I didn’t realize that the “Best By” date on this beer was 6/15/10 until I pulled it out of the fridge. Will the Harpoon UFO Hefeweizen be yet another reason to love Boston? Boston Beer Company (makers of Samuel Adams), Boston Beer Week, and the bar that inspired Cheers! are just a few reasons to love Boston. So, well-done for capturing a really strong pumpkin flavor here - I guess I'm just tending to like beers that are less sweet, these days.Harpoon Brewery hails from Boston, which is one of the best drinking cities in the USA. There's no artificial flavoring in this one, just pumpkin and spices. **Updated: See below for a nice comment from the creator of this beer. I noticed that he left an inch or two at the bottom of his glass when we left. Even one of my friends, who liked his sip of mine enough to order his own pint, agreed that it was sickly-sweet after a bit. While this one might taste rewarding at first, it becomes increasingly harder to drink as it warms and the artificial taste begins to grate. In theory, and often in practice, they are much more complex and interesting than that. Pumpkin beers should not be treated like fruit beers. This is why people rarely describe soda as "complex" or write blogs reviewing it. And while artificial flavoring is great at achieving a difficult taste that just doesn't want to stick, it leads to that flavor being one-dimensional, overly sweet and blandly sugary. But in any case, this beer tastes like it was flavored with artificial pumpkin flavor, rather than the usual combo of vegetable matter + spices. Then it hit me: UFO Pumpkin tastes an awful lot like the terrible Kennebunkport Pumpkin I found at Trader Joe's last year, which used pumpkin flavored syrup to enhance the "pumpkin." Now, I don't know for sure that this is what UFO has done - not having any behind-the-scene's access, I can only guess based on my tastebuds. (Admittedly, that doesn't sound terrible in theory. It doesn't make you work to notice the pumpkin - something that would otherwise be fine, but it also doesn't taste all that much like beer, so it's a bit like drinking pumpkin soda. Whatever it was/is, it's just too sweet for me, and it seems like a weird attempt to make a more mass-market, fruit-beer pumpkin ale with a very specific and unimaginative flavor profile. Initially I thought maybe there was lactose sugar in it, but there still seemed to be something else that that wouldn't explain. This beer was too sweet and singular and specific in its taste. The flavors seemed like they should be appealing, since I do love pumpkin so much, but something was off. It has a noticeable, firm pumpkin flavor that many pumpkin beers lack - I'd even call it a very clear taste well defined and unwavering. And on the surface, it seems like this one should be fine. I passed it around my table of seasoned beer drinkers, and to my surprise, they all said they thought it was fine. Granted, this beer isn't awful, and it took me a while to figure out what was bugging me about it. I took a sip and immediately knew something was wrong here. (It's kind of my thing.) The smell was good. As it's a brand new pumpkin beer, I was contractually obligated to order it. I had this on tap at Hop Devil Bar in Manhattan. I just don't think this is one of them.įirst of all, I'm getting annoyed with this trend of breweries releasing their pumpkin beers well before fall.
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