Sea Dog Pumpkin Ale

Brewed by Sea Dog Brewing (Shipyard Brewing Co.)
Style: Spice/Herb/Vegetable
Topsham, Maine USA

Pours a golden orange with a thin head. Aroma is sweet and mild, pie spices and such. Flavor has no detectable pumpkin flavor, more pie spice, a little too heavy on the cinnamon, not heavy enough on the numeg and pumpkin. Tasty, just needs some tweaking to be up to par.

Bottle. Pale golden with a white head. Pumpkin pie spice aroma - lots of nutmeg and clove. Light, fizzy body. Very light flavored beer with some artificial spice flavorings. Blah.

Much more pumpkin pie spice than pumpkin, and boldly artificial at that! Weird fake nutmeg, allspice, mace notes with a hint of pie filling and sweet condensed milk...which might not have been that bad, if only they had mixed all up with a decent beer. But really, now, why would you want to do that anyway? I like their other brews so far!

Bottle from Trader Joe’s. Pours a copper color with an average creamy white head that diminished quickly with little lacing. Light hoppy pumpkin aroma. Light to medium body with thin texture. Light sweet pumpkin flavor with a short finish.

12oz bottle. A good pumpkin ale, but not great. Smells of nutmeg and pumpkin. Not much spice flavor in this. The pumpkin flavor is a bit much. Just not enough complexity to it.

Pours a fairly pale yellow color. Aroma is slightly sweet with a bit of graininess. Nutmeg is noticable. Fairly spicy flavor. Tastes like a fairly cheap lager with some spice added. I’m not sure about the pumpkin.

12 oz. bottle from Trader Joe’s for about $.89 - my expectations are low. Pours golden and clear with a fairly foamy white head and lots of tiny bubble streams rising. This looks an awful lot like a pale lager rather than something with pumpkin. Aroma is also pale lagerish - except with cardboard overtones and noticible pumpkin pie spice notes including nutmeg, clove and ginger. Flavor is just plain bad in my book, the malt sweetness is eclipsed by a weird and unpleasant metallic spicy flavor that resembled pumpkin pie filling left in an open can in the refrigerator for a few days. Body is thin and carbonation assertive, but not aggressive. Not enjoyable at all. Bad Sea Dog, bad dog!

Pumpkin ales always smell great, just like pumpkin pie but the flavor is usually too strong. This one not only smells great, but has a very light spicy pumpkin flavor, along with nutmeg, allspice, cinnamon and some sweet citrus. The mouthfeel was kind of thin, but this was otherwise pretty tasty, and a great beer to sip during the fall season.