Long Trail is excited to launch Long Trail Pumpkin Ale, a slightly sweet seasonal treat artfully brewed with pumpkins, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and cloves. The perfect drink for a fall day, this exceptionally balanced beer has an aroma very reminiscent of pumpkin pie.

I’ve been spoiled. My first taste of any Pumpkin-style beer was Southern Tier’s Pumpking Imperial Ale, a very sweet, pumpkin-pie, almost pumpkin-ice-creamish beer. Since then, anything more realistic with the Pumpkin flavoring, especially when cinnamon and nutmeg are strongly present, just doesn’t do it for me.

And here’s an example of just such a disappointment, but only to my expectations. The liquid enters the mouth with a distinct herbal, seasoning taste from the abundant nutmeg present in the brew. While there is a pumpkin flavor, it’s like that of a raw pumpkin and immediately wafts over the mouth. It is sweet, but naturally pumpkin-like, not desert sweet in essence. It’s sour, but not in a beer IPA or hoppy sour. The nutmeg is so much so that I get a very slight gag-reflex from this ale because I find it that unpleasant to the taste. It’s not very seltzery, and leaves that raw pumpkin flavor behind in the mouth.

Yuck.

Not my type of pumpkin style ale, but it may be for someone else.