Stumpkin (Heartland Brewery's Stout + Pumpkin)

[David W. James]

On May 10, 2005, at 2:58 AM, bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:
> Heartland Brewery has now expanded to several locations in New York
> City. I've been looking at some items on the menu, such as the
> "Broadway Breeze."
> ...
> "Stumpkin" looks interesting. It's "stout" plus "pumpkin." It does not
> appear to be trademarked. Could this qualify as a New York drink?

I have seen 'pumpkin stouts' at microbreweries for several years,
though I do not remember the details as to which ones and what they
called it. Some are attempts to make pumpkin pie in a bottle, others
use the pumpkin without the spices to modify (originally extend, see
below) the resulting flavor.  The one or two I have tried (none
recently) were good but unremarkable ales. A search on Google turns up
81,000+ pages for '+pumpkin +stout' and over 60K for '+pumpkin
+brewing'.

Ah, adding +history returns a hit at
http://www.anchoragepress.com/archives/documentaef1.html, which
includes:

> It all got started when Steve Schmitt, then-president of Great
> Northern Brewers (Anchorage’s homebrew club), and I were talking on
> KRUA 88.1, on a show called "Dr. Fermento’s Growler Hour," which used
> to air every Tuesday night. Our guest that night was Breck Tostevin, a
> local homebrewer with a melon full of beer history. As Tostevin
> recounted pieces of beer’s foamy story, he mentioned that in colonial
> America, due to the scarcity of the ingredients to make beer, anything
> fermentable was fair game.

> There were plenty of pumpkins in the fall back then, so it was common
> for brewers to use pumpkin as an adjunct in beer or even as its entire
> fermentable base. Porter was common then, too, Tostevin noted;
> America’s first pumpkin ales were probably porters. According to
> Tostevin, Martha Jefferson, who wore the brewing pants in that family,
> probably made pumpkin porter at Monticello. In 1771 a "Receipt for
> Pompion Ale" was published in the papers of the American Philosophical
> Society, outlining a procedure for beating pumpkins in a trough to be
> pressed and fermented into a beer.

(The Great Pumpkin Challenge
Can You Make The Doc Smile?
by James "Doctor Fermento" Roberts

The Anchorage Press, November 29 - December 5, 2001 / Vol. 10, Ed. 48)

So, no, it isn't something that NYC can claim.

David