It's Halloween! I love the Halloween season for beers and snacks and spooky happiness. It's part of the reason why I'm called Spectre. And with this season of screams and chills I do love pumpkin flavoured beers and food. It seems to be the only time of year we get anything flavoured with pumpkin, which seems a shame to me. Cinabar has looked high and low for a pumpkin beer for me this year. Brewers either don't seem to be brewing with pumpkins or have run out of stock.
The Wee Beer Shop imports and finds interesting beers. This Carve 'N Yams Pumpkin Coffee Porter was produced by Elusive Brewing, and is marketed as being a pumpkin pie flavoured Porter. At 5.2% in volume it contains the usual water, barley, hops and yeast, but doesn't mention which ones on the can. It also contains pumpkin, Hasbean coffee, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and cloves. It sounds like a group of quite complex flavours for a beer. I have a bad feeling the coffee might overbear the lot! So I'll see what it tastes like…
On opening the can there was a deep rich coffee aroma that was full of spices. This almost black in colour Carve 'N Yams Pumpkin Coffee Porter has a rich dark chocolate malt flavour to begin with, merging with roasted coffee and all the spices of nutmeg, and fiery cinnamon and ginger, and a touch of cloves. What I couldn't note strongly in the flavour was the pumpkin.
This beer to me was reminiscent of the traditional German game of 'hide the sausage'. By eating it, of course, I don't know where your minds are these days! In this beer the brewers hid the pumpkin a little too well for my liking. I loved the combined flavours, but what I predominantly wanted was a pumpkin beer. Sadly this chocolate malt and spicy roasted coffee Porter didn't deliver that pumpkin in the flavour for me. It was really tasty and went very well together with my accompanying fig biscuits, but alas no pumpkins were harmed in the writing of this blog.
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