Headless Helper

There will always be central aspects of the holiday season that are total bummers. For some its traveling long distances crammed up against smelly strangers in a metal box impossibly cruising tens of thousands of feet above the surface of the planet: screaming children placed at all corners like mentally mutilating motion sensors. Others sweat the savagery of the shopping days with names that smack of biblical plagues, or chug horrendous herbal-speed-sodie-pops to shakingly click on once in a year low prices at ungoldy hours.
Our horror for the holidays is a hydra with one head: Pumpkin Ale. While we like to consider ourselves non-haters, we believe there is a special circle of hell for the makers of oft ubiquitous after October bottles that bear cutesy pictures of harvest squash, jack-o-lanterns, and other autumnal ephemera. When another pie tasting beer pops up in the stead of a truly wonderful winter ale we cry a little…we die a little.
Usually, this blatantly biased and unfair critique is leveled against the most deserving of bummer-breweries. This year the emperor’s unsightly ass was exposed with a suggestion from Alex, the beer buyer and expert-extraordinaire of Red Carpet in Glendale. While staring at the cases, arms filling with brews, we set upon the slightly campy looking bottle to the untrue North. Ichabod Ale will undoubtedly be the only pumpkin ale to grace this blog, graceful commentary in tow. The brew is a very rare seasonal selection from the Alpine Beer Company, when we bought ours a few weeks back there were a rumored three cases in Los Angeles, two of them in front of us.
Why did Ichabod avoid the Axe? Firstly this is no “special release” from Sam Adams. Alpine is a tiny brewery and you can taste the small batch vibe before the beer is in your mouth. The flavors immediately turn towards Flanders, or at least Michigan, where sour and crisp flavors set the stage for what few sugar and spice notes play in the finish. The beer tastes like it’s spent some quality time in beautiful wood barrels nestled in snowdrifts atop pointy hills. The addition of pumpkin in this case is in reverence to the age-old equation of fruit+time=booze. No dribbling of an extract from New Jersey over sterile brew towers for Alpine; which means none of that nonsense for you. You taste the room where this beer was made before you taste the time of the year, and for us that’s the real merry maker.

Dairy Pairy: Senne-flada, an unpasteurised washed rind cows milk cheese from the Swiss Alps.
Soundtrack: Dawn Penn’s “No, No, No”