way to spread the word on great craft beers. Casual beer drinkers can become beer geeks, but they never will if they can't get the beers that all their beer geek friends are raving about at a time of year that they are willing to splurge a little and to try something new.

Drink it in.