Monday Rant: Frozen Pumpkins?

Into the stockpile it goes.

Somehow we all knew it was going to happen. After all, our favorite seasonal brews seem to appear earlier and earlier each year. I'm just going to warn you now that this is going to be the paragraph of callbacks. I certainly know I've harped for almost two years about the seasonals hitting shelves on an earlier basis. I recall writing something proposing some kind of craft beer paradox in which seasonal beers end up coming out so early that the release dates are months out of season (i.e. fall beers being released in the spring).

In that very post, I linked to a report of Penn Brewery planning on releasing one of the first pumpkin beers this summer. The month of the release? July. Well the week has come and gone. Amidst one of the hottest heat waves of the 2013 calendar year, Pumpkin Roll Ale has hit the shelves of our beer distributors.

I honestly don't know where a brewery can get pumpkins to have a pumpkin ale come out this early. Did they have a surplus of them last year and freeze the pumpkin meat? That's the only feasible thing I can come up with in my rage.

I told myself all week long that this past weekend was the one in which I wouldn't drink or buy any more beer. As if I didn't need more anyways. In great fear of this pumpkin beer being stripped from the shelves with ultra beer geek speed, I caved and got myself a case on Saturday. Oh, how shameful it is.

I wasn't thrilled at the thought of beers in a can. Slowly, but surely I've grown on that. Canned beer is easily stackable and takes up less room in a fridge. I think we're close to having all of us getting used to beer out of season. Maybe even to the point where we demand these beers year-round instead of this absurdity. One thing we are close to is a certainty. We now have pumpkin beer in July. Which brewer dares to be the first to do it in June? The clock is ticking.