In a small room at Allagash Brewing Company in Portland, Maine, sits a coolship, a vessel for cooling wort in the open air. Each year on All Hallows Eve, that wort will be laden with the essence of crushed pumpkins and molasses, and the invisible lifeforms haunting the Allagash coolship room will descend upon a steaming seasonal liquid to make their contribution to one of the most unusual pumpkin beers in the country.

Jolly Pumpkin La Parcela is not your typical pumpkin beer. Brewed with pumpkin, pumpkin spices, and cacao nibs, this mixed-fermentation, sour, oak-aged pumpkin ale is a fall beer for folks who don’t think they like pumpkin spice beers.

Third Eye Brewing Double Astral is an Imperial Stout brewed with cacao nibs from Maverick Chocolate. It’s a familiar concept, but it’s beautifully executed in this Great American Beer Festival gold medal-winner.

Rabid Brewing’s annual Feast of the Goat Queen celebrates all things weird and wondrous. Described as a Ren Faire for Fae Folk, it features burlesque, wrestling, fire dancing, and more. It also marks the release of Crown of Horns Chocolate Cream Ale brewed with Malah Na Bulong Philippine cacao.

Austin Jevne of Humble Forager Brewery will always remember the night he visited an Amish maple sugar shack in Wisconsin to source maple syrup for Sugar Shack Diaries, a decadent Imperial Stout brewed with Ecuadorian cacao, Mostra coffee, Mexican vanilla, and maple syrup.

Andy Conrad is the fifth generation to tap his family’s maple trees near the small town of Minerva in eastern Ohio. He and wife Amanda own Sandy Springs Brewing Company, a charming brewery in downtown Minerva with its own on-site Airbnbs, and each spring they brew Happy Sappy Imperial Amber Ale with maple sap from his family’s grove, maple syrup, cinnamon, and clove. The connection to these Conrad family trees runs deep.

Atlanta beer writer Ale Sharpton and New Belgium Brewing have partnered on Piano Keys, an elegant Imperial Stout brewed with ethically-sourced cacao nibs and vanilla. The beer has given Ale and New Belgium the opportunity to host events and start conversations that have invited new fans into the world of craft beer, and—most importantly—helped those newcomers see a place for themselves in craft beer.

Fantasy and mythology drive much of what husband and wife team Tobias Cichon and Raiye Rosado do at Rabid Brewing. As the brewery celebrates their 4th anniversary, I sat down with the pair to talk about the passion behind their brewery, the mythological backstories behind their beers, and the sense of adventure the keeps them pursuing their dream.