Pumpkin Spice Latte Ale Uses Whole Nutmegs and a Local Roaster

Real pumpkin, cinnamon sticks, whole nutmegs, cloves, lactose, Madagascar vanilla and coffee from Cleveland roaster Six Shooter. Masthead has built the drink the whole season is named after, from the actual ingredients.

Style: Pumpkin Ale
Release Date: 2026-09-25
ABV: 8.3%
Masthead Brewing Co. (Cleveland, OH)

The ingredient list is the story here. Masthead Brewing Co. brewed its version of a pumpkin spice latte with real pumpkin, cinnamon sticks, whole nutmegs, cloves, coffee beans from Six Shooter, lactose and real Madagascar vanilla beans.

That is the actual drink, assembled from parts, at 8.3 percent ABV. It is out now for preorder and pickup at the Cleveland brewery.

The whole-spice approach

The Cleveland brewery's own phrasing is worth reading closely. Real pumpkin. Whole nutmegs. Real Madagascar vanilla beans. Breweries reach for spice extracts and flavouring for good practical reasons, since they are consistent, measurable and far easier to dose across a batch. Whole spices are slower and less predictable, and they behave differently depending on when in the process they go in.

They also taste different. Nutmeg in particular loses a great deal in the gap between whole and pre-ground, which is why cooks who care about it keep the seeds intact and grate to order. A brewery listing whole nutmegs rather than nutmeg is making a point about method, and Masthead makes the same point three times in one sentence.

The lactose and vanilla are doing the latte half of the job. Lactose is an unfermentable milk sugar, so it stays in the finished beer as sweetness and body rather than converting to alcohol, and it is the standard route to a creamy, milk-coffee texture. Madagascar vanilla is the bourbon-type bean that carries the rounded, familiar vanilla character most people picture.

A local roaster in the cup

The coffee comes from Six Shooter Coffee, a small-batch roaster based in Cleveland. Peter Brown started it in 2014, roasting in a basement on a one-pound roaster while teaching during the day, and it has since grown into shops in the Waterloo Arts District and Old Brooklyn along with a wholesale business. Naming the roaster rather than simply listing coffee is a meaningful distinction in a beer like this, where the coffee has to hold its own against pumpkin, four spices and vanilla.

At 8.3 percent, this sits well above the standard autumn pumpkin ale, and the lactose suggests the strength is meant to be carried by sweetness and body rather than left exposed. It would be at its best next to something rich at the end of a meal, which is roughly where the drink it is named after usually turns up anyway.

Pumpkin Spice Latte Ale is available now for preorder and pickup at Masthead's Superior Avenue taproom. Four-packs are 13.99 dollars plus tax.

Editor’s Take

Count the whole spices. Cinnamon sticks, not cinnamon. Whole nutmegs, plural, which means somebody stood in a brewery grating nutmeg into a kettle at 8.3 percent scale. Cloves. Real Madagascar vanilla beans rather than the extract that would have done a perfectly serviceable job for a fraction of the effort and none of the sentence.

Masthead uses the word real twice in one list and whole once more, which is not an accident. The pumpkin spice latte is the most thoroughly artificial flavour concept of the modern era, a thing that famously spent years containing no pumpkin whatsoever. Building one out of actual pumpkin and a sack of whole nutmegs is a joke with a lot of labour behind it, and the punchline is that it probably tastes better than the original.

The coffee is the detail I would not skip past. Six Shooter is a Cleveland roaster that started in somebody's basement in 2014 on a one-pound roaster, which makes this a local brewery putting a local roaster's beans into the most globally recognisable coffee order there is. Put that in a glass instead of a paper cup and the whole thing stops being seasonal shorthand and starts being a beer with a supply chain.

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.