5 Reasons We’re Seeing Pumpkin Beers In June

It seems like for years now we’ve been seeing pumpkin beers ship earlier and earlier. We remember back to 2011 and how strange it was to see Sam Adam’s pumpkin beers hit retail shelves in early August. Fast forward to now and breweries like Elysian, Southern Tier, Cigar City, among others, are releasing their pumpkin ales as early as June.

Releasing pumpkin beers in the heat of summer is fast becoming an industry norm and there’s a number of reasons why this trend isn’t going away, whether we like it or not…

 1) Craft Beer Consumers Can’t Get Enough Of Seasonals

Craft beer sales is currently more than $19.6 billion business, and seasonal beers now make up 15% to 25% of those overall sales according to the Chicago-based market research firm IRI. And according to the Brewers Association, even craft beer’s most popular style, the beloved IPA, takes a backseat when these pumpkin beers hit the shelves.

2) You’ll Evidently Buy Pumpkin Beers No Matter How Early They Come Out

Retail sales is the ultimate arbiter – and retailers wouldn’t offer up their valuable shelf space if pumpkin beers didn’t sell through in the summer…In fact when Southern Tier started releasing their Pumkingin July, sales reportedly “increased 50% – 80% over it’s debut.

There’s also the “first-mover advantage” argument, which posits that early entry into a new industry or product category gives any firm an almost insuperable head start. Does that mean that we can expect to begin seeing pumpkin in March? Probably not. But pumpkin beers eventually becoming available in late May, is most certainly not out of the question. 

3) Pumpkin Beers Have An Implacable “Sell-Buy” Date

Unlike winter, spring and summer seasonals, which can remain economically viable long after the season’s transition, pumpkin beer sales hit a wall on October 31st. And as weird as it might seem to see pumpkin beers before Labor Day…absolutely no one wants to drink them after the Halloween decorations come down.

4) It May Be More About The Pie, Than The Pumpkin

Hello… pumpkins are a late summer/early fall crop. And as our friend Jason Notte wrote in The Street, you probably “don’t care if there’s fresh pumpkin in your beer and actually prefer that it tastes like pumpkin pie spices. And if fresh pumpkin flavor is not all that important to its consumers – why bother to wait till harvest, when you could be out in the marketplace, competing with other brands already on shelves?

5) Breweries Have Other Seasonals In The Pipeline

A friend or ours, reflecting on craft beer’s fast-growing trend of “un-seasonal” seasonal releases, observed that “pumpkin beers have to come out in June, to make room for all the Oktoberfest’s in August.” 

And you know what? He was right.