When Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales first brewed a pumpkin beer, Founder and Brewmaster Ron Jeffries thought about it with a characteristic distinctiveness. “I approached it like, okay, what can we do that’s not going to be normal?”
That Jolly Pumpkin, based out of Dexter, Michigan, did not brew a pumpkin beer for several years after starting out had become a bit of a joke, says Jeffries. It wasn’t until they brewed a small batch for the Great Pumpkin Beer Festival at Elysian Brewing that the brewery, which specializes in oak-aged beers, released La Parcela, a 5.9 percent ABV sour pumpkin ale brewed with pumpkin puree and cacao. I talked to Jeffries about the joke, how he brews with pumpkin, and their latest pumpkin beer.
On name confusion: “For years, Jolly Pumpkin never brewed a pumpkin beer, and it was kind of part of the joke. My wife and I thought of the name, and we didn’t put two and two together and think that people would come to the conclusion that all we did was pumpkin beers. We just thought it was a funny name, and we came up with the skull and crossbones, the play on the Jolly Roger. We had the pumpkin with barley and hops crossed underneath and we just thought it was funny.
Then at the first fall beer festival, people started asking for pumpkin beer, and we were like, ‘Well, we don’t have any pumpkin beer.’ Then it became a bit of a joke with people who knew the brewery and people who didn’t because at subsequent festivals, people in line would ask for the pumpkin beer and people behind them would be, like, ‘They don’t make a pumpkin beer!’”
On making a pumpkin beer, finally: “Dick [Cantwell, head brewer at Elysian] convinced me. He said he knew I didn’t make a pumpkin beer, but he had this pumpkin festival and asked if I would consider making a pumpkin beer for the festival.
We did make the first Jolly Pumpkin pumpkin beer for his event in Seattle. We didn’t have a pub at that time, and we didn’t have an on-premise tasting room; we were just a production brewery. So we made a small batch and shipped everything to Seattle, and a lot of people got really pissed because we finally made a pumpkin beer and it went to Seattle. So that next year we brewed a lot of it and did a label for it and have been brewing it ever since.”
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On how he approached La Parcela: I approached it from having brewed [non-sour pumpkin beers] over the years and also using some unusual ingredients to create different flavors and layers of flavors, so I added cacao, raw chocolate.
Pumpkin beers [often] have a lot of spice in them, and some pumpkin beers don’t even have any pumpkin in them. So I knew I really didn’t want to emphasize the spice too much, and I really didn’t want to emphasize the squash too much because squashy flavors in beer aren’t great either. But if I could have some cacao, some chocolate notes, and a little bit of that pumpkin pie subtlety in there with some of the tartness from our souring in the oak, I thought it might make for a pretty interesting beer.”
On brewing with pumpkin: For La Parcela, we put the pumpkin right in the mash. We get some of the flavor of the pumpkin, but it also contributes a really fantastic orange color that you just can’t get from malt. Because of the time of the year we’re making pumpkin beer, we use canned pumpkin; fresh just isn’t available for us. I try to get organic as much as we can. We also ‘dry pumpkin,’ add a bunch of pumpkin into the oak to condition it, and it actually has an additional fermentation from the sugars in the pumpkin so it can get quite lively.
Most recently, we’ve done this beer called Los Vivos y Los Muertos, which is, for lack of a better descriptor, a pumpkin-lime saison. We used the pumpkin in the mash, and it gave it this really vibrant color and [added] lime in the whirlpool. It’s a really wonderful beer, a very light saison. It’s 4.5 percent alcohol, really nice and light, and has a little bit of body and mouthfeel from the pumpkin and a tart, limey finish.”