Help! I Just Want to Drink More Pumpkin Beer!
While I was in the US, I drank five pumpkin beers of two different varieties: Night Shift Brewing's Pumpkin Piescraper and (an absolute classic) Shipyard's Pumpkinhead.
And I should have drank more!
Because yesterday I spent close to two hours searching online to try to figure out where to buy pumpkin beer in Berlin and, while I have a couple of lukewarm leads, I don't have a six-pack in my fridge yet. Here's what I found:
A couple of craft beer bars whose instagram accounts I can keep an eye on in the hopes that they mention a pumpkin beer on tap. Of course, then I'll have to go to a bar in order to drink it, which I'm not particularly interested in doing, considering, ya know, the pandemic.
Two craft beer stores that didn't specifically mention pumpkin beers on their websites, but do sometimes carry small batch and seasonal varieties. One of these stores gets a lot of US imports, which seems promising.
BrewDog, a Scottish brewery with a taproom and Biergarten not too far from our new apartment, has made a pumpkin beer in the past, but doesn't seem to be brewing or selling it this year.
And, finally, a brewery in Bremen (Freie Brau Union Bremen) makes a Pumpkin Ale, which I can order online and have delivered to me. So, that is probably what I will do.
This is a far cry from walking into the grocery store in Somerville, MA and choosing Pumpkin Piescraper from amid literally dozens of pumpkin beer options.
Is the lack of pumpkin beer in Germany a particularly large or pressing problem? Nah.
But drinking pumpkin beer from a glass with a cinnamon-sugar rim is one of my preferred ways to celebrate spooky season and I'd like to do it at least once more before I switch gears and start drinking glühwein.