Pumpkin Seasonal Spirit distilled...

I just finished distilling this year’s batch of Pumpkin Seasonal Spirit. For those of you not familiar with it, let me explain. We take Lakefront Brewery’s Pumpkin Spice Lager and distill it, then age it in used bourbon barrels for the summer and bottle it for release in fall. This is not some sort of sickly sweet pumpkin liquer. The best way to describe it is a lightly flavored, young malt whiskey. The actual name for this product is bierschnaaps. It’s an old German tradition to distill leftover beer before it spoils. Unfortunately, our federal government feels the term bierschnaaps is misleading to the consumer. So, after trying several attempts at other names for the product, the best we could settle on was “Pumpkin Seasonal Spirit”.

This year’s batch will be even better than last. After meeting with Russ Klisch (Lakefront Brewery founder and president), we made some alterations to the recipe. Actually, all they did was leave out the hops. Hops are what give beer its bitterness, and even though this beer is lightly hopped to begin with, I thought we could get a better result without it. The bitterness of the hops is magnified during distillation, so this forced me to distill last year’s batch to a higher proof to strip away some of this flavor. Along with stripping away the hops flavor, some of the essential flavors were taken away as well. I was able to take more of a whiskey type approach to distilling this year’s batch. This allowed more of the pumpkin, spice and malt flavors to come through.

I suggest you to try this as an alternative to whiskey in your favorite cocktails. It makes a great old-fashioned as well as just neat or on the rocks. Check out the website for some of the recipes Jason has come up with or try some of our local establishment’s signature cocktails and martinis. Thanks again to Russ, Luther and everyone at Lakefront for this year’s effort. I can’t wait for September!

A quick note about the bottom photo: Jeremy Zuleger is one of our favorite sales reps from 102.9 The Hog. He showed up just in time to man the hose for loading the still with Pumpkin Lager. Sales people beware; you may be put to work when you show up here!