Throwback Earns Its Name Twice, and Adds Vanilla Bean

Hitchhiker's pumpkin ale returns Friday, built on real pumpkin and toasted malts and finished with vanilla bean alongside the usual spice blend. The name fits the style's history as well as its own.

• Style: Pumpkin Ale
• Release Date: 2026-09-18
• ABV: 6.6%
• Hitchhiker Brewing Co. (Pittsburgh, PA)

Hitchhiker Brewing Co. brings its pumpkin ale back on Friday, and the name has always been a little more layered than a seasonal returning to the calendar.

Pumpkin beer is one of the oldest brewing traditions in North America. Colonial brewers used pumpkin as a fermentable because malted barley was scarce and expensive, and the squash was neither. What began as a substitution eventually became a style, then a seasonal, then a punchline. The through-line is genuinely old, which makes Throwback an apt name for a beer built on it.

The recipe is 6.6 percent and uses actual pumpkin alongside toasted malts, which is the half of the equation that usually gets overlooked. Toasting the malt supplies the crust-and-caramel character people associate with pie, and pumpkin on its own is mild and vegetal enough that it needs that support to read the way the name promises.

Conditioning is where Hitchhiker separates it. The beer is finished on a blend of pumpkin spices and vanilla bean - the spices being the expected part, the vanilla less so. Vanilla sits lower in the register than cinnamon or clove and tends to soften a spice bill rather than compete with it, pushing the result toward custard rather than potpourri.

For a beer that spends most of its reputation defending itself, that is a reasonable way to go about it.

Throwback is available for online pre-order now. Pick-up begins Friday, September 18 at Hitchhiker's Mt. Lebanon and Sharpsburg taprooms.