Nat O'Lantern

Our beer, like our history, is well worth remembering™

In Colonial times, the most common ways to prepare pumpkins was to stew them, add them to soups, or make pies from them – although they called it pumpkin pudding or paste rather than pie. Few people know, however, that Colonial Americans also drank their pumpkin. An enterprising person can make an alcoholic beverage out of almost anything, and the Pilgrims seem to have been first to make pumpkin beer or ale. A stanza of a poem of the day provides evidence that they were versatile with their ingredients:

If Barley be wanting to make into Malt,
We must be contented and think it no Fault,
For we can make liquor to sweeten our Lips,
Of Pumpkins and Parsnips and Walnut-Tree Chips.

The Pilgrim recipe was said to involve a mixture of persimmons, hops, maple syrup, and, of course, pumpkin. In Virginia, planter Landon Carter mentions pumpkins in his diary in 1765. He, too, concocted some sort of alcoholic beverage from fermented pumpkins. He christened it pumperkin. Perhaps he used a method similar to an anonymous recipe of 1771:

• Let the Pompion be beaten in a Trough and pressed as Apples.
• The expressed juice is to be boiled in a copper a considerable time and carefully skimmed that there may be no remains of the fibrous part of the pulp.
• After that intention is answered let the liquid be hopped culled fermented & casked as malt beer.