Pumpkin Bake Off Chases the Maple Frosting, Not the Pie

Most pumpkin beers reach for pie. Low Tide Brewing has aimed at a different dessert entirely.

Pumpkin Bake Off is back on tap at the Johns Island taproom, returning as what the brewery calls everyone's fall favorite. Low Tide has not published specs for this year's pour.

The brewery's tasting notes move through the beer in order. Classic pie spice arrives first, described as present but restrained, "without knocking you on the ground (it's still beer after all)." Then comes what Low Tide calls a nice maple character, which it compares directly to "one of those pumpkin bars with a little maple frosting." Actual pumpkin shows up on the finish, along with a rounded caramel malt flavor. The brewery frames the whole thing as a sweeter dessert beer without being overly cloying.

That pumpkin bar comparison is doing more work than a throwaway line usually does. A pumpkin pie is custard, soft and cool and spice-forward. A maple-frosted pumpkin bar is cake, which means more browned sugar, more density and a distinct sweet layer sitting on top of the spice rather than blended through it. Caramel malt is the ingredient that gets a beer to that second description, and it is the one the brewery names on the finish.

Low Tide's own photograph of the pour backs up the malt-forward framing. The beer comes out deep brown in the glass, closer to a brown ale than the orange that pumpkin beers are often assumed to be, under a tan head finished with a dusting of spice. In the shot it sits on a wooden rail between two pumpkins, one of them carved with the brewery's boat logo.

Pumpkin Bake Off is pouring now at the Johns Island taproom on Maybank Highway. Low Tide has also flagged that Tura'Lu Irish Red, another returning seasonal, is due on taps shortly, without naming a date.