![]() ![]() On the positive side, Night Owl is one of the best pumpkin ales I've ever tried. I took a flyer on Night Owl because 1) the brewery is one of the most trustworthy in the country, 2) it's been getting strong reviews this year, and 3) I haven't had a pumpkin beer in a few years and began to wonder if I'd unfairly maligned the style in my memory. I wouldn't mind having an Oktoberfest along with my pumpkin pie, but combining the two seems unnecessary. A light-bodied beer, usually malted with some Munich or Vienna malts to give it an orangey hue, and a handful of the usual spices-nutmeg, cinnamon, clove. There's nothing about pumpkin that mandates a beer must taste like pumpkin pie, and yet this seems to be the near-universal interpetation of style. ![]() Yet they are popular, and people enjoy seeing them come around each year if for no other reason that to celebrate the change of season. Pumpkin ales occupy a class of Rodney-Dangerfield beers along with light fruit ales and chili beers-they don't get no respect. Today's beer, Elysian Night Owl, a spiced pumpkin ale. I have been working my way through some of them, and I'll try to do better about getting up respectable reviews. Fortunately, brewers seem to share this view, and they release scads and scads of specialty beers around this time of year. For us, extra-pale ales are fine and good, but they can't hold a candle to the meatier, burlier beers that start appearing around Halloween. ![]() (As I now know-and probably you do, too-that's when the bulk of beer is sold.) But for beer geeks, the most interesting beers are those that go best with a cold day. Long, long ago, in a land-well, in this land-it was the case that summer was the primo beer season. ![]()
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