南瓜啤酒重回地域特产：新英格兰的秋天生意，全国热度却在分化

Earlier this month, Jack’s Abby Brewing in Framingham, Mass., cranked up the oom-pah tunes for Oktoberfest revelry featuring stein-hoisting contests, plump pretzels, and lots and lots of lager.

“We set our all-time sales record for the beer hall,” says Sam Hendler, CEO of parent company Hendler Family Brewing.

Unsurprisingly, golden Munich Fest and Copper Legend Oktoberfest lagers took the top draft sales slots. Third place welcomed an underdog: Pumpkin Crop, a spiced autumnal lager. “That’s different from 10 years ago when it was all German lagers at Oktoberfest,” Hendler says. Now people want to party with pumpkin beer. When it comes to drinkers losing their gourd, “Massachusetts is a pretty good bellwether for New England.”

Pumpkin beer’s popularity in New England dates to Colonial America when resourceful brewers embraced pumpkins as a cheap and plentiful fermentable. During craft beer’s late-20th century rise, the region’s breweries rebooted pumpkin ale as a spiced fall seasonal that tasted like boozy pumpkin pie.

“You can almost call it the original pastry beer,” says Phil Markowski, the brewmaster at Two Roads Brewing in Stratford, Conn.

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Pumpkin beer hit a rough patch in the mid-2010s when market saturation and summertime releases sparked a backlash. Many pumpkin beers disappeared, but the style held strong in New England, fall’s wonderland of pumpkin patches, apple orchards, and leaf-peeping.

“These iconic seasonal moments create appetite and excitement for beers that echo the flavors and feelings of fall,” says Jon London, the head of beer at Boston Beer Company, which makes cinnamon-spiced Sam Adams Jack-O pumpkin ale.

Instead of dying on the vine, pumpkin beer today thrives as a regional specialty with deep-rooted preferences for time-tested brands. Born in 1996, Shipyard Brewing’s Pumpkinhead Ale still shines from its Portland, Maine headquarters down the East Coast. Across the country, Seattle’s Elysian Brewing first brewed the spiced Night Owl Pumpkin Ale in 1997, and the brand returns every fall.

“We love traditions and are creatures of habit, aren’t we?” says Jeff Richards, the senior marketing director at Elysian. “Pumpkin beer is one part of how we share in the spirit of the season.”

Why New England Is Awash in Pumpkin Beers

No region loves pumpkin beers more than New England. Over the past five years, Google Trends data show a concentration of interest in New England, with a pronounced spike this year. “Fall seasonal beers are more popular in New England than other areas of the country,” a Total Wine rep reported via email.

Pumpkin beer is “built into the culture,” says Rob Day, the vice president of marketing for Barrel One Collective, which encompasses 15 mainly New England brands including Harpoon, Smuttynose, Wachusett, and Long Trail. “People look forward to these moments.”

Barrel One sells seven different pumpkin beers and ciders, many with regional affinity. New Hampshire enjoys Smuttynose Pumpkin Ale, New Yorkers order Five Boroughs Pumpkin Ale, and Massachusetts drinkers crush Wachusett Pumpkin Ale.

“In each state, there’s a different pumpkin product in our portfolio that’s outperforming,” Day says. Sales of UFO Pumpkin are up 18 percent in Rhode Island, while Harpoon Pumpkin Cider is up 9.3 percent in Connecticut and Clown Shoes Pumpkin Sombrero is up 28 percent in New Hampshire.

“Fall seasonal beers are more popular in New England than other areas of the country.”

Pumpkin beer drinkers aren’t monolithic. For Hendler Family’s Massachusetts brands, flavor and ABV preferences vary across customer bases. Night Shift’s potent and strongly flavored Pumpkin Piescraper appeals to a younger, more urban crowd, Hendler shares, while Wormtown’s mellower, lower-alcohol Fresh Patch hits the blue-collar, more suburban customer base.

“The pumpkin beer phenomenon works across all demographics in Massachusetts,” Hendler says.

In Massachusetts, this fall’s most popular pumpkin beer is Shipyard Pumpkinhead, according to Circana data. “That’s our biggest market,” says Bruce Forsley, Shipyard’s president. Now 30 years old, Pumpkinhead accounts for almost half of Shipyard’s annual production and remains steady. “Craft beer has been struggling the last few years, but this segment remains healthy and robust with no immediate signs of decline,” Forsley says.

Shipyard is singularly focused on expanding and supporting the Pumpkinhead franchise. Smashed Pumpkin, the 9 percent ABV imperial pumpkin ale, continues to grow, and there’s also a version aged in bourbon barrels. This year, Shipyard also introduced an NA Pumpkinhead that sold out in three weeks. “We vastly underestimated the NA beer market,” says Forsley, who plans to boost production next year.

Pumpkin’s Fandom Spreads Wide

Thriving pockets of fandom expand beyond the Northeast, too, in part fueled by legacy brands. Southern Tier Brewing in Lakewood, N.Y., has ardent fans of Pumking Imperial Ale (born 2007) in New York State and adjoining regions; and Dogfish Head in Milton, Del., has legions of mid-Atlantic fans for Punkin Ale, first brewed in 1994.

Despite national interest seemingly waning, pumpkin beer sales are actually increasing in several surprising pockets. Shipyard ships Pumpkinhead Ale to 42 states. Georgia is growing, and “Florida is a very good market because New England transplants are down there,” Forsley says.

The challenge with wide distribution is a shorter selling season in warm-weather states. Pumpkin ale can be a tough sell when it tops 100 degrees in Texas, so distributors want to sell the beer in two or three weeks. “There’s not a traditional fall season,” he says. “There’s just the thought that, This is the time of year when I should have this beer.”

Heatwaves, though, aren’t a dealbreaker. Total Wine & More reports that searches for pumpkin products ramp up around the end of July, with a 210 percent increase from July 2020 to July 2026. And that warm-weather arrival of pumpkin beers is a feature, not a bug, of the complex beer-distribution system and demands of the calendar. “Seasonal creep” is just standard operating procedure for large brewers that need lead time for brewing, packaging, and shipping.

“Our distributors, by and large, will bring Pumpkinhead in July to be prepared to release it as soon as they have sold their last case of the previous seasonal beer, which is summer,” Forsley says. Could be mid-August, or maybe late July. “It’s based on depletion.”

“Craft beer has been struggling the last few years, but this segment remains healthy and robust with no immediate signs of decline.”

Boston Beer typically releases its fall seasonals, including Jack-O, during the first week of August. “That’s when people start craving fall,” London says. In a competitive sales landscape, “we want to be first to market with the seasonals people are excited about.”

Selling pumpkin beer earlier gives breweries a headstart on the style’s unofficial October 31 end date. “Even though pumpkin carries into Thanksgiving in such a big way, Halloween kind of ends pumpkin beer and you’re on your way out,” Day says.

Pumpkin Is an Invitation to Party

Encouraging customers to party maximizes the compressed sales season. This October, Two Roads hosted its eighth annual Roadsmary’s Baby Pumpkin Fest to celebrate its pumpkin beer partly aged in rum barrels. Attendees competed in pumpkin-carving competitions, watched The Ring, and ate pumpkin pie.

“The Northeast is known for pumpkin celebrations,” Markowski says, adding that Roadsmary’s Baby remains the top-selling Two Roads seasonal. Though volumes are down around 50 percent from the pre-pandemic peak, Two Roads still sells more than 1,000 barrels annually. “It’s here to stay,” he says.

Early October also marked Elysian’s 22nd annual Great Pumpkin Beer Festival. Nearly 3,000 people attended the block party to drink pumpkin ale poured from a hollowed-out 1,700-pound pumpkin. “We sold more beer on that Saturday night than we’ve ever sold on any single GPBF day,” Richards says. One-off releases keep interest high. Elysian has produced more than 100 different pumpkin beers over the years, including a pumpkin cheesecake ale and a pumpkin sour ale.

“The ability to create novelty around the familiar each year is so cool,” he says.

Beer styles were once rooted in place and taste: crisply elegant kölsch in Cologne, Germany; acidic lambic in Brussels, Belgium; bitter West Coast IPAs in California. Now every beer can be made everywhere, recipes and processes replicated around the globe. Reverting pumpkin beers to regional specialties, only sold for a few short yet festive months, can rekindle what once made craft beer so special. Here’s a beer, only available for the here and now.

Check out Maine’s fall foliage, hit a pumpkin patch, then pop by a neighborhood bar for a Pumpkinhead pint rimmed with sugar and cinnamon. Says Forsley, “It’s truly an American experience.”

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