Halloween Appropriate Beers to Die For

Since the inception of this demented ol’ beer blog, we’ve brought you our annual picks for some hellishly delicious brews you might find around Fearvana during one of the most damned fun and frightful times of the year – Halloween.

As we gear up for the rainiest month of the year, November, and witness the trees grow bare of their leaves and the temperatures drop, many jovially celebrate All Hallows’ Evening, the unofficial yet, internationally recognized holiday staked in the Western world by costumes, candy, and sometimes even spooks. This is a time that gained precedence for remembering the dead such as saints, martyrs, and believers of religious rights. Costumes, bonfires, and the carving of the harvested gourds mark October 31st here in the West.

Trick or Treat: Give me something good to…quaff…

For the craft beer drinker, pumpkins carved into jack-o-lanterns may not be the means of keeping the souls trapped betwixt heaven and hell away. It may be a hearty pumpkin ale brewed with the fruit of the gourd and typical accompanying spices such as nutmeg, all-spice, cinnamon, and so on, or it may just be another ghastly offering…

This year we’ve conjoined with Eugene, Oregon’s best craft beer destination, the Bier Stein for an evening of guising paired with some of the best regional breweries (with a few from afar) to extend Killer Beer Week an extra week …er…yeah…11 days in total…

The Bier Stein’s Halloween night (October 31, 2015) happens to winningly fall on a Saturday this year and will double as a hell/fund raising night. The charity will be the Nation Brain Tumor Society. You see, we don’t want our brains tainted with tumors before devouring them as food (insert canned ghoulish Tales from the Crypt-esque laughter).

The links to the Bier Stein post above will give you an idea of what specialty brews to expect as well as many other details regarding the event.

In addition, here’s some picks of hellishly delicious brews that you might care to seek out for Samhain:

Gigantic Brain Damage – This Belgian style quad is not for the faint of heart, palate, or purse. If you are fortunate enough to have secured a bottle of this beast of a beer that was released exclusively at the brewery in SE Portland on September 3rd, this mind blowing hellhound was aged on bourbon and pinot noir barrels for 28 months giving it’s bold fruity, dark base a boost of character and alcohol unlike much of what you might even imagine. 13% ABV and 40 IBU. But fear not (well, not too much). Only 120 cases of this $20 per 22-ounce bottle were released into the world. Not sure whether it is the magnificent character of the beer as rare as the pages of the Necronomicon that make it worth having or the hauntingly artful label art composed by Nychos, an urban art and graffiti illustrator from Vienna, Austria that make Brain Damage such a keeper/creeper. We bought it for both.

Southern Tier Pumking – So what if this beer keeps getting the nod every Halloween from us? After all, it is the pumpkiniest (word?) beer of them all. Try to drink a 22-ounce bottle of this dessertif treasure and see how far you get. The brew has the many components of actual pumpkin pie in the flavor profile, right down to the crust. That’s because this 9-percenter utilizes real pumpkin in all stages and phases of the brewing process. scare the bejeebus out of your liver with this lovable yet dangerously delicious bad-boy and you will understand why it truly is the king of all pumpkin craft brews. Plus, the high sugar and alcohol content is not carved out for every palate, but it certainly does age well.

Ninkasi Imperial Pumpkin Sleigh’r – Keeping with the big and bad brew theme for this year’s picks, here’s another one straight out of the pumpkin patch. Ninkasi’s Sleigh’r Double Alt has been a seasonal fall and winter favorite for a while now, but in 2015, the Eugene brewery added a pumpkin rendition to their R&D (Rare and Delicious) series. 9% ABV, 70 IBU and brewed with over 300 pounds of organic pumpkins as well as a big helping of brown sugar make this one of our favorite pumpkin brews to date. With a big sweet mouthfeel and lots of complexity, this beer is not your run-of-the-mill pumpkin brewski (you know, the ones that are heavy-handed with spice and lack a breadth of robust pumpkin flavor). Learn more about this gourd-eous brew from our previous presser here.

Double Mountain Old Dirty Goat – A fall classic doppelbock from Hood River’s Double Mountain Brewery, this is the last of the season in DM’s lager series. Candied pumpkin pie, light floral notes, and a bloody crimson hue make this the perfect Halloween treat for your taste buds. Weighing in at 7.2% ABV and 35 IBU, the Goat, a symbol of paganism, and to some evil is anything but in this mouth watering sacrifice. Join the brewery with the Greenneck Daredevils on Halloween for some killer tunes and a hell of a time! More details here.