Smuttynose, beyond having a website that doesn’t use flash in obscene ways and also has a page for each beer, is a really fine brewery I just haven’t made enough time for in my life. This autumn, I decided to remedy that (as much as I could), by pairing up their Old Brown Dog and their Pumpkin Ale for a single setting.
My hope was that the pairing would be instructional. Pumpkin Ales vary, but often have some similarities to brown ales in that they have a great deal of malt flavor (as far as pumpkin is a malt) and veer away from the hoppiness found in ale styles like American Pale Ales and IPAs.
Well, I fucked that up in the best possible way.
Old Brown Dog
I like Brown Ales a lot. They are an often overlooked style which, I think, would be wholly more appealing to more people than the obligatory American Pale Ale or IPA that every brewery seems to make. As Porter and Stout are to malt and IPAs are to hops, Brown Ale is to balance.
And Smuttynose’s Brown Ale is simply fantastic. It’s big, weighing in at 6.5% ABV, has a big rich body, and yet is balanced with the necessary hops to make it very drinkable. This would be an alarmingly good session beer that could put me under the table before I realized what was going on: for it’s comparable bigness (in every respect), it simply doesn’t seem heavy.
All the proper flavors are there, and I won’t bother to list them: it’s a truly fabulous and unapologetic Brown Ale, with a great personality and a capital “B.”
Pumpkin Ale
And so I opened up the Pumpkin Ale expecting more of the same kind of balance, perhaps a pumpkin tempered, less hoppy beer complimented with spices. Smuttynose’s Pumpkin Ale has pumpkin, spices, hops, and malt, but that’s about as much in common with my expectation as this beer would be.
The best way I can describe this beer is as such: say you took a hoppy, fine American Pale Ale and de-paled it by adding enough Pumpkin to turn it a beautiful golden color. Then you spiced it with a light hand, more akin to how much spice is used in a good wheat beer than the over-the-top pie-spice you often find in Pumpkin Ales. If you did all that, and the result was awesome, it would be pretty close to Smuttynose’s Pumpkin Ale.
If you generally avoid Pumpkin Ales because you’re a hop head, or you dislike fruit in your beer, but you want to feel vaguely seasonal, this is the Pumpkin for you. The only flavor similarity to its Brown Ale cousin is that it is incredibly agreeable in every way. It would be a great session beer that you wouldn’t get tired of, in spite of the Pumpkin.
And thus ends my experiment. I learned comparatively little from the comparison (these could have been two completely random beers for all their similarities), except that Smuttynose makes two excellent beers. If I were going to do it again, I might try the beers in the opposite order.
Who am I kidding? I’d love to try this again, in either order.
I’m just gonna quote this for truth: “How can a company that produces a Porter, a Stout, and a Wheat beer year round justify only brewing a versatile Brown Ale for three months out of the year?” Word. Moar brown ales plz.