Unfortunately, this beer starts off at a disadvantage. I’m drinking it as my second pumpkin ale of the night, and the “warm up” was Weyerbacher’s IPA* (P = Pumpkin, to be reviewed later). All I can think is that this tastes like the Bud Light of pumpkin ales. There is no nose on this, and I’m drinking it out of one of those wonderful Sam Adams glasses. How do you miss the nose when you’ve got a well shaped glass, you ask? Well… open up a bottle of X Lite. X can be anything, so long as it has a light version. They all smell the same, which is to say they don’t smell at all. I want to give this beer a fair shake, but I’m just not a huge fan.
There is a faint pumpkin flavoring to it. The aftertaste is where it most came alive to me. It’s a very lightly colored beer, which is rarely impressive to me. One of the positives of this beer is that it does feel very light, so you could drink a lot of it and not feel weighed down. It actually does quite well as a second beer, in the sense that I had a very heavy beer first and just didn’t want to get extra hammered tonight.
Given what I wanted, it succeeds, but in so doing it doesn’t impress me as a pumpkin ale at all. I can’t get over the light taste of it; pumpkin ales are known for smacking you in the face with all the cinnamon, pumpkin, and nutmeg you can handle, and in that vein I can’t help but be disappointed.
I don’t think this will be a big winner in the tourney. We haven’t yet set the pairings, though I do plan to feature this for lighter fare. I have my own biases towards the powerful and heavy, though, so we’ll see how the jury votes. Sorry, Shipyard, I’m just not a fan of this one. Looks like the Beeradvocate review agrees. I don’t expect this one to go very far, but I’ve been surprised before by a jury of my peers.
Shipyard is a craft brewery in Maine, and it appears they have a fairly broad selection of seasonals. I wish I could have gotten hold of their Smashed Pumpkin, but alas, it was nowhere to be found in the Raleigh or DC areas.
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