pumpktoberfest #4 - in da house.
film: hostel
beer: southampton publick house pumpkin ale



at some point over the last decade, filmmakers decided that horror film = doing crazy shit to people or making them do crazy shit to each other. call it the tarantino effect, call it the final destination or saw effect, call it what you will, but if you took a group of people, put them in outlandish situations & killed them off in a series of creative ways, you had beaucoup box office bank. one such film was hostel, which came out in 2005 as one of many "presented by quentin tarantino" films. in it, a group of americans decide to backpack around europe. they end up travelling to slovakia & staying in a hostel. people start disappearing. gruesome "horror" ensues. in fact, it's so gruesome that the film's restricted in some countries. it's directed by eli roth, who if you saw inglorious basterds, you know as "the bear jew." he & tarantino must be tight.

i first saw the film back in 06, during the few months when i was living in watertown. i'd been laid off a few weeks earlier, so it was just me & hostel in the middle of the day chillin round the apartment. i'm not usually that freaked out by horror films, but this one freaked me out. as it is, i'm not a fan of hostels. i've only stayed in a hostel once in my life & if i wasn't sharing a private room with a friend, i never would have done so. communing with strangers is not for me. to make matters worse, my roommate & a few of my friends were preparing to take a trip to europe for oktoberfest, so there were a bunch of travel books strewn about the coffee table & for some reason, that made the whole "travelling around europe" aspect of the film way too real. if i actually remembered my dreams, i probably would have remembered nightmares for weeks.

as far as buildings go, i'll take a pub (or "publick house" for long) over a hostel any day of the week. our fourth pumpktoberfest beer, the southampton publick house pumpkin ale, is named for a pub/restaurant way out in southampton, long island. it's been around in various forms since the 1800s & over time, has served both average joes & famous peeps, peeps like babe ruth & clark gable. the latest incarnation of the publick house came into being in 1996, when they fixed up the restaurant, added a brewery & started pumping out beer. over the years, they've won a ton of medals at the annual great american beer festival, so they must be doing something right.

the pumpkin ale is one of their seasonal brews, an amber colored beer made with pumpkin, spices & vanilla extract. out of the four pumpkin beers i've tried this pumpktoberfest season, this one is the best of the bunch. when i opened it & gave it a good whiff, the vanilla stood out & when i drank it, it made a nice complement to the pumpkin taste. that's right. unlike with the other three i've tried thus far, for once you could actually taste a little bit of pumpkin in the beer. up until this one, the pumpkin beers had done nothing to dispel my notion that pumpkin beers are nothing but a bunch of spices, so this one was a pleasant surprise. like i said, they're doing something right. southampton's in da house!