Chocolate in the Gourd: Jolly Pumpkin La Parcela Pumpkin Ale
By David Nilsen
The folks at Jolly Pumpkin heard the joke for years: If pumpkin is in your name, why don’t you brew any pumpkin beers?
The Michigan brewery was founded in 2004 by Ron and Laurie Jeffries as the first 100% sour, wood-aged brewery in the United States. New Belgium, Russian River, and a few others were brewing similar beers before this, but never as the heart and soul of their business. It was quite a gamble for Jolly Pumpkin—if consumers didn’t get on board with these strange, funky beers unlike anything most drinkers were familiar with, Jolly Pumpkin wouldn’t be around for long.
Maybe that’s why the pumpkin beer question didn’t bother Ron too much—he was too busy fielding questions about why his beer was sour and if he was aware he had an infection of wild yeast and bacteria in his brewery.
It wasn’t until Jolly Pumpkin had been in business half a decade they finally decided to give the seasonal spice fans what they wanted and trot out a pumpkin beer. In typical Jolly Pumpkin fashion, it was nothing like any pumpkin beer out there.
La Parcela (“the plot” in Spanish, referring to a parcel of land; presumably a reference here to a pumpkin patch) is a sour, mixed-fermentation, oak-aged ale brewed with pumpkin, cacao, and spices. If you’re looking for PSL, this ain’t your beer, but look past the initial tasting notes and you’ll see there are recognizable features here—gentle spice, comforting flavors—but they’re distorted in a funhouse mirror for Halloween; this is a pumpkin beer from the Upside Down.
The label is suitably mischievous—a bat-winged cat winks at us from atop a lit jack o’ lantern, the bright harvest moon rising behind it and an army of dried corn stalks silhouetted against the moonlight. The label has been updated since the original Adam Forman design, but the beer’s recipe has not, though the description beside the endearingly spooky artwork doesn’t tell us much about what to expect—“ale brewed with pumpkin & spices”. The details are more interesting.
Building a Different Pumpkin Beer
Peter Bruno, Jolly Pumpkin’s head brewer, says the biggest trick with La Parcela is getting the adjuncts to show through after months in oak with the house mixed culture. What enters that gauntlet is often unrecognizable when it comes back out.
“Having the pumpkin character really come through [is hard],” he says, explaining the brewery adds a little over 3 pounds of pumpkin per barrel (31 gallons) directly to the mashtun. “With making sour beers, they’re not like your typical beers. We use a lot of specialty malts in a beer like this to get a different result coming out of the oak, because the oak and bacteria mask the malts and the pumpkin flavor.”
Jolly Pumpkin’s beers are all aged in oak with a resident cocktail of yeasts and bacteria. After a beer spends months in oak barrels or foeders, the brewers blend from multiple barrels to yield a finished batch. For many of the brewery’s beers, they used a solera method, never fully emptying a vessel, but merely adding more fresh beer after some is removed for blending. Peter says this isn’t utilized as much for La Parcela, as the brewery will rely on yearly batches to provide most of what’s needed for each October release.
"The results aren’t going to be the same every time,” he explains. “But if this beer is lacking acidity for some reason, we’re going to have to use these blender barrels.”
Batches of La Parcela spend 8-12 months in oak before they’re ready to be packaged. How long different brands at Jolly Pumpkin age varies, largely depending on their ABV. At 5.5% ABV, La Parcela takes a bit longer than very light beers like Bam Biere or Blanca. Ultimately, the time in the barrel and any needed blending will be left up to a tasting panel and handled by sensory analysis alone.
It’s an oft-heard refrain that pumpkin beers are really pumpkin spice beers taking much of their character from the blend of baking spices we’ve come to associate with fall confections. La Parcela uses these spices—a house-blended mix of cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and clove—but sparingly. More than anything, the spices provide a subtle accent to the complex fermentation profile of the beer rather than proclaiming “pumpkin pie” or “snickerdoodle.”
Not Your Typical Chocolate Beer
Another not-so-secret ingredient is working behind the scenes as well to provide nuance to the beer’s flavor profile: cacao.
Jolly Pumpkin uses Ecuadorian cacao nibs from TCHO Chocolate to undergird La Parcela’s flavors and provide balance to its acidity (depending on origin and post-fermentation processing, cacao nibs can possess considerable acidity, similar to what we see in coffee beans). Peter adds about a pound per barrel at the beginning of a 60-minute boil. He says he prefers the Ecuador nibs to the more popular Ghana cacao, which has a more conventional “chocolate” flavor.
“[Ecuador] lends a better balance of dark chocolate,” he explains. “You have to be kind of aggressive to get the cacao character into the beer. The full boil seems necessary. If we’re using the liquid cacao or chocolate (such as Cholaca) on the back end it’s a different story.”
Tasting La Parcela, it might be difficult to identify cacao, since we’re used to associating the ingredient with a recognizable chocolate flavor. Much like the spices, the cacao here is providing subtle complexity and nuance. Peter says he feels it helps create balance within this quirky beer and props up the spice profile.
“La Parcela is different from all the others. I think it was designed to stand out among the crowd among overly sweet pumpkin beers with the chocolate and the acidity.”
While it can seem fashionable to hate on pumpkin beers, even beer aficionados who would never wait up with Linus to see the Great Pumpkin can appreciate La Parcela. Cacao, oak, and mixed fermentation set this gourd apart.