if you're proactive or confused & you've already gone & flipped ahead to october in your fictional eat!drink!snack! wall or desk calendar, you'll know that tomorrow is october 1st, which marks the beginning of pumpktoberfest, the happiest, pumpkiniest month of the year here at eat!drink!snack! since it's one of those brand new holidays (the hallmark deal is still pending), you may not be familiar with the inner workings of pumpktoberfest, so imma break it down for you. basically, halloween is the lamest holiday ever. pumpktoberfest is one of the best holidays of all time. thirty-one days, yo! thirty-one days!

as legend has it, pumpktoberfest developed one day in the mind of shawn parow, a mid-thirties blogger from brooklyn. for days, he had been wondering what stupid gimmick he could roll out next on his blog. after a string of post-work evenings standing in front of the coolers at bierkraft poring over microbrews, he realized that, with about a month until halloween, there were a shit ton of pumpkin beers coming out. he'd tried a pumpkin beer or two in his day, but had always taken the same stance with them as he did with christmas beers--they were too much of a spicy novelty item. maybe it was the presence of all that alcohol or maybe it was the five hours sleep the night before, but on that evening, he had a change of heart.

there were enough pumpkin beers in those coolers to field a basketball team & our plucky blogger reasoned that there had to be more out there...& he was right. he started checking the coolers at assorted bodegas & delis. he went on the world wide web. he found that there were enough pumpkin beers out there to field a canadian football team. he got a bit obsessed...& from there, pumpktoberfest was born. initially, he thought BIG & planned to celebrate pumpktoberfest each day with a different pumpkin beer, reporting back to you in blog form. like most of his plans, after going out & collecting a number of pumpkin beers, he realized that he could only field a canadian football team with a few substitutes & scaled those plans back to a pumpkin beer report every odd-numbered day for the entire month of october, each paired with another of his recently rekindled loves...horror films.

he figured that halloween month is the only logical month to go nuts over horror films & then he came across a trailer for the michael bay-directed remake of nightmare on elm street & that sealed the deal. then he watched some footage of the shuttle disaster online & decided to do the columns in countdown form. as he envisioned it, every odd-numbered day for the month of october, he'd give the low down on pumpkin beers whilst providing a list of his favorite horror films, culminating with his top pick...ON HALLOWEEN NIGHT. as the legend goes, if you drink a pumpkin beer with a friend this october, you pass the spirit of pumpktoberfest on to them & when they drink a pumpkin beer with another friend & don't invite you along, they're passing on the spirit of pumpktoberfest...& so on & so forth. it's like herpes, but with less physical contact! happy pumpktoberfest! spread the pumpkin love!

#131 - pumpktoberfest!
snack: david pumpkin seeds
drink: southern tier pumking


in celebration of the impending pumpktoberfest, last night, i half-lazily put together a pumpkin snack-drink combo. for my snack, i picked up a 5 oz bag of david pumpkin seeds that i kept at my side during the evening. whenever i felt the need to run to the kitchen, grab every item in the refrigerator door & mold them into a masterpiece of pumpktoberfestian proportions, i just popped a few of the pumpkin seeds in my mouth & the urge faded for about 60-120 seconds. then i repeated as necessary. i have to be honest though. i'm not all that into pumpkin seeds. i'll take sunflower seeds any day of the week, but pumpkin seeds are just plain weird. with sunflower seeds, at least i know that i shouldn't eat the shell. with pumpkin seeds, sometimes it's a gray area. the bag's not even clear on the subject, but they do encourage you to "break out of your shell™."

these ones have the white, extremely salty outer shell & in typical pumpkin seed fashion, if you manage to crack open the shell, there's a tiny green seed awaiting you on the inside, a pumpkin that never reached its potential if you will. oh well. chomp chomp. since, like i mentioned, i'm not all that into pumpkin seeds, i got sick of them after a while & ultimately tossed them aside, wondering what else i could eat as i picked the pumpkin seed shells from my teeth. maybe i'll use the rest of the bag to stem off smoke cravings or something.

while my snack was lazily thought out, the drink portion of it definitely wasn't. when i first came across it, i knew that i had to ring in pumpktoberfest with the king of all pums, the southern tier pumking. it's a local beer, brewed in upstate ny & according to the bottle, it's "an ode to púca, a creature of celtic folklore." that means that this beer was made in the name of a mischievous shape-shifter who from what i gather, has november 1st (the day after harvest) as his day. since i don't believe a word of that crap, i also ignored the label's suggestion to "pour pumking into a goblet." what kind of person has a friggin goblet lying around? vampires & other blood-drinking types, that's who & i'm not one of those (yet), so i poured mine into a pint-sized mug like a real man & basked in my defiance of labels.

um, this stuff is amazing. when i first opened it, i gave it a good sniffing, since i'd read that it was really pumpkiny. of the pumpkin beers i've tried, i never really felt that any of them were all that pumpkiny. it was more like with them, "pumpkin" meant pumpkin spices--nutmegs & cinnamons & allspices & the like. when i first sniffed the pumking, i could already tell that it was something different. the bottle lists "puréed pumpkin" as an ingredient & since i don't have many opportunities to use this phrase, i'm going to use it here: "you can really taste the puréed pumpkin." you can also taste the caramel malt in it & it's not overly spiced like most pumpkin beers. it sets a pretty high bar for pumpkin beers & i'm skeptical that any of the other pumpktoberfest beers i have in the queue can beat it. i guess we'll just have to wait & see. surprise me imagined pumpkin beer canadian football team! surprise me with one of those grey cups or something!