The colder months are an exciting time for drinks lovers. As we say adieu to the frozen concoctions of more humid days, the chillier weather means a reintroduction to old friends like Hot Toddies and mulled wine. But there are some drinks that go beyond a single season. One such cocktail is the Daiquiri, which has a delightful simplicity that allows for seemingly endless opportunities for riffs and variations — taking the rum drink from summer to winter with just a few easy swaps. Read on for seven inventive ways to winterize the Daiquiri with recipes from VinePair’s library. The Whey Daiquiri, a Take on the DaiquiriFor a drink to cozy up with, look no further than the Whey Daiquiri. Developed by Jay Khan, beverage director at Hong Kong-based COA, this recipe brings the comforting flavors of milk tea to the Daiquiri with the addition of chamomile and milk whey. These ingredients are an unlikely yet exciting addition to the Daiquiri’s main ingredients: rum, lime juice, and sugar. The Autumnal Daiquiri RecipeOne sip of this spiced tipple will instantly bring back memories of apple picking and cider donuts. To make one, swap out rum for Calvados, an apple brandy, and stir in honey syrup rather than simple syrup. These ingredients are shaken up with lime juice and a few dashes of aromatic bitters and topped with an apple fan. The Jettison Daiquiri RecipeFor a depth of citrus flavors, this Daiquiri is made with grapefruit-infused simple syrup and a few dashes of bitters. Add in a blend of Panamanian and Martinican rums and a squeeze of lime, and take the simple flavors of the Daiquiri to the next level. The Armagnac Daiquiri RecipeThe earthy flavors of Armagnac take the Daiquiri from summer to winter in one fell swoop. Along with grapefruit and lime juices and Maraschino liqueur, the resulting drink is rich and layered, with undertones of caramel. Spicy Ancho Chile Daiquiri RecipeThough a classic Daiquiri is endlessly refreshing, a little added spice takes the drink to the next level. This variation takes the ingredients of the Daiquiri and adds Ancho Reyes Verde liqueur for a subtle peppery flavor that’s sure to warm you up on the coldest of days. Top with a fresh chile, and sip fireside. The Chartreuse Daiquiri RecipeFor a herbaceous drink to match your favorite holiday flavors, add green Chartreuse to your Daiquiri. This drink is made with the liqueur, as well as honey syrup, rhum agricole, and lime juice for an earthy, warming appeal. The Rosemary And Honey Daiquiri RecipeMade for sipping on cozy snow days, this Daiquiri variation is made with dark rum, rosemary, honey syrup, and lime juice. A sprig of rosemary to garnish the concoction brings an added seasonal aroma, making the beverage ideal for the most festive occasions. The article 7 of the Best Daiquiri Recipes for Fall appeared first on VinePair. source https://vinepair.com/articles/7-best-fall-daiquiri-recipes/ Via https://vinology1.tumblr.com/post/666755767001645056
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Perhaps the most well-known fall seasonal beer style among American consumers, pumpkin beer has stood the test of time. Since the mid-1990s, pioneering American craft brewers such as Dogfish Head and Schlafly have released pumpkin ales year after year. So, much to the chagrin of anti-pumpkin-spice aggressors, the polarizing trend is still here — but why? In this episode of the “VinePair Podcast,” co-hosts Adam Teeter, Joanna Sciarrino, and Zach Geballe taste an early example of pumpkin ale and share their takes on why they think it continues to be a seasonal favorite. Sciarrino also sits down with VinePair’s managing editor and resident beer expert Cat Wolinski to learn a little more about the history and changing consumer base for pumpkin beer. To cap things off, the co-hosts try Elysian’s Great Pumpkin imperial ale for the Friday tasting. Tune in to learn more about why pumpkin beer continues to get buzz when fall rolls around each year. Listen OnlineOr Check Out the Conversation HereAdam Teeter: From VinePair’s New York City headquarters, I’m Adam Teeter. Joanna Sciarrino: I’m Joanna Sciarrino. Zach Geballe: and I’m Zach Geballe. A: Why are you still here? Z: Can’t get rid of me. Z: I’m like bed bugs, man. J: I like it. We’re all in the same room. Z: When you’re on their side, I don’t know what you’re wearing. J: Do you have shoes on or not? A: You’re in your basement, in your hovel. Z: In my hovel? Excuse me. A: Aren’t you in your little wine cellar? Z: Yeah. I’m in a corner of my house. I don’t live in a hovel. A: But you have a wine cellar in the basement, right? Z: I do. A: That’s what I thought. How many bottles? Z: Like 400. Got to be ready. J: For what? Z: Come visit. You’re welcome to. A: Did you bring any with you? Z: I had to pay to check bags. I’m not going to do that. A: I’m sorry about that. So, I don’t know today’s topic of the podcast because it’s been kept from me. I’m going to let one of you introduce it. Z: Oh, that’s a lie. It’s staring you right in the middle. I figured, it’s the time of year where it’s #SpookySeason. We’re getting into true fall. It brought to mind a question that I thought we could try to answer as a team here, which is: Why is pumpkin beer still a thing? A: I don’t know. It shouldn’t be. Z: I know that’s your opinion, Adam. I respect and appreciate your personal aesthetic stance on this matter. A: Everyone needs a cause. My cause is being anti-pumpkin beer. Z: Maybe you can win a Next Wave Award sometime. In any case, it does really surprise me that a beer style that’s relatively recent and is — and I like pumpkin beers all right — undeniably gimmicky. You don’t see the same thing with any other seasonal ingredient. Well, fresh hop beer is a thing, but then again, hops are a part of beer always. Maybe that’s not the same. You don’t see raspberry or lavender beer season in spring. A: I guess nothing’s really taken off in the same way. You have summer ales, but it’s not the same as everybody going for pumpkin. Z: There’s not an added ingredient in those that everyone is jazzed about. Joanna, coming from the food side, it’s not like there’s a cry in food for pumpkin-flavored everything. Well, maybe there is. There’s pumpkin spice everything. J: Yeah. I think we have to acknowledge that this coincides with the great rise of pumpkin spice and pumpkin spice lattes, candles, et cetera. A: Zach, have you been to Trader Joe’s recently? Z: No. A: There’s literally an entire section devoted to pumpkin flavors. “Here’s our pumpkin soup. Here’s our pumpkin pasta sauce. Here’s our pumpkin spice yogurt.” J: I think it waned for some amount of years. Now it’s kind of come back. A: There’s a lot of people out there — I don’t know if it’s as many as summer people — who believe fall is the best season. J: I’m one of them. Z: Yeah. A: Keith is another. My wife is another. I was born in summer, so you know? Z: What other season could they be? A: June gave the world Adam. Drake literally named his company October’s Very Own because he was born in October. Just call me Drake. I mean, fall is a great season. I would say it’s a top-two season. Z: Well, there’s only four. I mean, come on. A: As long as we can all agree that winter is the worst season. A: The worst. J: True. A: People can’t convince me that skiing is a thing. Anyways, fall’s a great season. Summer has a lot of things people get excited about. I mean, I would say, you know, the equivalent of pumpkin beer. I see so many tomato pictures all the time on Instagram. Everyone’s like “tomato season.” Everyone does it. J: It’s true. A: Pumpkin is the tomato of the fall. Z: That is maybe the most brilliant analogy that’s ever made on this podcast. Congratulations, Adam. This comes back to my question, which is why are pumpkins the only thing that we’re adamant must be added to beer every year? A: It’s Charlie Brown, dude. Z: I kind of don’t mind pumpkin beer, but I hate everything about Halloween. A: Oh, get out. Z: And I’m the person here with kids. A: Halloween has become, in the course of the last 40 to 50 years, but especially in the last 20, much more of an adult holiday. Z: Yes. It was shocking to me when I moved to New York for college because I hadn’t done a Halloween thing in years because I was a teenager. All of a sudden, my freshman year, everyone was asking, “Are you going to the Halloween parade? Are you going to the Halloween parties?” I was like, “What? No. Is there candy? What’s going on.” J: It’s the best. Z: I want to ask one more thing about pumpkin beer before this goes even further off the rails. This is why I don’t do these recordings in person. Who knows where we are right now. A: I think it’s way better. Z: It’s true. It’s more fun. Listeners, I hope you agree. What’s also weird to me about the pumpkin beer season is that not only has it remained a thing. It’s ebbed and flowed a little bit, but it remains a category. It seems like breweries are content to put out the exact same beer every year, even relatively small to medium-sized craft breweries. That strikes me as also odd. Even breweries that do creative, innovative things much of the rest of the year, when it comes to pumpkin beer season, they just decide, “Let’s dust off that recipe and make our batch.” Maybe it goes back to the pumpkin spice lattes. People want the exact same thing. It is almost like people just want their signifier of the season. They want to drink a 6-pack of whatever. A: They want to drink the leaves. Z: I guess so. I just wanted to talk about how strange the continued trend is. It’s not a fad. I think it’s just here, and it’s its own weird segment of beer that exists ephemerally, even more than summer or winter ales. A: It’s the drink of fall. It’s the thing that everyone feels like they have to have at least once to say that it’s fall. Z: Yeah, I think that’s right. A: What’s also weird about pumpkin beer is that, to make most pumpkin beers and be in market when it’s appropriate or earlier, you actually aren’t using this fall’s pumpkins. Z: Not pumpkin at all, sometimes. J: Sometimes squash. A: Sometimes it’s spice. But if you are using it, you’re using squash or pumpkin puree from last season. It’s this really weird thing. Z: Part of that’s the season creep that happens with everything. Pumpkin beers available in August now. You definitely did not harvest pumpkins for that. A: OK. Can we try this dumb shit, because it’s sitting in front of me. It’s making me really upset. J: The last thing I wanted to say is that I think a lot of beer people drink Oktoberfest. A: Yes, they do. J: But now that craft beer is so accessible to so many more people, that there are other people who are drinking pumpkin beer. A: Why don’t you go talk to a craft beer person? I don’t want to have this conversation anymore. Z: We’re going to make Cat talk to us about it. A Pumpkin Beer Conversation with VinePair Managing Editor Cat WolinskiJ: Today on the podcast, I am joined by Cat Wolinski, VinePair’s managing editor and resident beer expert. Cat, welcome to the show. Cat Wolinski: Thank you, Joanna. J: I’m excited to have you here because we’re talking about pumpkin beer. Pumpkin ale, I suppose, is the better way to say it. I wanted to chat with you about it because I think we’re all very curious to know if pumpkin ale is still relevant. What do you think? C: Relevant is an interesting word. Pumpkin beer is still definitely around. J: It’s still a thing? C: Yeah, but I think who it’s a thing for has changed over the years. J: Yes, that’s a good point. Why don’t we talk first about how, when pumpkin beer became a thing, how it gained popularity initially, then what happened, and who is it popular with now? C: I think it started out as a brewpub, fun, seasonal thing. Some of the older classic craft breweries made them for the fall. It wasn’t such a contested subject then. It was just a fall flavor. That was the harvest. It’s theoretically made with pumpkin, which is associated with the season, with Halloween, and things like that. J: Was this back in the early 2010s? C: It was longer ago. I think Elysian has been making pumpkin ale since the late ’90s. J: Whoa. OK. It’s older than I thought. C: When I say brewpub, this is also the days of yore. It’s early craft beer. When I was coming up as a beer drinker and writer, it was still something fun, something you saw at beer festivals, or something that your friend who thinks they’re really into beer but only like sweet beers would seek out. One that was big around here in New York was Southern Tier Pumpking. That was legitimately considered a good beer by drinkers and beer people, too. It would be served with a brown sugar rim, and it was a special occasion. J: Wow. Interesting. Back in 2012, I was working at Bon Appétit at the time, and we did a pumpkin beer tasting to publish on the site. That’s when I feel like it was really coming into more mainstream popularity. C: Wow. Weird that that’s almost 10 years ago. Yeah, I think it still exists in the way that I just described it. It’s still a fun, seasonal thing for a lot of people in the way that a pumpkin spice latte is a fun seasonal thing for people. The pumpkin latte is not necessarily something an everyday coffee drinker drinks or wants, though. Even since 2012, there’s been this big anti-pumpkin beer movement. It was like this thing that everyone had to bandwagon hate. “Who wants to put baking spices in a beer? It’s not even real pumpkin sometimes!” J: Why do you think that happened? Why did it fall out of favor with the craft beer drinking community? C: Speaking first from personal experience, I think pumpkin beer can be an entry point to another dimension of beer flavor. In the same way that a lot of people remember their first craft beer or the first beers that made them think, “Woah, I didn’t know beer could taste like that,” I think that feeling existed with pumpkin beer. I think it’s also something that you grow out of as you get more into beer. If you’re someone who really continues to seek out different flavors, you might learn that you love a Belgian Ale. You can find those warm caramel notes in Chimay or Belgian Strong Ale. You might find other, baked-good-associated flavors, like banana and clove in a wheat beer. It became looked down on to be forcing flavor into the beer, like with pumpkin; then it’s not “real” beer anymore. J: It’s not the most sophisticated flavor palate. C: Yes. But it’s also not supposed to be sophisticated. It’s literally supposed to taste like pumpkin pie. I think myself and a lot of my comrades think, “Who cares if you like pumpkin beer?” I don’t personally drink it. I’m tasting one today to remind myself how they taste. I think they’re fine. If you want something that’s sweet and spiced, go for it. At least you’re drinking beer, in my opinion. I think it’s pointless to hate on pumpkin beer. Sorry, Adam. I know he’s the biggest pumpkin beer hater. What’s the point, man? J: Drink what you like. C: Yeah. J: Something that I feel like is worth noting in this conversation — or what I think is a big part of this conversation — is the pumpkin spice latte that you mentioned. I want to talk about that movement and pumpkin spice in general. I feel like, as that gained popularity, people started to think, “This isn’t cool anymore.” C: I see what you’re saying. J: As it became more mainstream, the edgier, alt craft beer drinkers said, “This isn’t cool anymore. Let’s all hate on it.” C: I think that is definitely true. Despite being a precursor, perhaps, to the popularity of the PSL, as the PSL waxed, pumpkin ale waned. If that’s the argument, then what’s going to happen with fruited hazy IPAs? Why are we all up in arms about flavoring an ale with fall-themed flavors, but it’s cool to put lactose, all sorts of fruit, and things in a different beer? Those are still considered cool and worth waiting in line for. J: Maybe we give that 10 years and see what happens. Is that too long? C: It’s true. Ten years from now we’ll think, “Can you believe how much hazy IPAs dominated everything? Yeah, they were delicious, but that’s so lame now.” It used to be uncool to have fruit in beer. One of my other early beer experiences was Leinenkugel. I remember thinking, “Wow, this tastes like Froot Loops. That’s so weird.” That was one of the early “aha” moments of my beer-drinking life. There was also the stigma attached that, “It’s not real beer. Who needs fruit flavors in a beer?” Now, so many beers use fruit and it’s cool again. J: I also think it’s curious because I think a lot of it is in the label and less in the flavor profile. Oktoberfests are very popular. That has kind of similar baking spices and warm notes that a pumpkin beer would have. Craft beer people may like one over the other. C: Yeah. I love Oktoberfest. I love a Festbier. I love a Märzen. What you’re saying is true. J: Who do you think is drinking pumpkin beer now? If it lulled a bit after its initial popularity and now it’s popular again, who’s drinking it? C: Besides Keith Beavers, who has discovered and enjoys one of these beers that we’re tasting, I think it’s like someone who doesn’t really drink cocktails, but when they go out with friends, they’ll get a Margarita or even a vodka cranberry. One demographic here is someone who’s not a beer nerd, but someone who is interested in trying different things. Maybe they have a local brewery that they love. Like I said before, it’s also a special occasion kind of thing. J: People love seasonal things. C: Yeah. There’s such a draw. Maybe they’re not going to go back to that brewery for their house lager or even their house IPA. That may be why brewers and beer geeks get mad about it, too. It’s like being the person that only goes to church on Christmas and not every other Sunday. There’s also the component of seasonal creep, as they call it. It’s how CVS is decked out in Christmas decorations before Halloween and you feel like, “Oh my God, this is so stressful.” Pumpkin beer used to be something we had in October and November. Then, all of a sudden, it was September, and then July. All these brands are trying to push theirs out to market sooner because there’s such a short window that people will want to drink them in. The same people that are excited to drink it in October are going to be over it come December. It’s a strange enigma, the pumpkin ale. There are other things, too. There’s pumpkin lager. There are some really respected breweries that do different things that are really unique, like Prairie Artisan Ales in Oklahoma. They do a sour pumpkin ale that has all the sophisticated things of a funky sour beer, but it has actual pumpkin in it. It’s cool, but it’s also not going to be their moneymaker. Right? It’s just a little fun thing. J: There’s still some amount of experimentation with pumpkin ale. I see that you have this coffee pumpkin ale. C: I wanted to compare them side by side because I thought maybe I would like the coffee pumpkin ale better, but it’s even sweeter than the other one. Not that I don’t like sweet. That’s just not what I go to beer for. J: Maybe that’s why it makes such a good beer around Halloween time. People like sweet things. There’s trick or treating. C: It’s fun. I would pair this with a Kit Kat. Why not? J: OK, Final thoughts: Pumpkin beer, Yay or nay? C: I say yay. If pumpkin beer makes you say “yay,” then yay. J: Cat, thank you so much for joining me today and for lending us your beer expertise in this hotly contested area. I really appreciate it. C: Thank you for having me. The VinePair Team Tries Pumpkin AleA: All right. Z: The moment of truth. Let’s open these. J: We weren’t going to get through this season without making you do it. A: It is the Friday before Halloween, too. J: That’s true. Tell us what we have. A: Did you bring this, Zach? Z: I did bring this. This is all the way from Seattle. It’s the Elysian Great Pumpkin imperial ale. A: It’s one of the more famous ones too, I think. Z: It is. Elysian was started in Seattle. It made its way national because it was bought by AB InBev. According to the bottle, the Great Pumpkin is the world’s first imperial pumpkin ale. It’s packed with pumpkin and roasted pumpkin seeds, and spiced with cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and allspice, Adam’s favorite collection of spices. A: For the record, I like pumpkin pie. J: I was actually wondering that the other day. Do you like other pumpkin things? A: I do like pumpkin pie. Z: How about pumpkin bread? A: Eh. Z: OK. J: For the listeners who don’t know this, Keith trolls Adam pretty hard about pumpkin spice things. A: So annoying. J: It’s great. A: Keith bought me a T-shirt. It literally says “pumpkin spice and everything nice.” Z: Have you ever worn it? A: Once, to take a picture and send it to Keith. OK. This is gross. It tastes like drinking a candle. It tastes like drinking a cinnamon-flavored candle. Z: I think it’s all on your head, man. J: It does taste like pumpkin pie. It’s a lot sweeter than I thought it was going to be. A: It’s sweet. I don’t like it. I don’t want to drink anymore. I just don’t think it’s very good. There’s an aftertaste now, too, that I don’t like. Z: It’s so much better than the hard seltzers, because it’s actually a product that I would consider drinking. My feeling about pumpkin beer is that it’s fine and if it’s a thing that you enjoy as a drinker, great. Have fun. This amount that I am consuming here — these three to four ounces — will probably suffice for the entire season. A: I’m good with two sips. Z: You were probably good with zero sips. A: What was weird about it for me, too, is that there’s a point in the experience of this beer where it tastes like an actual beer. Z: Yes. For sure. A: It’s somewhere in the middle. At the beginning and at the end, it’s all gross-ness. Z: I can see what you’re saying. There’s a hint of pumpkin spice up front. Then, there’s the beer. Then there’s a feeling like I had a three-day-old pumpkin pie. Keith, you want to share your thoughts on this beer? In the many pumpkin beers you’ve had, where does this sit? Keith Beavers: I agree. This is one of the better ones I’ve had. It actually has a creamy texture to it. It kind of feels like you’re sinking your teeth into a delicious, spicy pumpkin pie, and I like a pumpkin pie. J: It has a lot of body. Z: I should’ve tried to find a pumpkin hazy. We could’ve seen which force is stronger: Adam’s haze boy status or his hatred of pumpkin. A: I saw one. It was staring me in the face at Trader Joe’s and I thought, “I’m not doing this.” K: I think I figured it out. I think Adam’s love-hate relationship with pumpkin spice is because he loves pumpkin pie so much that when those spices are in another thing, it upsets him. He just wants the pumpkin pie. A: I would also say that pumpkin pie is not the most superior of all pies. We can get into that close to Thanksgiving. J: Save it for the pie episode. A: I have major pie thoughts. We’re getting closer to Thanksgiving. We can talk a lot about pie and pairings with pies. Pumpkin pie would not be my first choice of pie. Z: We can draft pies. That’d be fun. A: All right, guys. Well, I’ll see you on Monday. Z: I’ll see you guys next time I’m in town. A: It’s been a pleasure, Zach. We’ll see you from Seattle next time. Z: Sounds great. Thanks so much for listening to the “VinePair Podcast.” If you love this show as much as we love making it, please leave us a rating or review on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever it is you get your podcasts. It really helps everyone else discover the show. Now, for the credits, VinePair is produced and recorded in New York City and Seattle, Washington, by myself and Zach Geballe, who does all the editing and loves to get the credit. Also, I would love to give a special shout-out to my VinePair co-founder, Josh Malin, for helping make all this possible and also to Keith Beavers, VinePair’s tastings director, who is additionally a producer on the show. I also want to, of course, thank every other member of the VinePair team who are instrumental in all of the ideas that go into making the show every week. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll see you again. Ed. note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity. The article VinePair Podcast: Why is Pumpkin Beer Still a Thing? appeared first on VinePair. source https://vinepair.com/articles/podcast-pumpkin-beer-tasting/ Via https://vinology1.tumblr.com/post/666755765464399872 This October, VinePair is celebrating our second annual American Beer Month. From beer style basics to unexpected trends (pickle beer, anyone?), to historical deep dives and new developments in package design, expect an exploration of all that’s happening in breweries and taprooms across the United States all month long. After exploding in popularity in the early 2010s as the world of craft beer began its own exponential growth, pumpkin ales became, just as quickly, the biggest joke in craft beer. As early as 2013, Buzzfeed News was asking which side of the debate you fell onto, following a controversial BeerAdvocate retweet of someone calling pumpkin beers “the mullet of craft beers.” Things got worse in 2015, when Anheuser-Busch chose to punch down at craft beer in its infamous Super Bowl ad, and it used a pumpkin beer to do it. (OK, technically a pumpkin-peach.) Now that the American brewing community has matured (a bit) and the fall seasonal world has mostly moved on to Oktoberfest adoration, where do these pie-spiced ales stand in today’s craft beer landscape? Is there a squash-ale stasis, or are we seeing brewers slowly return to the style that has more or less stagnated for years? In the broadest sense, Google Trends shows an annual spike in pumpkin beer interest every October, and there’s been a slow but steady uptick since bottoming out in the middle of the decade. As of now, 2021 is currently trending to have the highest search interest since October 2015. It’s a small indicator of a resurgence, but an indicator nonetheless. We looked into some numbers provided by Chicago-based market research firm IRI, but since it doesn’t track pumpkin beers as a style, we’re choosing instead to look at some anecdotal evidence from the category leaders. To get a better feeling for where the world of pumpkin beers is today, we reached out to a couple of authorities in the field, one responsible for the nation’s most popular pumpkin beer (Southern Tier’s Pumking) and one responsible for many awards (Whole Hog’s Pumpkin Ale). We also wanted to see what brought one of the nation’s most innovative, interesting breweries to make its very first pumpkin beer this year: Off Color Brewing’s Pumpkin Beer for Cafes. It’s a weird time for pumpkin beers; let’s find out how things are panning out for the pros. The Pumpkin Beer Powerhouse: Southern Tier’s PumkingIf you noticed an overall dip in pumpkin beer midway through the last decade, no one felt that more than Phin DeMink. As co-founder of Southern Tier, home to the category-leading 8 percent imperial pumpkin beer known as Pumking, DeMink experienced the contraction of the category first hand. “A few years back … it was just pumpkin everything,” he says. “It went a little over the top, between the candles and Starbucks and cereal.” The result for pumpkin beer peddlers: “We went through this pumpkin beer exodus. … There was definitely a big fallout.” DeMink estimates that they lost nearly 20 percent of their pumpkin beer volume during that mid-decade seasonal backlash — not insignificant when you consider that, per DeMink, “if you just looked at IRI, there were a couple of years where we outsold the category.” Pumking is indeed a powerhouse, and has recently spawned a variety of other products, including Warlock (a pumpkin stout), Pumking nitro, and cold brew coffee Pumking nitro. There’s even Pumking whiskey plus a “King & Cola” RTD through its distillery arm. All those line extensions aside, it’s been a good time for Pumking prime as of late. “We were one of the few [breweries] that was like hey, everybody’s been eating pumpkin pie forever, Thanksgiving isn’t going away,” DeMink says. “We’re gonna just stick to our guns and weather the storm. We saw a couple of years where competition was growing leaps and bounds. And [then] that whole pack went back to Oktoberfests. So the last couple of years for us, everything’s been really, really healthy.” DeMink estimates that year over year, they’re up by double digits just for Pumking alone. “We were kind of anticipating that this was probably going to be a comeback year,” he says. For a company that starts spinning up the Pumking machine as early as May in order to meet demand, it’s good to see the renewed enthusiasm for a seasonal product that’s really only got about a two-month window to make the lion’s share of its sales. “It’s in a great spot,” DeMink said. “But it’s funny, because now all of a sudden I’m seeing pumpkin beer starting to pop up again.” The Critically Praised Pumpkin Beer: Whole Hog’s Pumpkin AleIf you use medals from the Great American Beer Fest as a generally well-regarded metric of quality, the annual Pumpkin Ale from Whole Hog Beer in Stevens Point, Wis., is head and shoulders above every other pumpkin beer in the nation. In fact, it might be one of the most highly awarded beers in America. Since its release in 2011, the beer has medaled five times at GABF, including two gold medals. Mike Schraufnagel has been along for the entire ride, having worked at the brewery for 13 years, including the last three as its brewmaster. Whole Hog’s pumpkin ale has remained the same beer since some final tweaks in 2012, and aside from a brief foray into a barrel-aged option in 2015, remains the standard bearer for what an excellent pumpkin beer should be. Per Schraufnagel, there’s never been a better time for Whole Hog’s pumpkin beer than this one. “It had a heck of a year, it really did,” he says, praising some new logistical advances on the distributor side that allowed Whole Hog to get a better sense of demand. “We [went] into the year thinking, OK, we need 23 brews of it this year and we can fulfill all the pre-sale orders. Whereas in the past, we started out with 10 brews and just kind of, you know, put our ear to the ground to see what the feedback was, and hoped that we’d end up [selling] a good number of them.” Logistics aside, the appetite for the Whole Hog’s Pumpkin Ale is there in spades: Sales increased roughly 25 percent since last year, and the brand has moved over 2,100 barrels of its pumpkin beer in 2021 so far (up 600 barrels from the previous year) with most of them out the door by late August. “As the numbers were coming in for the pre-sales I was like, ‘This can’t be right,’” Schraufnagel says. “Right now it would be hard to find a bottle anywhere.” Pumpkin Beer’s Modern Progression: Off Color’s Pumpkin Beer for CafesChicago’s Off Color Brewing has made its name since 2013 as one of the nation’s most well-known experimental breweries. From leading the way for fruited goses and funky farmhouse ales, and self-created styles like “tiki-weisses” and Russian-style “serf stouts,” to its experiments with wild yeasts, foeders, and puncheon-aged beers, Off Color beers often push the limits. But it also loves classic lagers and the occasional pastry stout, as evidenced by its DinoS’mores series of beers. With all that in mind, it’s either outrageous or inevitable that Off Color would produce a pumpkin beer, which it did for the first time this summer, in the form of its chai-vanilla-infused Pumpkin Beer for Cafes. Co-founder and brewer Dave Bleitner said it was just the right time for an Off Color pumpkin beer to enter the landscape. “We don’t want to do stuff that’s prevalent. And I think we found more recently that everything’s gone so radical. You know, to one end there’s the haze craze, and then [on] the other end the Zima phase,” he says of the recent spate of sparkly, fruity beverages emerging from breweries. “It’s like, well what about … beers that are good?” Bleitner says. “We would joke, “Oh yeah, let’s do a historical style that was from the ‘90s.” But why pumpkin beer, a style that has so fallen out of favor? “I guess it was uncool enough for us to do it now,” Bleitner says. Off Color’s Pumpkin Beer for Cafes is based on its original “Beer for Cafes” which features chai spices on top of a rich, malty beer. Bleitner says that making a pumpkin chai was a natural next step, blending red rooibos tea with cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, pumpkin puree, and vanilla to make a beer that was definitely pumpkin-forward but undeniably Off Color. “I try not to make stuff that I wouldn’t drink, and there’s not a lot of pumpkin beers out there that I seek out,“ Bleitner says. “They’re either overly sweet, … overly boozy, or overly spiced, and I’ve never really had one that was well balanced.” It came along at the right time, apparently: Even though Off Color brewed the biggest-ever batch of its annual Oktoberfest, “the pumpkin beer outpaced it by like, 50 percent,” Bleitner says. “We actually ended up with more in-house for to-go sales than I originally intended to have,” he says. “We had a hundred-something cases and I was like, ‘That seems like a lot for this.’ And we blew through it.” Unfortunately, it came along too late for one potential patron. “Last year we had somebody come into the bar and say, ‘I’ll take your pumpkin beer,’” Bleitner says. “We said, ‘We don’t make a pumpkin beer.’ And then, they left. ‘Ooooookay.’” Good news for that guy: It looks like the market’s coming back to meet him. The article Is 2021 the Year of the Pumpkin Beer Renaissance? appeared first on VinePair. source https://vinepair.com/articles/best-pumpkin-beer-guide-2021/ Via https://vinology1.tumblr.com/post/666755763798261760 This October, VinePair is celebrating our second annual American Beer Month. From beer style basics to unexpected trends (pickle beer, anyone?), to historical deep dives and new developments in package design, expect an exploration of all that’s happening in breweries and taprooms across the United States all month long. The year is 1986, and Halloween is fast approaching. Whatever will you wear? Don’t worry, The Los Angeles Times has a Fright Night costume dispatch that should help you hone in on the season’s spookiest, sexiest get-up. “Carmen Miranda is in, Playboy bunnies are out, and people are scouring the city for Gumby attire. Belly dancers are hot, and Cleopatras, too. But topping them all in popularity is curvaceous cult heroine Elvira, currently of Coors beer commercial fame.” The Elvira, she of the pitch-black mane and pale-moonlight bosom? Of Coors beer commercial fame? In this day and age, it’s hard to believe, or even remember. But for a handful of years toward the end of last century, the Mistress of the Dark was all over the airwaves pitching a new light beer from the mid-size Colorado brewery, which was at that point just starting its national push after decades of distribution restricted to the Western U.S. Elvira’s Halloween Coors spots were instant classics, and gave the then-new Silver Bullet an enviable hold on the adult-ifying October holiday, which had previously been the province of candy companies catering to trick-or-treating kids. But as good as they were, they wouldn’t last. After less than a decade, the two parted ways. It was a blow to the brewery’s marketing department, then struggling to compete with the high-dollar heavyweights in Milwaukee and St. Louis. And it was baffling to the Queen of Halloween herself. “All of a sudden it was like, ‘Oh, we don’t understand these [ads] anymore,’ and ‘Oh, we’re not gonna make a [TV] commercial, we’re just gonna have you do a voiceover,’” Cassandra Peterson, the entertainer who created and has played the Elvira character for over four decades, tells VinePair. “It was like, What?” Why didn’t Coors keep making black, beer-selling magic with the Mistress of the Dark? It’s a spook-tacular war story from the ‘80s light-beer battlefields, a cautionary tale of the collision between mainstream beer marketing, well-funded Christian conservatives, and accusations of occult behavior. And, of course: cleavage. But before Elvira’s “gravity-defying bosom” enters the frame, we’ve got a Beerwolf to meet. Of Light Beer Wars and Silver BulletsYears before Elvira ever set foot on a Coors Light commercial soundstage, the Colorado brewery had plenty to be afraid of. After decades of nearly unchallenged dominance in the American West, by the mid-‘70s, Coors had encountered new bogeymen in its backyard. “Smelling blood,” wrote author Dan Baum in his 2001 history of the company and its eponymous family, “Citizen Coors,” Anheuser-Busch “was coming after Coors in California with discounts, price promotions, and a bottomless-pockets advertising blitz.” And from the Midwest, Miller was menacing the Colorado brewer’s territory, too, bludgeoning the Banquet Beer with its not-so-secret weapon, Miller Lite. “Miller, which had sold twice as much beer as Coors in 1977 and was already the country’s number-two brewery, attributed almost all of its growth to Miller Lite,” wrote Baum. The situation was all the more doom-and-gloom in Golden because Coors (which, despite going public in 1975 remained firmly under the company’s powerful, family-controlled board, led by Bill Coors, chairman, and Joe Coors, president) was almost fatally late to the light beer game. By the time the Coors elders accepted the inevitability of light beer it was 1978, and the fledgling Silver Bullet brand had a lot of catching up to do. “Coors seemed to be the brand that was competing against Miller [Lite] and [Budweiser] for all the key holidays,” says Gary Naifeh, a career marketer who served as the Coors Light brand director in the early ‘80s. “Coors Light was, to some degree, playing second fiddle.” At the time, the Colorado brewer was only distributed in 11 states, while Miller and Anheuser-Busch products were available nationally. And when St. Louis marched Bud Light into Coors country in 1982 as part of the brand’s national rollout, Naifeh found the bloody battle for light beer supremacy knocking on his door. Then, as now, holidays were key “occasions” in the American beer business — an opportunity to move cases and kegs with splashy ads, clever in-store promotions, and limited-time offers. But: “The national holidays were just owned by Miller” and Anheuser-Busch, Naifeh tells VinePair. With their national distribution, spectacular scale, and marketing savvy — Miller’s honed at then-owner Phillip-Morris; A-B’s bought with mountains of dough — the bigs were gobbling up primetime airwaves, appointment-viewing sports, and holiday specials across the country. But Halloween, long considered child’s play, was still up for grabs. “Halloween was building steam, it was becoming a more adult holiday,” says Peterson, crediting both the gay community at large, and the 1984 national syndication of her show, “Movie Macabre,” for that shift. (MTV seemed to agree: In 1986, it tapped the Mistress of the Dark to anchor its Halloween special from Salem, Mass.) The outgunned marketing team in Golden saw an opportunity the big brewers had overlooked. “Halloween was not a big holiday in the beer business, and Coors was looking to find a way that it could own a particular holiday,” recalls Naifeh. “I thought, gee, I really like Halloween, and we have adult Halloween parties in my house. Maybe it could be a really big adult holiday.” Coors Light’s first crack at inserting itself into the trick-or-treat discourse came in 1983, when it introduced the Beerwolf, a howling werewolf that could only be brought to heel by — you guessed it — Silver Bullets. What happened? Peterson remembers the campaign as a flop in her new bestselling memoir, “Yours Cruelly, Elvira”: “[T]he cheesy-looking hairball didn’t quite accomplish what [Coors had] hoped for.” Naifeh says the opposite: The Beerwolf was a smashing success, once the marketers got the blessing of the notoriously staid Coors family brass. “It was such a big hit with the public [and] when I introduced that stuff to the wholesalers at our national convention, there were people literally standing up on chairs and clapping,” he tells VinePair. Regardless, by 1986, Coors Light’s marketing department was looking for its next Halloween hit. “There’s a saying that people don’t get tired of your commercials, you get tired of your commercials,” says Rob Klugman, who was vice president of marketing at Coors during the Elvira era. (He has since left the firm.) The Beerwolf’s successor would have to be bold, hip, and TV-ready if the Colorado brewer was going to keep pace with the bigs. From Los Angeles, the Mistress of the Dark beckoned. The AdsElvira’s witchy star was on the rise by the time Coors came knocking in 1985 thanks to passionate local fans in L.A. and the aforementioned syndication deal. (A feature film, “Elvira: Mistress of the Dark,” would follow in 1988.) But Peterson nevertheless remembers the beer brand’s pitch as a pivotal step for the character: a national ad campaign, with all the exposure and money that it entailed. “This was the most lucrative source of income we’d had since the character began,” she writes in “Yours Cruelly, Elvira.” (The chapter, aptly, is titled “Boobs ‘n’ Beer.”) “I had a freaking blast doing” the first commercial, Peterson tells VinePair. Airing in the run-up to Halloween 1986, the 30-second spot‘s concept was cooked up by Coors’ creative team and Chicago ad agency Foote, Cone & Belding, but the horror host brought it to life with her signature valley-girl-meets-goth lilt and striking figure. “Here I am, stocking up for Halloween — got my stakes, got my ribs,” she says, gesturing toward a shopping cart full of wooden spikes and human bones. “When I ask the stock boy where the Coors Light is stacked, he points me to the Coors and Coors Light Halloween display, and I’m on it!” Then Peterson strikes a pose next to a life-size cardboard standee of herself to amplify the punchline: “Whoa, it’s like deja vu!” Both the ad and the standee (which we’ll come back to) went over big. According to Baum, Elvira’s “raunchy and hugely popular Halloween campaign” comprised part of “a fresh wind of positive change [that] blew through the brewery” in the mid-‘80s, along with a long-delayed embrace of computers, and plans for a new $70 million facility in Virginia that would help take the company national. (For what it’s worth, Klugman offered a less sweeping, albeit still positive, assessment of Elvira’s import to Coors. “Obviously if we did [the Elvira Halloween campaign] for five years or so, we were happy with it, but this was a campaign that ran for three or four weeks a year. I don’t know that I’d be comfortable saying it had much significance beyond that.”) But before that first commercial ever hit the air, Coors’ marketers had to get buy-in from the board of directors — which meant they had to get buy-in from Bill and Joe Coors themselves. According to Naifeh, Bill Coors had personally and enthusiastically greenlit the early Beerwolf spots, which featured the beercanis lupus chatting up a few bathing-suited women. But Elvira, with her occult aura and — in Klugman’s words — “what must have been a very, very good push-up bra,” was another story. So after getting storyboards together, the department cut a test reel with Peterson to present to the board. As the former vice president of marketing recalls in a recent phone interview, the presentation was hardly smooth sailing. “They had two problems: One was that Elvira, whatever she was, vampire or whatever, this was not an acceptable Christian concept.” Klugman sighs. “And second was her cleavage.” To Peterson, the idea that her boobs would jeopardize the campaign is still patently absurd — it’s literally and figuratively central to the Elvira character, a trait she likens to Superman’s “S” mark. But to get the deal done, she collaborated with the Silver Bullet marketers about how much cleavage she’d show in the spots, with an eye toward winning approval from the conservative Coors elders. The result: “I’m showing about as much cleavage as a teenage boy,” she says of the ads, laughing exasperatedly. “I had my hair pulled forward, and I even put tape on my chest so that I could stick my hair to it. … I mean, how crazy, right? They’re selling beer, not Pampers!” Crazy or not, the modesty gambit worked, and Elvira’s Coors partnership got the all-important Coors family green light. The Elvira spots ran alongside a full-court-press retail activation that included massive case mountains of Coors and Coors Light and a reported 150,000 life-size Elvira standees, carried forth to retailers by its fired-up distributing partners. The standees were a huge competitive edge for Coors, Naifeh remembers. “When you can walk in with something like Elvira, who obviously is known outside the beer community … I mean, the people that were the buyers at the Kroger’s and the Safeways, they knew Elvira. So when you can give a retailer something that [they think] is really cool, you just bought yourself a place in their establishment to feature your products.” Covered-up cleavage aside, Peterson was pleased with the cut-outs. “They stopped in-store traffic flow faster than a spilled case of Mrs. Butterworth’s pancake syrup on aisle thirteen,” she writes in her memoir. And customers loved them, too — perhaps too much. Klugman told The L.A. Times in 1986 that the company was having trouble getting them to retailers, because people kept walking off with them. (“I’m afraid to find out what people are doing with them,” another Coors executive told the paper.) Everything was coming up Elvira, and Halloween was the Silver Bullet’s for the owning. But even as the tax reports rolled back to Golden showing Mistress of the Dark-induced sales upticks, trouble was brewing in the Coors family cauldron. Ditching “the Demon”VinePair was not able to verify when, exactly, things started going south between Elvira and the Coors Brewing Company, and contemporary reporting proves deficient on this front. Peterson pegs the souring of relations to 1988, following Procter & Gamble’s bizarre, unfounded Satanism scandal a few years earlier. Naifeh was foggy on the exact year, and so was Klugman. Molson Coors declined to make Peter Coors (who was president of the company’s brewing division in the Elvira years, and chairs Molson Coors’ board of directors to this day) or anyone else from the company available for an interview. Regardless of the exact date, at some point in the late ‘80s, the brewer backed away from Peterson’s character. Despite the successful Halloween campaigns, or maybe because of them, Elvira had become unpalatable to one or several Coors family members. Baum lays the blame at the feet of born-again Christian Jeff Coors. “Jeff could barely look at the Halloween promotions using ‘Elvira, Mistress of the Dark,’” he wrote in “Citizen Coors.” “They stirred in him a powerful revulsion, even fear.” Between that and the P&G saga then playing out in the headlines (or both), the Silver Bullet’s affiliation with Elvira proved too unholy for the firm’s executives. (In a zany turn, Baum reported that the Coors marketers even tried to devise a cardboard modesty panel to send out to distributors to affix to the standees already in circulation, in order to save the company’s Halloween that year. Naifeh says that never happened, and Klugman doesn’t remember. But Peterson insists it went down. “I had a big argument with them,” over the panels, she says. “There was nothing to cover. I don’t know if they were gonna knit turtleneck sweaters and send them out to everybody, because you [already] couldn’t see anything!”) Whatever the year, Peterson and Naifeh both remember the brand stopping down on the commercials for at least one season, maybe two, then trying to start them back up again. What contemporary media remains from that era seems to confirm that timeline: On YouTube there are Elvira spots with burned-in copyright dates from 1991 and even 1994. But the comeback was not to last. The brewer bailed on the buxom host, and the latter says it was not a mutual decision. “The reports of Coors and Elvira’s amicable parting of the ways were grossly exaggerated,” Peterson writes in “Yours Cruelly.” Here again, the record is foggy, and most signs point to a Coors family member finally killing the campaign. But Peterson says it wasn’t Jeff, but Joe Coors, who shut down the spooktacular spots for good. This would track: While Jeff was technically Coors’ parent company’s president at the time, his father, Joseph, a major Republican donor who wrote the check that launched the right-wing Heritage Foundation, was involved in the firm’s operations until the late ‘80s, and remained on its board until retiring in 2000. Peterson wasn’t personally in the room for his pivotal ruling, but she’s pretty sure Joe ended Elvira’s run around 1995. She says her counterparts within the company, at some point toward the decade’s end, brought a cardboard cutout to the elder Coors for review — and he saw Satan’s fingerprints all over it. “They said that they took the latest standee into Joseph Coors, to see what he thought, and he said — and I remember their words like it was yesterday — ‘I see demons there!’” From then on, according to Peterson, Coors’ marketers tried to dial the campaign back to voice-over and radio, to keep the Mistress of the Dark’s slinky, salacious likeness off screen (and therefore, out of eyeshot of any Coorses concerned with eternal damnation.) But that idea frustrated the horror host, who by then had come into her own as a bona fide B-list star with a national cult following. Worried that when the watered-down campaign flopped she’d be blamed, Peterson and her team decided to walk. It was a bitter pill, all the more so because she’d had so much fun on the campaign — and because she’d adjusted her character’s chesty image to accommodate the Coors family’s modesty requirements. But never again. “After Coors, I drew the line,” she says. “I said to myself, my character needs to look like this all the time. I’m not going to put panels over my boobs, I’m not gonna try to cover them up.” CodaIf this story were written in 2020, it would end right there. But with the publication of “Yours Cruelly, Elvira” in September 2021, Peterson dropped a bombshell on her still-loyal legions of fans: For the past two decades, she’s been romantically involved with a woman. Elvira, Queen of Halloween and longtime gay icon, is a member of the queer community herself. This begs the question: Did the Coors family’s well-documented track record of funding right-wing organizations that worked to block protections and marriage rights for LGBTQ+ Americans factor into the breakdown between brewery and horror host? At the very least, it would have been impossible to ignore, posits Allyson Brantley, Ph.D. The professor of history at California’s University of La Verne authored “Brewing a Boycott,” a historical account of the three-decade collective action waged by labor organizers, Chicano and Black activists, and the LGBTQ+ community in an attempt to force the Colorado brewer to improve its hiring practices and politics. “At first the boycott began as a shop-floor conflict … in the ‘50s and ‘60s, but in the early ‘70s, Joe Coors himself became more public in his politics,” says Brantley. Around that same time, the labor wing of the anti-Coors coalition drew the queer community into the fight with a grim detail on Coors’ hiring practices: a polygraph test that included questions about prospective employees’ sexual preferences. “A lot of employees said the polygraph test asked problematic and invasive questions,” says Brantley, noting that the general practice of requiring lie-detector tests for employment was not itself uncommon at the time. As the late Baum put it in a May 2000 interview with C-SPAN, “This was a company that used to run lie-detector tests to run the homosexuals out.” With that, queer organizations like Bay Area Gay Liberation, the Stonewall Democratic Club, as well as contemporary gay leaders like San Francisco mayor Harvey Milk, joined the fight against Coors. Queer consumers proved to be one of the boycott’s staunchest wings until the AIDS epidemic ravaged the community in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Brantley adds. (In an emailed statement to VinePair, Molson Coors spokesperson Marty Maloney said: “Molson Coors has a long history of advocating for the rights of the LGTBQ+ community because that’s what we believe is right. That was true more than 20 years ago when Coors Brewing became one of the first companies to extend health benefits to the partners of LGTBQ+ employees, and it remains true now.” He did not dispute Brantley’s description of the lie detector tests, which Coors reportedly began phasing out in 1986 after Congress began exploring bills to prohibit them from companies’ hiring processes.) VinePair asked Peterson whether she was aware of the Coors family’s posture toward the gay community, and whether it factored into her decision to work with the company, particularly given the revelations of her memoir. “In the beginning, I had no idea, didn’t even think about it,” she says. But in the intervening years between her first and second wave of Coors spots, she continues, “I had discovered that the gay community had boycotted them for their many right-wing causes.” When Coors came back around to restart the Halloween campaign, the Mistress of the Dark was ready. “I met with some of their marketing team, and I actually believe I helped make a bridge to some gay activists in the community, to talk about that with Coors to help resolve the issues that the gay community wanted resolved,” says Peterson. “I used that as one of my bargaining chips when we went back to Coors because then, I had a little power.” Whether this righted any of Coors’ wrongs in the LGBTQ+ community is up for debate, says Brantley. The company began pouring money into gay organizations, either to clean up its image in the eyes of queer drinkers, or because the company’s new, non-family leadership believed it was “right,” or both. But Coors family members remained powerful players in right-wing politics. As recently as 2004, the comparatively forward-thinking Peter Coors — who, even according to the mostly unsparing Baum, was friendly with gay and lesbian customers — ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate in Colorado on a platform that included support for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. (He supported civil unions for gays and lesbians; Coors Brewing’s then-CEO disavowed his chairman’s politics even so.) Still, it seems like a net positive if the Mistress of the Dark was able to move the Coors Brewing Company toward some form of reconciliation with the gay community — even if it wasn’t quite a Silver Bullet. The article Elvira’s Short, Sexy Stint as Coors Light’s Halloween Queen appeared first on VinePair. source https://vinepair.com/articles/elvira-coors-light-halloween-mascot/ Via https://vinology1.tumblr.com/post/666755762699255808 It’s an exciting time for cocktail lovers on the go. From cans and bottles to cartons and bags, there is now a plethora of premixed drinks available on the market that make it easier than ever to sip our favorite cocktails without having to go to a bar. The options are especially endless for whiskey enthusiasts, with a sea of everything from Old Fashioneds and Manhattans to Gold Rushes and spiked lemonades hitting the market with gusto. With so many options for whiskey-based RTDs now available, the VinePair team tasted through the many offerings to separate the wheat from the chaff. A large portion of these RTDs are Old Fashioneds and Manhattans — the former beating out the latter by a landslide, impressing our panel with natural orange essences and spirit-forward depth. With so many Old Fashioneds to choose from, our final list includes the offerings, both canned and bottled, that stood out from the pack and impressed the VinePair team most. From boozy bottles sure to please whiskey fans, to crushable canned cocktails that can easily replace your weekend hard seltzers, these are the best whiskey-based RTDs to drink right now. Tattersall Old Fashioned
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