Fall beers....

Hey all,

The fall beers are hitting the taps hard and fast lately.  We had the HHI go on a little while ago and now in the past two days we have the Octoberfest as well as the Pumpkin Ale on.  All of these beers came out great this year.  The HHI with its wet Cascade and Chinook hops from Maine, has the best of both hops.  Nice big piney aromatic with the citrus rind flavor of the Cascade coming though in the flavor.  It has been drank pretty heavily over the week and is about half gone already so if you haven’t tried it come and get it before it goes away.  

I have a double batch (14bbls) of both the October fest and the Pumpkin Ale so that should last a couple of weeks at least.  The Oktoberfest is true to style having that great Munich malt cracker flavor that dissipates to a very clean finish because of the lagering.  Really loving this beer right now.

The Pumpkin Ale is different then most pumpkin beers out there. The "pumpkin" beers form the big guys out there, more often then not, doesn’t even have pumpkin in the beer.  If you get lucky they might wave a can of pumpkin puree over the mash tun.  They are light bodied and highly spiced.  We take a different approach here at Portsmouth Brewery.  Since we uses fresh pumpkin in the beer we have to wait until the pumpkins are ready.  Which puts us way behind on our release date of the beer...but it is well worth the wait.   We use 100# of Dickinson Pumpkins from Blueberry Bay farms in Stratum.  We shred them and then hand toss them into the mash as we are brewing.  Then we lightly spice the beer to let the pumpkin flavor come though and just give a nice balance to the beer.  

We do have cinnamon sugar available to rim your glass...but PLEASE at least try the beer with out it because it really doesn’t need all the extra accouterments.

cheers,
Tyler