In today’s craft beer world, there tend to be two schools of thought when it comes to brewing. On one hand, you have the traditionalists who stick with classic, well-defined beer styles, and do their best to create textbook examples of the style. On the other hand, you have the experimenters, those who take an “anything goes” approach to brewing, and continue to push the envelope of what beer can be.

Brewers in this latter group often have a fondness for flavoured beers, ranging from the somewhat mundane (raspberry, cherry, peach…) to the completely out there (juniper, hot peppers, carrots…). To serious adherents of the Reinheitsgebot and other old-timey beer traditions, the addition of these odd enhancers may seem to go against all historical brewing rules, but in actual fact, the use of ingredients outside of water, barley malt, hops and yeast while brewing is a practice that goes back centuries.

Hops, for example, were not used in brewing until circa 1000, and they weren’t cultivated in England until the 15th century. So a variety of herbs, spices and plants were often used as bittering and preserving agents in early ales. And while barley malt has always been the most common source of fermentable sugars when brewing beer, many other starch sources can serve the same purpose, as proven by the addition of rice, corn and other adjuncts to the ingredient list for many mainstream lagers.

A seemingly unlikely replacement for barley malt is pumpkin. Not only is it not a grain, but the consistency of its flesh is such that it just doesn’t seem like a good fit for the brewing process. Yet when the earliest North American brewers ran short on expensive imported barley and started looking for locally-grown substitutes, pumpkin somehow became a relatively popular choice.

Like most beer styles that weren’t pale lagers, pumpkin beers fell out of fashion over the years, but during the American craft beer boom in the 1980s, Bill Owens of Buffalo Bill’s Brewpub in Hayward, California revived the style, and in the 20+ years since, it’s become one of the most popular seasonal beer styles for many microbreweries and brewpubs across the US. Most modern versions are brewed using spices that are usually associated with pumpkin pie (cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, allspice), and some brewers forgo the use of pumpkin entirely, depending on the spices and sweet malts to evoke enough pumpkin pie aroma and flavour to pass the test.

Here in Ontario, pumpkin beers have never caught on as much they have for our southern neighbours, but this autumn has seen three of our province’s craft brewers take a crack at the style. Perry Mason at Scotch Irish Brewing did a one-off cask of a hopped-up version called Atomic Punkin’ for the recent Cask Days festival at Volo, and the recently opened Grand River Brewing in Cambridge has a draught-only Highballer Pumpkin Ale on tap at a few places around town.

The most widely available, though, is the latest seasonal release from Etobicoke’s Great Lakes Brewing. Simply dubbed Great Lakes Pumpkin Ale, this orange-amber ale is brewed with real pumpkin, and there’s hints of it in the aroma and flavour, although the sweet malt and spice notes are more prominent. Nutmeg and ginger are especially obvious, and the finish has a nice hit of slightly tongue-numbing cloves to compliment the mild hops. It’s a little lighter in body and less assertive in flavour than some of the pumpkin beers I’ve tried, but I don’t say that as a criticism, as it’s still quite enjoyable.

The beer has proven to be very successful for Great Lakes, with kegs being emptied quickly at spots like C’est What and Volo, and the limited run of 5,000 bottles selling out in just a couple of weeks. There are still a few bottles on the shelves at selected LCBO outlets (LCBO 67710 - $4.95/650 mL), and those who miss out can console themselves with a bottle or two of the 2007 version of Great Lakes Winter Ale which will be in stores soon in a special holiday gift set.