Buffalo Bills Pumpkin Ale

Brewed by Buffalo Bills Brewery
Style: Spice/Herb/Vegetable
Hayward, California USA

Pours clear copper with gold edges and thin off white head. Pretty full aroma of cinnamon and spices, pumpernickel, faint ginger bread, some pumpkin and mellow sweet dark fruitiness. The carbonation creates and initial punch of harshness that quickly rolls into pumpkin, cinnamon and all spice. By midway smooth mild pumpkin and maltiness give way to another wave of wintery spices and ginger bread. A little out of the can pumpkin feel and a bit heavy on the spices for my taste.

12 oz bottle...Pours golden-brown like apple juice with a fizzy off white head that quickly diminishes. The aroma is that of a heavily spice ale...coriander, cinnamon, all spice, maybe some nutmeg...slight traces of pumpkin. The flavor is sweet and spicy followed by a lasting pumpkin flavor. The palate is thin, fizzy, and quite refreshing for a seasonal beer. There is also a wee bit of cloying sweetness. Not bad, but a little too sweet...

Bottle at some Halloween party.

Pie-spicy and thin, mildly sweet, maybe some pumpkin in there somewhere. Haven’t been in a hurry to try this one and that reticence wasn’t a mistake. Drinkable, though...the WTF reaction to the spices and sweetness dissipates quite quickly.

(bottle - 12 oz) Light orange in color with a thin white head. Aroma is very pumpkiny but not a lot of spice like others. Fresh pumpkin, some light cinnamon, and some cream perhaps? Flavor is very light with almost no traces of pumpkin in it. Some cinnamon and nutmeg and the lightest flavor of pumpkin in the middle and a lightly bitter finish. It’s not bad, but I don’t think it should advertise it as a pumpkin ale.

Bottle: Light body, very light pumkin flavor and not a lot of spice. Not offensive but not a good beer by any means.

Mild yellow gold appearance. Slightly cloudy. Thinly emcompassing head on surface of ale. Pumpkin pie spices are apparent in aroma...but strangely so. I felt more like I had opened a spice cabinet than I had inhaled the comforting aroma of a fresh pie. Very thin mouthfeel; quite watery. Flavor is artificial cinnamon/nutmeg/cloves wrapped around a macro lager. Unfortunately, one of the weakest pumpkin beers I’ve had so far.

I almost refused to rate this because I’m not really that certain it was actually beer. It tasted like someone urinated in a pumpkin, left it there for year, and then attempted to make a beer from it. jVery sour. WTF. Pumpkins aren’t sour. Will re-rate if I get a better batch?

The bottle said it was the original pumpkin ale, and it tasted like an ale made 200 years ago. Maybe I got a bad bottle, but this beer just tasted bad. Not a whole lot of good going on here.