Pumpkin beer in the first week of September needs a word for what it is doing. Well Crafted Beer Co. has settled on Summerween.

That is the brewery's label for the fall changeover at its Ambler beer garden, where three seasonal beers went up over Labor Day weekend. Gourdo ESP is the pumpkin one, an ale at 6.6 percent that Well Crafted lists as an Extra Special Pumpkin.

The name borrows its shape from Extra Special Bitter, the English style that trades hop bite for a caramel-leaning malt bill. That is a useful thing to have in mind before reading the tasting notes. According to the brewery, the beer is brewed with spices and pumpkin, and carries pleasant notes of cinnamon, clove, caramel and rum.

Cinnamon and clove are the standard pumpkin spice rack and turn up in nearly everything in the category. The other two are what distinguish this one. Caramel is a malt character rather than a spice, and it sits exactly where the Extra Special framing suggests it should. Rum is the genuinely unusual entry. Well Crafted does not describe any barrel aging, so the note is coming from the spice and malt themselves, and a dark, molasses-leaning malt bill next to warm baking spice can land in that territory on its own.

Gourdo ESP is on draft at the Ambler beer garden, with cans available to take home. It went up alongside a Festbier at 5.5 percent and a Pumpkin Spice Latte Blonde Americano at 5.8 percent. The brewery says some of the lineup is pouring now and the rest is close behind.

Editor’s Take

Every year the pumpkin beer arrives a little earlier, and every year the industry agrees to treat this as normal, and somewhere in a warehouse in August there is a pallet of gourd ale waiting for a socially acceptable release date. Well Crafted has skipped the pretending entirely. They have called the week Summerween, put the pumpkin ale on while the beer garden is still in short sleeves, and got on with the afternoon. I respect it a great deal. Name the absurdity out loud and it stops being absurd.

The beer is also hiding a small joke in its initials. Extra Special Pumpkin sits one letter and one vegetable away from Extra Special Bitter, and that is not purely wordplay, because the caramel note the brewery is reporting is exactly the register an ESB occupies. Somebody thought about this rather than reaching for the nearest pun.

The rum is the part I want to sit with, though. Cinnamon and clove appear in every pumpkin beer ever brewed and by now barely register as information at all. Rum is a different sort of promise, and it is the one I would be reading the glass for.

Source & Editorial

JollyPint independently prepares release articles using information published by breweries through newsletters, websites, and other official public communications. Brewery-supplied descriptions and tasting notes are reported as provided, while editorial context is added by JollyPint.

Cinnamon and Clove Are Expected in Gourdo ESP, Rum Less So

Pumpkin beer is on at the Ambler beer garden and the brewery is not pretending it is fall yet. Gourdo ESP runs 6.6 percent, with cinnamon, clove, caramel and rum in Well Crafted's notes.

Source & Editorial