Dessert Station: Pumpkin Cheesecake Is Not the Pumpkin Pie

Corporate Ladder Brewing Company already makes a pumpkin dessert beer. The one it put on tap today is deliberately not that beer.

Dessert Station: Pumpkin Cheesecake is pouring now at the Palmetto taproom, a gluten free dessert beer at 6.5 percent ABV. The can lists it as conditioned on pumpkin cheesecake and graham cracker. Corporate Ladder sums the result up as liquid cheesecake, graham cracker and fall spice, and is explicit that this is "a completely different take" from its existing Pumpkin Pie.

That distinction is doing more work than a name change normally would. Pumpkin pie is custard in a pastry shell, and its flavor is spice-forward by construction. Cheesecake is a dairy proposition first, denser and faintly tangy, sitting on a pressed graham base instead of a crust. Building toward the second one means the graham takes over the job the pastry had been doing. The cream cheese character, rather than the spice tin, becomes the thing a drinker is meant to register first.

The brewery's own phrasing supports that reading. It describes the pumpkin spice here as tempered, which is an unusual note to strike in a season when much of the category competes on how assertively spiced it can be. Corporate Ladder is not selling this one on intensity.

Timing gets acknowledged rather than ignored. In announcing the beer, the brewery conceded that the Florida forecast has not caught up with the calendar, and framed the release as fall by decision instead of by weather.

Pumpkin Cheesecake arrived in a four-beer drop, alongside Vile Maxim, a 12 percent imperial stout, Tiki Sour: Pina Colada at 8.5 percent, and a 7 percent hazy IPA called It Comes in Pints? It is on draft now and available in 16 ounce four-packs to go, with online ordering for taproom pickup.