Pumpkin Beer

Fall means flaming red leaves on the Cherry Street maple trees, intermittent sideways rain and putting your rain gear on and off two or three times on the way home, your favorite football team breaking your heart all over again, and, of course, pumpkin beer.

Mmmm, pumpkin beer.

The Elysian Brewing Company (and probably some other places in town) have this seasonally; a pumpkin-flavored ale with a hint of cinnamon or maybe nutmeg and allspice so it’s like drinking a slice of pumpkin pie. You wouldn’t want to only drink it; that is, you wouldn’t want to have no other beer choices, but my goodness, it’s so good that I have been occasionally, during the last few weeks that it’s been offered, finding excuses to ride over there and have a quick pint (or two), even when I’m not all that thirsty or in cases I should be somewhere else.

It’s funny to find yourself craving something like this; now I know how it feels to be a junkie or at least how it feels to be this guy I’m acquainted with, Don, who told me in passing that sometimes he’d be driving down the street near Ezell’s Chicken and couldn’t help himself from stopping in and getting a box of wings. When I heard that story, I was all like, “Oh, sorry you have no willpower, man; if you were a more evolved person you could reign in your animal desires and ascend to a place of higher consciousness, like me.”

But now I see I’m just the same as that, only with a different item I’m attracted to. It’s easy for me to eschew fried chicken flesh, but not so simply to refrain from an frothy amber ale, whose pumpkin tones tickle the nose and tease the palate.

It’s been a couple days since I’ve been to the Elysian for some of their signature Night Owl; tomorrow, though, I’ll probably be sipping pumpkin pie.