The Great Pumpkin Beer-Off

Pumpkin beer, like anchovies on pizza or shorts on men, can be a divisive topic: you either like it or you don’t. If you don’t, well, walk on by — nothing to see here. But if you are, like me, a devotee of the gourd-based brewing arts, you are well aware that not all pumpkin beers are created equal. Which one is the best? More to the point, which one is the best for you?

There are so many pumpkin beers, and so little time in which to drink them. Let me make your autumn easier — for the past two years, I’ve held a pumpkin beer tasting, pitting competitors head to head in a bracket-style throwdown with the goal of finding the tastiest pumpkin beers out there. The Spiced Sixteen.

Each of the offerings was seeded* by a random draw and sipped out of tiny cups by a panel of twelve pumpkin-beer aficionados, who cast votes to decide which made it to the next round.** I’m going to spoil this year’s bracket for you now: DC Brau/Epic*** Fermentation without Representation came out on top. Which is, for the purposes of this article, a disappointment because it was a limited release offering from last year brought by a friend who collects and ages beer. If you can find it: cool! Enjoy! But otherwise: Consider what you want in a pumpkin beer. Light? Sweet? Pumpkin-y? Pie-y? Dark? There’s something for everyone out there, and I’m here to help you find it.

Above you’ll see this year’s Spiced Sixteen Bracket. Here are some standouts from the past couple years of tasting.

Beer: Dogfish Head Punkin
Brewery Location: Milton, DE
Like a pumpkin or like a pie? Pretty much exactly in the middle
Light or Dark? Medium
Notes: At our tasting, Punkin lost a close first round match (5 votes to 6) to the eventual winner. The pumpkin flavor isn’t overpowering or overspiced, but there’s enough of a brown sugar taste presence to place it in the middle of the scale between pumpkin and pie. This is a good pumpkin beer if you don’t want to overthink things too much: if you like pumpkins and you like beer, Punkin won’t let you down. (Schlafly is very similar, and either would be a fine introduction to the field).

Beer: Southern Tier Pumking
Brewery Location: Lakewood, NY
Like a pumpkin or like a pie? Strong Pie
Light or Dark? Light-to-Medium
Notes: Southern Tier won last year’s Spiced Sixteen in a near-unanimous vote. With good reason: it’s sweet without being too syrupy, and the flavor is balanced nicely between pumpkin pie spices and a softer vanilla, almost a pie crust flavor. If you want a pie beer, Pumking will knock your socks off.

Beer: Shipyard Smashed Pumpkin
Brewery Location: Portland, ME
Like a pumpkin or like a pie? Pie
Light or Dark? Light
Notes: Smashed Pumpkin came in second this year, likely due to its ability to be pie-like while remaining crisp and light — it definitely doesn’t taste like it’s 9% ABV! It was kind of a sleeper hit; I don’t think anyone had it pegged as going to the Chomp-ionship round, but when the dust settled, there it was. Steady and reliable.

Beer: Woodchuck Pumpkin Cider
Brewery Location: Middlebury, VT
Like a pumpkin or like a pie? Pumpkin
Light or Dark? Light
Notes: This received relatively poor initial reviews, though I chalk that up to surprise rather than it actually being a bad drink. You see, it’s intensely bubbly and extremely light — it tastes more like a sparkling pumpkin soda than anything else. As long as you know what to expect, it’s a fresh spin on the style. And a bonus I discovered the following night, spiked with cake vodka it makes for a pretty satisfying cocktail.

Beer: Starr Hill Pumpkin Porter
Brewery Location: Charlottesville, VA
Like a pumpkin or like a pie? Pumpkin
Light or Dark? Dark
Notes: Starr Hill is decidedly on the other end of the scale — it’s deep, pumpkiny, and malty. with a little hint of ginger and nutmeg at the end. Additionally, it just tastes roasted in the most satisfying way. Overall, it’s deliciously complex. Though there are many pumpkin porters out there, Starr Hill is one of the few that manages to avoid the unfortunate oily taste. Definitely one to enjoy on a cold night, ideally near an open fire.

Beer: Harpoon UFO Pumpkin
Brewery Location: Boston, MA
Like a pumpkin or like a pie? Strong Pumpkin
Light or Dark? Medium
Notes:This beer smells like a pumpkin pie, but the taste has minimal spice and sugar. The flavor is just pure, unadorned pumpkin. I get the impression that making a palatable pumpkin-ier beer is much more challenging than making a pie-ier beer, which makes this all the more impressive — it is strongly pumpkin and very, very good. Of all the beer described here, this one would be the best to pair with fall foods like braised anything or tarte tatin.

Beer: Sam Adams Pumpkin Ale
Brewery Location: Boston, MA
Like a pumpkin or like a pie? Pumpkin
Light or Dark? Light
Notes: The 2011 Spiced Sixteen featured a side competition between two beers from larger-scale breweries: Sam Adams vs. Blue Moon. Blue Moon’s was pronounced undrinkable**** but Sam Adams’ got positive enough reviews to warrant the upgrade to inclusion in 2012’s bracket. Sure, it’s no revelation, but it doesn’t claim to be — a simple, but good pumpkin ale.

Those are some of the highlights. But where there are highlights, there are also lowlights.

Beer: Evolution Jacques au Lantern
Brewery Location: Salisbury, MD
Like a pumpkin or like a pie? Pumpkin
Light or Dark? Medium to Dark
Notes: It just smells kind of foul, and the taste isn’t much better. That oily taste I mentioned above? Jacques au Lantern has it in spades. This was a surprise and a shame, because Evo has produced some very good beers. But… this one lost to the Woodchuck. Draw your own conclusions.

Beer: Fordham Spiced Harvest Ale
Brewery Location: Dover, DE
Like a pumpkin or like a pie? Pie
Light or Dark: Light
Notes: Smells fantastic! Like a clove-heavy pie coming right out of the oven. Pity it tastes like… well, have you ever left a cup of water on your desk over the weekend, and thought it would be fine to drink on Monday? Yeah, it’s like that.

My sister, previously noted in this space for serving me terrible things, brought a bottle of Kennebunkport Brewing Company’s Pumpkin Ale, which the aforementioned beer ager gleefully pointed out is Beer Advocate’s lowest-rated pumpkin beer. We sampled some between rounds, prompting these comments: “Was this brewed with cinnamon fireballs?” “Is there any pumpkin in this at all?” “I think they dumped in a bunch of vanilla extract at the end and forgot to stir” and “[sound of beer being spit back into cup].” That said, one participant gladly finished the bottle — proof that there really is something for everyone.

* Pun not intended! Okay, pun sorta intended.
** The Spiced Sixteen were narrowed down to the Eerie Eight, the Final Gourd, and the Chomp-ionship Round. That previous pun sounds more intended now, huh.
***The Utah Epic, not the New Zealand Epic. Though both are excellent breweries!
**** How undrinkable? Well, one of the best parts about hosting these is that everyone brings a sixpack (or two large formats) and at the end of the night, everyone is able to take a few bottles of their favorites home. When emptying out the fridge to make room for this year’s stock…I found three of these hidden in the back. Yikes.

Related: How To Make Bourbon Salt

Victoria Johnson still hasn’t found a good pumpkin latte. Legible bracket handwriting courtesy of Kia Matthews.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

I Am Fucking With My Enemy

I am fucking with my enemy because I think it would be a fair afternoon to do so. Oh, he is no longer my enemy except at certain hours, in certain locations, such as hat shops and bait shops. There were never any knives. I turned the war in and on myself, though I was too good at it for scars. See what happens when we turn in opposite directions? Once I would have broken a whole pine forest with my bare hands in order to get to the hot little swamp, and now I hear his footfalls on my steps. It is good to have the steak in front of us and not devour it. We even put each other in our mouths. And I don’t for one minute miss the wonky nights of old.

Nutella

I think I’ll eat a whole jar of Nutella and weep, not that I have any food in the house. I’ve kept it severe for years, which might be why I’m starving right now. I must want to starve, or else I’d say, hey, it’s our birthday. The cars rush by the bedroom window, flaming with bodies that can’t stay still tonight. They think if they keep moving they won’t break someone’s arm. They’ll break someone’s arm, and more, not to mention the little boy who’s crossing the ditch in the bicycle. He’s had enough of his mother’s silence, enough of the stale sprouts on his sandwich, and when the car hits him from behind, he doesn’t fly over the tops of the trees as the stories said he would, but he freezes and glitters and turns into the form of a cardinal. The cars keep moving. I’d like to say it’s not so bad to let this night go unsung, but I just can’t do it. You’re waiting for me to pick up the phone — isn’t that right? I walk outside and dream what’s left of us on a piece of toast.

Paul Lisicky’s latest books are Unbuilt Projects and The Burning House.

Don’t worry, we can meet the rest of your poetry needs here, in The Poetry Section’s archives. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

by Rachel Monroe

I.

In eighth grade, Mary liked Leonardo DiCaprio, Emily liked Paul McCartney, and I liked Gavin Rossdale. We probably didn’t say liked, though, or even loved. We were obsessed, we were crazy, we swooned, we fantasized. We liked the mall, and love was a word for grandmothers on the telephone: they loved us, they hoped to see us soon. The feelings we had were much more gigantic and upsetting. Crush was good. It implied force, and pain, and the possibility that we might not make it out the other side intact.

At the time, I was pretty sure I had every picture of Gavin Rossdale ever published taped up on the walls of my room. I bought every magazine, even the dumb or European ones, that had an article on him. I spent hours looking online, too. When I found a picture I didn’t have, I’d print it out on my dad’s computer, and the ink would make the printer paper heavy and wilted. I went through a lot of tape. “Well, I guess you’re definitely heterosexual,” my mom said, surveying my new decorating scheme. We tend to think of obsessive fact-collecting as the purview of men (baseball cards; car specs; the various pressings of various obscure 7-inches), but a teenage girl in the throes of a crush can hoard information along with the best of them. In eighth grade, I knew more about Gavin Rossdale than I do about many men I’ve dated since. I knew his mother’s name. I knew his dog’s birthday (March something, if I remember correctly).

The crush was a private thing that happened in my room, but it was also a shared activity between friends. It didn’t matter much that Emily’s crush was a haggard guy in his mid-50s, or that Mary’s was dying as the Titanic sank, or that my romantic rival was Gwen Stefani. Our crushes weren’t about anything as simple as attainability, or kissing. You couldn’t take Paul McCartney to the homecoming dance; the very idea was absurd, because the homecoming dance was an absurd nothing, especially when compared with the immensity and violence of our feelings.

My mom should’ve understood. At the Beatles’ 1966 concert in Chicago, she’d had to slap my Aunt Martha hard to get her to stop from screaming herself into a faint. From the teenyboppers to the Beliebers, teenage girls have been mocked for their crushes, but that scorn is just a shoddy mask for the anxiety these crushes inspire. Because a teenage girl with a crush is frightening. The Beatles were always on the run from shoving, hysterical girl-crowds, who wanted — what? To crush into them, to crush themselves, to crush against other girl-bodies that were all feeling the same feeling together, a chaos of feeling, a feeling that took your breath away. “A Beatle who ventures out unguarded into the streets runs the very real peril of being dismembered or crushed to death by his fans,” Life reported in January 1964. A girl with a crush is also capable of crushing.

II.

A week or so after James Holmes shot up an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater, the internet was shocked (shocked) to discover that teenage girls on Tumblr were declaring their love for him. The members of this internet clique called themselves Holmies, and incessantly re-posted the same sullen pictures of Holmes with captions like “I WANT TO CUDDLE HIM UNTIL HE SUFFOCATES” and “I want to feed him a tuna fish sandwich. with. mayonnaise.” The internet treated this as though it were a new phenomenon, but the Holmies were just an offshoot of the already-existing Tumblr worlds of girls who crush, hard, on killers. Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, and Charles Manson all have their groupies, but the widest and most prolific group seems to be the Columbiners, who have devoted themselves to Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

In some ways, the Columbiners are not so different from the Beliebers. The main difference, of course, is that Justin Bieber is unattainable because he’s a famous pop musician, while Harris and Klebold are famous because they are murderers, and unattainable because they are dead. But a girl with a crush has more in common with another girl with a crush than she does with a regular civilian. Both groups tend to speak in the self-consciously cute vernacular of internet teens (“*fangirling*”; “UGH every time i look at him i just flail around for a minute”), making fun of their own intensity even as they indulge it. They appreciate crooked smiles, strong forearms, and boys who write bad poetry about love (Beiber: “If I could just die in your arms/I wouldn’t mind”; Klebold: “I, who write this, love you beyond infinince”).

And both groups have flocked to Tumblr to showcase their love — not surprising, actually, since Tumblr turns out to be the perfect medium for a crush shrine, one that’s far more dynamic and interactive than a scrapbook or a bedroom wall. It allows posts and re-posts of pictures, quotes, gifs, and video clips while discouraging wider analysis or any sort of logical connection between content. Instead, the obsession acts as its own context. Every internet trinket relating to the crush object — a photograph of his parents’ house, a doodle in the margin of his math homework, a yearbook photo, a stock photo of the gun he preferred, his autopsy report — is relevant, because a girl with a crush is omnivorous, and very, very hungry.

III.

A crush relies on projection: it’s about externalizing an aspect of your own self onto the unattainable object. (My friend Emily, who crushed on Paul McCartney, is now a professional musician.) But a crush is also about sex.

Beatlemania was revolutionary, as Barbara Ehrenreich and her co-authors Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs pointed out in this 1992 article, because it inspired an active, public assertion of sexual desire at a time when young girls were supposed to be chipper, pony-tailed, and pure at heart: “For girls, fandom offered a way not only to sublimate romantic and sexual yearnings but to carve out subversive versions of heterosexuality.” The Columbiners are even more open about their lust; their expressions of desire shades, by turns, from innocent to forthright and dark and back again. Beatlemaniacs were overwhelmed with heterosexual frenzy; Columbiner sexuality tends to be much more fluid and self-aware. Columbiners draw Eric and Dylan as wet-eyed anime girls, or they sketch the two boys sitting on an unmade bed, each holding the other’s erection. The girls post pictures of themselves dressed up like Reb or VoDKa in cargo pants, NATURAL SELECTION t-shirts, and black trench coats. “You look so cute,” everyone else comments. “I want to cuddle with you.” They unabashedly admit that guns turn them on. “I want to touch Dylan’s pee pee,” a girl confesses in a Columbiner video. “I don’t, like, label my sexuality,” another teenage Columbiner writes, “but if I did I would be pansexual. :)” The Columbiner community, which is mostly made up of girls in their mid-teens, more than a decade younger than me, taught me a new fetish word last week: hybristophilia, the sexual preference for people who have committed murder or other violent crimes.

Taken all together, it’s a messy picture of attraction: do the Columbiners want to save the boys, or make out with the boys, or watch the boys make out with each other, or make out with fellow Columbiners? Or all of the above, depending on the day? The possible contradictions don’t seem to bother them. Instead, they slide between self-consciousness and narcissism and obsession, between playfulness and darkness, between confidence and deep vulnerability.

It would be easy to read the Columbiners’ public performance of extreme sexuality as worrying, especially because the girls involved are so young. But is there really anything new going on here? Teen girl sexuality — like, well, adult human sexuality — can edge up against the dark and the illogical, even when the crush object isn’t a murderer. What’s more disconcerting, perhaps, is being confronted what teen girls, or a subset of teen girls, really want. If a focus group of middle-aged white men got together to design a teen idol, they’d most likely come up with someone who looked a lot like the glossy-haired, button-nosed Bieber. Klebold and Harris, in contrast, are as unmanufactured as you can get. They look like awkward seventeen year-olds from the 90s. Their clothes don’t fit right; they haven’t entirely grown into their faces. Crushing on them is an act of resistance that bonds the Columbiners together.

Because, in the most positive sense, what the Columbiners are doing is working through an obsession with the support of a non-judgmental community. They don’t have to explain themselves to each other, which seems to be a source of great relief. Along with their more explicit or swoony posts, the girls share their anxieties about upcoming history tests and awkward moments in class. They are vocally anti-bully. They upload pictures of themselves and ask if they’re ugly; “you don’t know you’re beautiful,” the Columbiner universe choruses back. Holmies post helpful information about psychosis in between their #dirtyholmiesconfessions, and Columbiners act as one another’s suicide watch. In living out their obsession online, the Columbiners are redefining “normal” teen girl behavior through finding safety in numbers.

IV.

Spend any time with an online fangirl community, whether the crush object is a murderer or a fictional wolf-prince or just a plain old pop star, and you’ll soon enough hear about “the feels.” (I JUST WANT TO JUMP OFF A CLIFF OR SOMETHING BECAUSE SITTING HERE WITH THESE FEELS DHFLKJDFHLDKJFH.) According to urbandictionary, “the feels” are “the feelings you get when you watch or look at some sort of picture of video, most times of a celebrity, where you cannot place what your feeling (usually feelings of the sexual variety).” The feels are sexual, but not merely or exclusively so. They are distinct from pre-internet emotions in that they are more like feelings for feelings’ sake. The internet, with its wealth of intangible content, is the feels’ native land; an internet crush is the feels personified. You can’t do anything about the feels except feel them, then maybe go look at some more pictures online. They are an appetite that does not expect to be sated, an intensity without any perceivable end.

Intensity without an outlet is a dangerous thing; it is also sometimes where revolution comes from. Beatlemaniacs sensed something not-right in their world, and reacted by freaking out, like some sort of 1960s-era maenads in knee socks. “To abandon control — to scream, faint, dash about in mobs — was, in form if not conscious intent, to protest the sexual repressiveness, the rigid double standard of female teen culture,” Ehrenreich and her co-authors write. “It was the first and most dramatic uprising of women’s sexual revolution.” Everyone else made the mistake of assuming that Beatlemania was about the Beatles. As every woman who pledged her teenage devotion to someone embarrassing (I’m sorry, Gavin) could tell you, a crush is more about the crusher than the crushee. Perhaps what’s so disturbing about the Columbiners is not who they’re crushing on, but how it’s actually not so difficult to imagine what it might be like to be one. Why not let yourself inhabit their world for a moment? What might you need to unleash? What makes you want to scream and scream until someone slaps you?

Related: Look Back in Eyeliner: Three Girls at a Duran Duran Sleepover in 1984

Rachel Monroe is a writer living in Marfa, Texas.

Columbiner Prom poster made by the James Holmies Tumblr, posted here.

“Can India control drug-resistant tuberculosis?”

“A friend of mine who grew up in Los Angeles once declared that transplants to Gotham only truly become New Yorkers when they exchange the exhortation “motherfucker,” which, to be sure, has a satisfying sting, for “cocksucker” — a designation more mellifluous, the ugliness behind its origin notwithstanding. And yet, as comforting as both those epithets may be, in the colloquial currency of a city where you are constantly confronted by a teeming mass of narcissists hell-bent on thwarting whatever goal you hope to achieve (even something simple as completing a speedy transaction at an ATM), the most common denomination of irritant — the dollar bill of sweary, frustrated descriptors for those exasperating sacks of skin swarming our space — is ‘asshole.’”
 — An expert speaks.

“The next Obama-Romney debate will be different. The same Obama will not show up. He’s been embarrassed. He’ll bring his LeBron.”

“A dance review on Wednesday about ‘Flex Is Kings Live,’ an event featuring the street-dance movement called flexing at powerHouse Books in Brooklyn, misstated one of the exclamations of approval taught by the hosts. It is ‘modd,’ not ‘mud.’”

“In 1968, with the Supremes struggling to remain at the top of the Billboard charts, Motown’s founder, Berry Gordy, gathered Mr. Wilson and a few other confidants to develop a bolder approach for the group. They came up with ‘Love Child.’ Its taboo-breaking lyrics, about having a child outside marriage, helped propel the song to No. 1 on the pop charts in late 1968.”
 — Houston-born Frank Edward Wilson, who wrote great Motown hits in the ’60s, died a week ago yesterday of a lung infection in Duarte, California. He was 71.

“American Says All of Its Planes Will Have Seats Bolted to the Floor by Saturday”

Poor Brian Johnson! Even though he is in part responsible for the second best-selling album of all time, he will still be, to a certain set, “not Bon Scott.” But you know what? I bet he’s made his peace with it. Also, he is probably not actually poor. Anyway, happy birthday Brian Johnson. Is it terrible of me to admit that this is my favorite song of AC/DC’s not Bon Scott era? Probably. (Also of note: Both Dr. No, the first real Bond movie, and “Love Me Do,” the first Beatles single, were both released today fifty years ago.)