Name: SPOOKYBOI
Brand: Four Fathers Brewing Co.
Availability: InStock

Most pumpkin beers are ales. Four Fathers Brewing Co. built this one on a lager, and that decision shapes everything else in the recipe.

SPOOKYBOI has returned for the season and is available now. The Cambridge brewery mashed the lager on a bed of oats, added cinnamon sticks and lactose during the boil, then added pumpkin spice and tea after fermentation. The brewery says that last step was specifically to push the pumpkin spice aroma and flavour further forward.

Each of those additions is working against the grain of the base style. A lager is generally prized for being clean, crisp and quick to finish, which is a difficult foundation for a dessert-leaning seasonal. Oats bring body and a rounder mouthfeel. Lactose is milk sugar, and brewer's yeast cannot ferment it, so it stays in the finished beer as residual sweetness and weight. Four Fathers describes the combined effect as a seasonal, pillowy body.

The tea is the more unusual choice. Adding an aromatic botanical after fermentation is the same basic logic as dry hopping, where the goal is aroma rather than bitterness, and heat would otherwise drive off the volatile compounds that make the addition worth making. Here it arrives with the pumpkin spice rather than instead of it.

The brewery's tasting notes run to brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, flat white coffee, vanilla and banana, before ending somewhere no spec sheet usually goes:

UGG boots kicking through dry autumn leaves.

Four Fathers sums the beer up as "basically, fall in a glass." We concur.

SPOOKYBOI is pouring on tap and is available in the brewery's retail store and through its online store.

Editor’s Take

Adding tea to a beer is not new. Adding tea to make something else taste more like itself is a lovely bit of lateral thinking. The pumpkin spice went in after fermentation, and the tea went in right alongside it. Tea carries tannin and a dry, leafy aromatic lift, which is more or less the register cinnamon and nutmeg already live in. It is less an ingredient here than a volume knob.

The detail I keep returning to, though, is flat white coffee sitting in the tasting notes of a beer with no coffee in it. There is lactose in the boil, and I would bet that is where the note comes from - milk sugar doing a convincing impression of the steamed half of a flat white, with the roasted edge of the spice standing in for the espresso. Put oats underneath that, in a style that normally prides itself on being crisp and getting out of the way, and you have a lager built to be soft on purpose. The UGG boots line in the tasting notes is doing real work too, and I mean that sincerely. Nobody writes that sentence unless they know exactly which afternoon in October they are aiming at.

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.

SPOOKYBOI Is a Pumpkin Spice Lager, Finished With Tea

Four Fathers builds its returning pumpkin seasonal on a lager rather than an ale, then softens it with oats and lactose and adds tea after fermentation to push the spice aroma. Back on tap and in retail now.

Source & Editorial