Shipyard Smashed Pumpkin Review
We've always like Shipyard Pumpkinhead so we were intrigued when we heard about Shipyard Smashed Pumpkin. Smashed Pumpkin is Shipard Brewing's Imperial Pumpkin, and it's new for 2009. The beer pours a nice deep amber with a light head full of pumpkin and spice aroma. You can smell pumpkin and nutmeg right away almost reminiscent of pumpkin bread. At 9% abv you'd expect the alcohol to come through but it really doesn't. The malt and spices really help balance out the alcohol quite nicely. There's no doubt this is a big beer and it's definitely has an ideal temperature. When we poured the first glass right out of the fridge the spices were a bit too dominant and the beer just didn't feel balanced. After letting it warm up a bit though this beer opens up into something pretty special. A rich malty pumpkin sweetness finished off with dry nutmeg and a hint of hops. Fans of Southern Tier Pumpking and Weyerbacher Imperial Pumpkin should definitely give this a go.
As a quick side note this beer is excellent for cooking. I tossed some of the bottle in with some ground turkey, zucchini, portabella mushrooms and caramelized onions and it added an awesome depth of flavor to a quick dish.
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DrinkCraftBeer Sticker Contest
A reader recently noticed one of our stickers in the wild and used in a very cool way! Someone had cut our sticker up to make it fit their bike and well we thought it was pretty damn cool. So that got us thinking, how else can they be used? Well while we've certainly got some ideas we thought we'd put out a challenge to all of you. We'll be giving away 30 stickers for free all we ask is you send us back a picture of where you put the sticker. The best use of the sticker will win a special prize pack with some cool DrinkCraftBeer schwag.
The Rules
1. Send us a request for a sticker on Twitter: http://twitter.com/DrinkCraftBeer use hash tag #DCBSticker and tell us why you deserve a sticker
2. We'll pick 30 people to get stickers.
3. Stickers will arrive in the mail. You come up with your coolest use.
4. Tweet us a pic of how you used the sticker.
5. We'll announce the winner on October 2nd, 2009 and send him or her a DCB prize pack.
6. Keep it legal, we don't want anyone getting in trouble here! No street signs, private property (without permission), etc...
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Victory Festbier Review
We love Oktoberfest, there's few other holidays that deliver us so many tasty lagers. Victory Festbier has always been one of our favorite offerings of the season. This beer is really clean. The malt starts of slightly sweet and evolve with subtle toasty notes. A lot of Oktoberfest beers can have a bit of a lager funk at the end. This beer is just smooth and malty with a nice hop finish that you'd expect from Victory. Victory puts out some of our favorite beers in fact we drive down to Pennsylvania from Boston each year to go visit Sly Fox Brewing and the Victory Brewery. One of the greatest things about this beer is that it doesn't try and be some imperialized version or super hopped version; it's just an immensely satisfying beer with a great malt profile that makes you want more with each sip. Add a comment
