If you haven’t noticed, it’s October. 

(Yes, you have less than three months to complete all those over-the-top 2018 resolutions you made before feeling like a total and complete failure. But there’s always NYE debauchery to help you get over that, so yay!)

But it’s the month where all things Pumpkin suddenly become exciting.
They’re ripe, reading for picking, and prime targets for modern-day marketing.

That rather detested fruit suddenly becomes fashionable so you’ll have people sipping on everything from Pumpkin Spiced Lattes to some healthy new vitamin-charged version of Pumpkin Juice.
There’s pumpkin in everything—your coffee, your beer (woot!), your food, your hair…umm…you get the drift.

The whole thing is so popular that there are legit Pumpkin festivals that are planned around this whole harvesting time, complete with music, dance, song, and pretty much everything else that you’d find at a festival these days.

Of course, the fact that Halloween also falls on this same month adds a spook value to the whole thing.

Funnily enough though, the original subjects of lamp carving were actually turnips.

Yup, here’s a little trivia for you. The tradition of carving Jack-O-Lanterns was actually an Irish one. As the story goes, it was to keep the spirit of Stingy Jack and any other spooky buddies he was hanging with at bay.

P is for (shameless) Plug.

Then when these nice, artsy Irish people ended up in good ol’ Murica, they found that this centuries old custom was a lot easier to carry on if they just carved pumpkins. And that’s how that happened.

As all other things, a suspicious percentage of beers also become pumpkin something or the other flavoured. (*cough Pumpkin Ale *cough*)
And perhaps, in doing so, have been the most polarising invention since the blue-black/white-gold dress.

While some people associate all the warmth of fall/winter with the flavours of this beer, others just think it’s a marketing gimmick.

But Pumpkin beers aren’t as recent a trend as one might think. The earliest versions of pumpkin-flavoured beer date back to when the pilgrims set up shop in America. So, the ‘fad’ has stood the test of time. You even had homies of old like G-Washington and Ben Franklin developing batches of their own.

A real beer baller, this GMan.

(It’s probably the incessant social media marketing that makes it particularly unbearable right now.)

Plus, with the different types of experiments brewers across the world have been indulging in, a Pumpkin beer could have anything from a 5-6% ABV to even a formidable 16.7%. (That’s Avery’s barrel-aged Rumpkin ale, which is made from local Colorado pumpkins.)
So trying to write it off as some weak fruit-juice version of a beer won’t make for much of an argument, haters.

As all classic trends, this Pumpkin beer craze made a come-back in the 80s and has been going strong ever since, thanks mainly to a brewer in California, who created a whole new recipe based on George Washington’s original parchment of pumpkin, and added a little pumpkin pie spice to the mix. (Yup, that’s the same stuff that goes into those infamous lattes.)

Basically, the point is that whether you love them or hate them, Pumpkin beer (and everything else Pumpkin related) is here to stay. For the duration of this month anyway.

And who has time for hate? So you might as well sip it up and spread some seasonal love.