All hallows' boozing: A guide to autumnal alcohol
Lakefront, Tyranena, and Dogfish Head's pumpkin offerings at Star Liquor.
Sampling the beers of fall can be a minefield of tricks and treats as brewers attempt to combine the crisp flavors of harvest-time with a hint of the heavy winter beers to follow. Well, some do, and others just figure that fall equals pumpkins, and therefore they should make a pumpkin beer to commemorate the one holiday when folks are willing to pay for it. The A.V. Club surveyed the Oktoberfest- and Halloween-themed booze available around Madison this fall to suss out the good stuff.
Pumpkinland
Outside of the darker, thicker Oktoberfest beers that seep into the market like the coming cold, the default October seasonal flavor is pumpkin—lots of disarmingly alcoholic pumpkin. Wisconsin represents with Lakefront’s Pumpkin Lager and Tyranena’s heavily alcoholic yet understated Painted Ladies Pumpkin Spice Ale. A litany of out-of-state pumpkin beers are on the shelves at local liquor stores, including O’Fallon Brewery’s Pumpkin Ale, New Holland’s Ichabod Pumpkin Ale, and Shipyard’s mildly pumpkin-flavored Pumpkinhead Ale, which complements the equally pumpkin-lite pumpkin ale by Buffalo Bill’s Brewery. New Hampshire's Smuttynose Brewery makes a strong but not very pumpkin-heavy pumpkin ale as well. Even Coors gets in on the action with Harvest Moon, a pumpkin variant on Blue Moon.
Then there are posers like Arcadia Ales' Jaw-Jacker Ale, which has a menacing pumpkin on the bottle, but offers only “spices” for flavoring. But even Dogfish Head’s heavy, pleasant Punkin’ Ale looks like a mere vine compared to Pumking by New York’s Southern Tier Brewing Co. Pumking's bottle includes the menacing visage of a jack o’ lantern and a rant about Púca, some sort of mischievous shape shifting Celt spirit, and with 9 percent alcohol content and imperial pints that go for $6.29 (at Woodman's), it makes a convincing claim to its royal title.
Oktoberfest
Wisconsin breweries don’t disappoint among the vast number of Oktoberfest-themed beers out there. New Glarus brings back its always-welcome Staghorn Octoberfest, sitting nicely alongside Central Waters’ Märzen Oktoberfest and Sprecher’s Oktoberfest lager. Capital Brewery doubles up with its Oktoberfest and potent Autumnal Fire Doppelbock. Riley’s Wines Of The World has a convenient variety pack of some local brewery’s Oktoberfest varieties, and Woodman’s even offers Oktoberfest beers from the motherland: Erdinger Weissbräu's Oktoberfest Weissbier and Hofbräu’s Oktoberfestbier.
Wine and a wildcard
Halloween-themed wines aren’t exactly common, so Door County Winery's Hallowine caught our attention. This apple wine is heavy on cinnamon aftertaste and surprisingly bitter. Algoma, Wis.’ Von Stiehl winery also throws its hat into the novelty wine ring with a Riesling-blend Oktoberfest wine that offers a more welcoming mix of sweet and tart. And if you can find that, Hiram Walker produces a Pumpkin Spice Liqueur The A.V. Club found marked down to $5.99 in the Riley’s discount bin. We got the last bargain bottle of this bewilderingly vanilla-heavy pumpkin liqueur the other day, so, uh, lucky us?
