The Lobstah PumQueen

Uncategorized October 31, 2010

An orange squash brought much joy to my life last night. I dressed up as a lobster,

met up with a vampire…

as well as a cop and a hunter…

and headed to a pumpkin beer festival at the Cambridge Brewing Company!!!!!!! When we arrived, there was a huge wait, but we braved the cold for an hour and a half because we LOVE beer. It was totally worth it in the end. We were ravenous when we finally got in, so we grabbed our first sample and ordered some pumpkin food.

I had bites of Matt’s grilled pork sausage with braised collard greens, cascade hop infused hot sauce, and pumpkin mustard relish; probably one of the best sausages I’ve ever tasted.

Also delicious was my roasted sugar pumpkin bisque with cranberry, sage and walnut crumble, and a brown butter drizzle.

Dessert was a to-die-for pumpkin bread pudding with pumpkin ale ice cream and house made butterscotch.

Although we had table service for dinner, we still had to get up to refill our glasses, so we all took turns running around to different stations in the restaurant to get more beer. Around ten, there was a procession through the restaurant and the ceremonious tapping of the great pumpkin full of beer occurred. Too bad the beer inside was blahh and very watery.

And now to the beers! I tried 16 different pumpkin beers (out of the 32 they had available). I didn’t waste samples on beers I’d already had (like pumking(!)) and there were a few that I really really wanted to try, but they were all out when I got around to ordering them. I rated all the beers with a letter grade and nothing I tried got lower than a B-. They had a few sour pumpkin ales, which I actually liked, but I just see those in a different category than the others because they are almost summery. Here are all the beers that got A’s:

The Bruery: Autumn Maple
Rock Art: Imperial Spruce Pumpkin Stout
Cambridge Brewing Co: Punjabi Pumpkin
Cambridge Brewing Co: Spinal Pumpkin Barleywine
Clipper City: Heavy Seas Great Pumpkin
Unita: Punk’n

And the winner of the best beer was the Iron Hill Bruce Camp-Ale. All the samples I had were 4oz pours, but I went back for this one in an 8oz pour at the end of the night because it was just divine. It was a bourbon barrel aged imperial ale; it was very rich (9.5% abv) and the bourbon from the barrels made it perfectly sweet. My second favorite was the Autumn Maple (above).