3rd Annual Blind Pumpkin Beer Tasting

This past weekend, we held our 3rd Annual Blind Pumpkin Beer Tasting! Every year, I like to select between 6 to 8 pumpkin beers, and invite a "panel" of friends and beer fans to come try them all, blindly, and score them to let me know which ones they liked the best. I then take their scores, and use them to compile a list my "best pumpkin beers" of that year.

This years contenders.....

Well, this past weekend, I gathered my small but honest, lively panel of friends to check out 2015's offering of pumpkin beers. Every year, I try and have a completely new group of beers to try, aside from the one that came in first the previous year. Last year, Southern Tier's Warlock Pumpkin Stout was our winner. so Warlock returned this year to defend it's title. The only other rule I try to have is at least one local beer to add into the list as well, which, this year, turned out to be a big deal!

This year, we tried 6 beers. Those beers were the aforementioned Warlock, Lakefront Brewing's
Pumpkin Lager, Tommy Knockers Small Patch Pumpkin Ale, Shipyards Smashed Pumpkin Ale, Anderson Valley's Pinchy Jeek Barl and Arizona's own Mudshark Brewing's Peaceful Pumpkin.

So, we gathered around my kitchen table, in the lavishly appointed Beer Czar Manor in Gilbert Arizona, snacked on some great pumpkin snacks (pumpkin banana bread, Pumpkin dip with gingersnaps and graham crackers, pumpkin whoopee pies, and pumpkin yogurt covered pretzels) and put about the difficult task of try, and rated the 6 beers. Here are the results with a few notes I took from the ranking sheets.....

#6. Anderson Valley's Pinchy Jeek Barl , Anderson Valley CA - This beer is aged for 6 months in Wild Turkey Bourbon Barrel. This beer was pretty easily identified by more than a few of the panelists as barrel aged, even bourbon barrel aged. The poor showing by this beer was partly due to one of the guests almost disdain for this beer, and after smelling it, and taking a tiny sip, refused to even score, giving it a 0! (she obviously is not a fan of barrel aged beers!) However, even if she had scored this beer the average the rest of the guests did, it only would have moved it up one spot. It was a pretty low scoring beer all around, despite the fact that it was actually my second favorite beer we tried this evening (I am admittedly a HUGE fan of bourbon barrel aged beers)

#5 Tommy Knockers Small Patch Pumpkin Ale, Idaho Springs CO. - This beer was universal
described by all our guests as either thin, watery, and in a few cases "boring". Not a bad beer, but nothing to get real excited about it. Very slight pumpkin flavor with little other flavor to back it up. Had the Anderson Valley beer not gotten a 0, this beer would have been the lowest scoring beer of the evening, by a fairly large margin.

#4 Shipyard Brewing's Smashed Pumpkin Ale, Portland Maine.- This one comes from Shipyards "Pugsley's Signiture Series" of beers, named after their original Brewmaster Alan Pugsley. This is a sort of "spicy" complex beer that seemed to have the greatest variation in scores among the guests. Seemed a sort of "loved it or hated it" kind of beers. The good news, this beer is now available in 12 oz. bottles so you can buy a single to find out if you like it before committing to a bomber!

Tied for #2
Lakefront Brewing's Lakefront Lager, Milwaukee, WI One that surprised me, and a lot of the guests when I told them it was a lager. I asked before people knew what they were drinking, if anyone could pick out the lager, and no one could on their first try. A surprisingly flavorful, full bodied lager, with nice pumpkin spice flavors.

Southern Tier's Warlock Pumpkin Stout, Lakewood, NY The winner of last year's event, it tied for 2nd this year, so it defended its title honorably. This was universally agreed to have the best aroma of any beer we tried. It has a very sweet, spicy aroma that smells a lot like I would think someone making pumpkin candy would smell. All in all, a great pumpkin beer, and one of my favorites still.

And the winner is......


Mudshark Brewing's Peaceful Pumpkin, Lake Havasu City, Arizona! The thing I noticed most
about the scores for this beer, it was no ones highest scoring beer, but everyone scored it very well! A solid, flavorful, yet incredibly drinkable pumpkin beer. This beer smells like pumpkin pie! This beer strikes a great balance between tasting like pumpkin and spice, but still maintain it's identity as a beer.  I was extremely excited to see a local beer take the top spot this year!!

I want to thank everyone that took part in this years tasting, this is always a fun event, that I think seems to get a little better every year! Hope to see you all in 2016!

I always want to congratulate the fine folks at Arizona's own Mudshark Brewing, for being the first Arizona beer to take the stop spot in this event! That is awesome, well done!

Until next time
Bottoms up my friends

The Beer Czar

The Beer Czar's Second Annual Pumpkin Beer Tasting

This past weekend, I hosted my 2nd Annual Pumpkin Beer Tasting. This is proving to be a very fun event for me! Aside from the fact I love to get together and drink a few beers, I also, unashamedly LOVE pumpkin beer. Pumpkin beer is kind of the cool beer to hate among beer people. Given its popularity, ubiquity and the fact that just about every brewery makes a pumpkin beer, many of which are just not good at all. It's getting harder to find those truly good pumpkin beers. That is exactly why I hold this event, I'm here to help folks! I get a selection of what I think (in many cases, its just what I've heard, since I haven't tried many of them) are good examples of the style, and then ask friends and family members to rate them, blindly, so I can come up with my sort of "best of" for this year's pumpkin beers.

This year, was a smaller, more laid back affair then last years, but equally as fun. This year, we had a total of 8 new beers to try. So, I gathered them around the table, poured them some beers, and let them go to work. Here is a list of the beers we tried, in the order they scored (#1 being the highest score....)

(click on the link to learn more about that beer)

1. Southern Tier's Warlock Imperial Pumpkin Stout - Lakewood, NY
2. Epic's Fermentation without Representation's Imperial Pumpkin Porter - Salt Lake City, UT
3. Southern Tier's Pumking - Lakewood, NY
4. Four Peaks Pumpkin Porter - Tempe, AZ
5. Pike's Pub and Brewery's Pike's Harlot's Harvest - Seattle, WA
6. Grand Canyon Brewing's Pumpkin Spring's Porter Williams, AZ
7. Dogfish Head's Punkin Ale - Milton, DE
8. Unita's Punk'd - Salt Lake City, UT

This years winner

So, there you have it, the list of Beer Czar's top Pumpkin Beers for 2014! Overall, I think a pretty good list of some really good pumpkin beers! Nice to have a couple of Arizona beers in there this year too. Next year we are planning a slightly larger event, so we will have room for a few more folks. If you would like to be a part of next years event, or any other events we might have in the near future, please let me know and drop me a line at thebeerczar@gmail.com





Here is a quick video with some more pic's, and the results, set to some awesome music!

Until next time
Bottoms up my friends

The Beer Czar

1st Annual Pumpkin Beer Tasting

The Beer Czar pumpkin keg!

This passed weekend, I had the pleasure of co-hosting a pumpkin beer tasting with my good friend Masked Blogster! The event was even recorded by the Masked Blogsters podcast, Maskerpiece Theatre, Hear what people thought about each beer, and some witty banter between Liger and Masked Blogster. You can listen to the podcast here... I even jumped on the mic from time to time to give some insight, and ad what I could to what was going on.
The event was small, friendly and laid back. We tasting a total of 7 pumpkin beers, blindly. Then the participants ranked each of the beers, and at the end of the night, we tallied up the scores to come up with a list "top pumpkin beers" to recommend to you all!

Masked Blogster 

We had a panel of six tasters, grading the beer on a scale of 1 to 5, in the areas of  appearance, aroma, taste, mouthfeel, and overall. They gave each area a grade of 1 being the worst, 5 being the best, and added up the scores for each beer. We later entered those scores into a spread sheet, which averaged up the scores, and ranked them in order of highest to lowest scores, giving us a 1st through 7th place.

Bobby and Mrs Blogster getting started

So without further ado, I will go over the list of beers we tried, in the order we tried them, along with a few notes about each one that the attendee's had to say, then I will give you the rank in which each beer fell. Just a quick note, if you want to read more about the beers flavors, I provided a link to the Beeradvocate reviews for each beer, just clink the link on the beer name, and it will take you to those reviews. OK, here we go...

Daniell giving her thoughts one of the beers

1. Shipyard Pumpkinhead, Portland Maine. Pumpkin Ale, 4.7% abv. For the first beer of the evening, was described as "light in color, but smooth", "nice aroma", "subtle pumpkin-iness" "sweet" and "too sweet" , and even a "love it"!

2. Wasatch Pumpkin Seasonal Ale, Wasatch Brewing/Utah Brewers Collaborative 4% abv. Terms ranging from  "more cinnamon and spice then pumpkin", "overall, quite good", "weird taste", "subtle pumpkin, enjoyable spiceyness" all the way to "blah, not a fan at all".


3. Pumpkick, New Belgium Brewing, Fort Collins, CO, 6.0% abv. Seemed to be a popular beer at the time of the tasting, people stating "pleasant finish" and "it leaves a great after taste", and some less enthusiastic "better then #2" and "not my favorite".

4. Fall Hornin', Anderson Valley Brewing Company, Booneville, CA 6.0% abv. This was the only beer we tried in a can, and it seemed to go over well. Heard things like "a little bitter", "more like a red ale", "really good finish", "smells awesome" and even a "loved it, favorite so far!".

5. Small Batch Pumpkin Harvest Ale, Tommyknocker Brewing Company, Idaho Springs CO, 5% abv. "Smells of caramel and chocolate", "looks good, smells great...", "..getting a lot of coffee in this one", and some "light on flavor" and even a "watery taste" and "thin mouthfeel"

Mrs Czar, not impressed!

6. Shipyard Smashed Pumpkin, Pugsley's Signature Series, Shipyard Brewing, Portland ME, 9% abv. This one had the widest range of comments by far. Seems the group either just loved this beer, and just absolutely hated it. Most terms were either "awful", "yuck" "horrible flavor" to "wow, best so far" to a "this is awesome!". This one it seems you'll have to try for yourself to figure it out! (note, it was one of my favorites of the evening as well)

MB and Liger giving the play by play

7. Peaceful Pumpkin, Mudshark Brewing Company, Lake Havasu City, Arizona 5.2% abv, Our only local Arizona beer of the evening. Not sure if it was tasting fatigue, or the late hour, but reaction to this one was a little muted, and not very enthusiastic, but it wasn't bad either. Had a hard time gauging this one at the time of the tasting.


After the tastings was wrapped up, I tallied up the votes, and here are the results, in the order they scored, and the scores they received.

The line up!

Beer Name                                      Score

1. New Belgium Pumpkick,              16.33

2. Mudshark Peaceful Pumpkin        15.83

3. Anderson Valley's Fall Hornin'      15.5

4. Shipyard's Pumpkinhead               14.33

5. Wasatch Pumpkin Seasonal          14.00

6. Tommyknocker Small Batch         13.67

7. Shipyard Smashed Pumpkin          12.37

The group!

All in all, I think it was a pretty successful event, and we had a ton of fun! The event was recorded by the Masked Blogsters podcast, I will post a link to the podcast here as soon as it is posted! Hear what people thought about each beer, and some witty banter between Liger and Masked Blogster. I even jumped on the mic from time to time to give some insight, and ad what I could to what was going on.

Look forward to more tastings to come from the Masked Blogster and I. I am thinking maybe  "The First Annual Ugly sweater and Christmas beer tasting"??? Has a nice ring to it....

If you have an idea for a tasting, or would like to host a tasting, please contact us at thebeerczar@gmail.com and we will make those arrangements!

For a complete look at all the photos of this event, check out The Beer Czar on Facebook here, and like us while you are there!!!    (link to photo album)


Until next time
Bottoms up my friends

The Beer Czar