It’s October, which I tend to think of as “PumpkinBeerSeasonHooray!” month. Unfortunately, Pumpkin Beer “season” hit atypically early in Chicago – around August – and I was in no position to go out and sample the breadth of beers I would normally try to sample during pumpkin beer season.
Such is life, and I had hoped that come early October, there would still be a variety (albeit smaller) of pumpkin beers on the shelf. I would get to try maybe three or four new pumpkin beers. It would not be the extravaganza of pumpkin beers I saw in someone I know posted about on Facebook1, but something.
I could not have been more wrong. By the time I got to Binny’s, they had two kinds of pumpkin beer. Total.
The good news was that they were both new to me. The bad news (aside from the selection) was that one was a 650 mL bottle and one was a six-pack. I don’t like buying full six-packs of new pumpkin beers2, so that was worrisome.
It turns out I am not the only one who feels this way, however! While at Binny’s, Bill and I ran into another woman who was aimlessly staring at the shelves, looking for pumpkin beers. She’d come all the way in from the suburbs to seek it out, and was not finding it. Now that? That’s unfortunate.
We pointed her at the six-packs and the 650 mL bottles and she grabbed one of each as well. We chatted for a few moments, and discovered that she also was wary of new pumpkin beers, and had been hoping to try individual bottles of beer.
So Bill, being brilliant, said, “Well, why don’t you two just split the six-pack?”
Hell. Yes. That was exactly the right choice. She bought the six-pack (and one of the 650 mL bottles), we bought a 650 mL bottle, and out in the parking lot we handed her $5 and she handed us three 12 oz bottles. Complete win.
Thank you, Jennifer. I hope you enjoyed your beers immensely. But if not, at least you’re only stuck with two more bottles…
fn1. Apparently pumpkin beer season hit at a totally reasonable time in the mid-Atlantic. And Portland, OR. WTF, Midwest?
fn2. I shall elaborate on this in a future post. Suffice it to say that pumpkin beers are very “love ‘em or hate ‘em.”