In my latest article for The Bulletin, out last week, I revisited one of my favorite seasonal styles: pumpkin beer! It had actually been three years since I wrote about pumpkin beers for the paper, and Immersion Brewing recently released its small batch Stingy Jack which gave me an excuse to highlight it again.

Here in Bend, Immersion Brewing Company recently released Stingy Jack Pumpkin Ale, a small batch specialty returning for its second year. The brewery brewed one barrel (31 gallons) and expects it may only last until Halloween.

From a marketing standpoint, pumpkin beers are treated as Halloween specialties, associated with jack-o’-lanterns and other related holiday imagery. Numbers tend to back this up, with sales dropping immediately after Halloween. Several years back the market seemed to hit a saturation point; there was simply too much pumpkin beer that ended up unsold. The industry scaled back but there are always favorites that are still brewed every year.

Personally, I’ve always associated the style more with the Thanksgiving holiday, especially considering most pumpkin beers are spiced to taste similar to pumpkin pie. Immersion’s Stingy Jack goes in this direction.

“We baked 75 pounds of pumpkin puree and added it to the mash during the brewing process,” Immersion’s Beer Ambassador Brian Maxson said via email. For the one barrel batch, that’s approximately two and a half pounds of pumpkin per gallon. “We used cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, allspice and vanilla” to spice the brew.

It was my first pumpkin beer of the season, and did not disappoint; you can read my tasting notes in the article.

Locally, only Immersion and Spider City Brewing seem to be brewing pumpkin beers this year, at least from what I could find at the time I was writing the article. I’d love to see more. And of course, I have bottles and cans of pFriem Pumpkin Beer, 2 Towns Hollow Jack’d, Laurelwood Pumpkin Ale in the fridge right now as well.