What happens when you put together five friends, four pumpkins, and 30 beers? We don’t know because we can’t remember; there were thirty beers. All we know is that we got ham-daddy. Fortunately, we had paper and pen on hand and can recount to you what happened. Well look at that! We were smart enough to leave the carving to more sober times, but it turns out we did manage a testing of our favorite seasonal libation: Pumpkin Ale.

Ahh, how we cherish the wonderful taste of autumn’s most ubiquitous gourd. The pumpkin conjures our grade school Halloweens; resplendent in our costumes and agog at the mastery of our neighbors’ jack-o-lanterns. The pumpkin gives us its flesh so our grandmothers can create a perfect pie (provided she doesn’t forget the sugar, like she did a few years ago). You can bowl with it, catapult it, and make unnecessarily complex dishes with it. You can entertain a whole rugby team with it. Fortunately, you can also make like Benjamin Franklin, George Washington or even the Pilgrims, and make beer with it.

The last time we followed the Pilgrims’ lead a whole race of people was moved west of the Mississippi and given some pretty questionable blankets. The Pilgrims were a shifty bunch, what with their buckles and religious zealotry, but we decided to put our better judgment aside and pop a few bottles of their pub progeny in the name of a fully-informed DCist readership. So here you go — a rundown of DCist’s experimentation with pumpkin ale, the autumn’s best brew.

We based our review on three criteria: aroma, taste and finish. We looked for a distinctly pumpkiny smell; we wanted pumpkin pie in a bottle. For a high score on taste, the beer needed to be spicy with nutmeg, allspice and cinnamon, but not too bitter. The finish should have been pumpkin-heavy but shouldn’t stay so long as to be overwhelming. We were looking for good pumpkin beer, not just regular beer with a pumpkin on the label. We are giving years of carved gourds a chance at revenge in the form of intoxication, they shouldn’t be pussyfooting around.

So, resolved to our task, with our rubric set up, and our bottle opener at the ready, we set off for the dark side of Halloween…