Uinta Crooked Line Oak Jacked Imperial Pumpkin

Brewed By: Uinta Brewing Company in Salt Lake City, Utah  

Purchased: Giant 750ml bottle from Evolution Wine & Spirits in Chicago, Illinois; 2012

Style/ABV: Spice/Herb/Vegetable (Imperial Pumpkin Ale), 10.31%

Reported IBUs: 39

Pumpkins, cool breezes, and Jason Voorhees. 

It's Halloween eve, bitches! Or All Hallow's Eve. Halloween is my favorite holiday, and nothing says Halloween like celebrating the night before with a special pumpkin beer. This is a giant beer from Uinta brewing, aged in oak barrels. And it is fucking delicious. So let's get down to brass tax, and drink some special beer!

Uinta Brewing Company has been around since 1993. The brewery started out in a small, renovated mechanic's garage, in Salt Lake City, Utah. The brewery began to build reputation by distributing beer to bars, restaurants, and liquor stores. By 1996, the brewery installed a bottling line. In 2001, the brewery outgrew its original building, and Uinta relocated to a 26,000-square-foot facility. The Uinta name comes from an east-west mountain range located in northeastern Utah. The brewery names many of its beers after Utah's landscape, including their Cutthroat Pale Ale (after the state fish) and their King's Peak Porter (after Utah's highest peak). An additional note: since 2001, Uinta has been 100% wind-powered, and in 2011, the brewery installed solar-electric paneling. Uinta continues to grow, and continue to produce some stellar, award-winning beer. For more info, click HERE.

Today's beer, the Oak Jacked Imperial Pumpkin, is part of Uinta's Crooked Line series of beers. The Crooked Line series was launched in 2010, and features "big beers" both in terms of taste and in the size of the bottle. The Crooked Line beers are bottled in 750ml bottles, and are cork finished. These beers push alcohol limits of 13% ABV, and many of these beers are aged in oak, whiskey, or bourbon barrels. The Crooked Line series of beers are meant to be shared with friends, over a meal, much like a bottle of wine.

Of course, you can certainly embrace your inner-alcoholic and solo these bad boys. That's how I roll. Today's beer is aged in oak barrels, and clocks in at a fantastic 10.31% ABV. This beer packs 39 IBUs. Let's get this into a glass, and see how it holds up.

Uinta Oak Jacked Imperial Pumpkin

This is a gorgeous beer. In low light, the beer pours with a dark-brown body, and has 3-fingers of nice and foamy head. The head is thick, and has a tan/khaki color. As the head pulls away, you get some gorgeous lacing, but head retention is excellent with this beer, and you can easily stir up some head by swirling the beer in the glass. When held to bright light, the beer takes on a reddish-amber color, and you can see through the filtered body. There's a lot of carbonation in this beer, in the form of medium to large sized bubbles. Overall, a gorgeous looking beer.

The aroma on this beer is fantastic, complex, and big. Right up front you get big oak, some hints of wood, a bandaid aroma, and big gourd and pumpkin notes. I'm talking about meaty gourd and pumpkin, and the taste you get if you suck on a pumpkin seed. As I smell further into this, I'm pulling out fat bready malts, raisins, and sweet malt backbone. There's also some underlying spice in this, with cinnamon, nutmeg, and pumpkin pie spice. The nose is very sweet, and it is dominated with big sweet bready notes, pumpkins, and oak goodness.

The taste is out of this world. You get huge huge pumpkin notes, with gourd and seed, and they bounce off the huge wood and oak notes from the barrel. Pumpkins already give tannins to beer, and you get huge tannins from the oak and pumpkin combination. There's a wine-like character to this beer, and it drinks like a full-bodied, sticky beer. And it damn well should, at 10.31% ABV. I'm getting bready caramel, bread, toffee, hints of raisins, hints of rum, slight booziness, some light cinnamon and nutmeg, vanilla, bourbon, clove, huge meaty pumpkin, pumpkin flesh, gourd, pumpkin seed, flashes of pumpkin pie, hints of crust, and some booze running throughout. There's some funk in this, and a hint of sour.

With the recent trend towards producing these giant pumpkin beers, I'm happy to see some breweries deviating and doing stuff like barrel aging these things. But, what's really impressive about this beer is that it's not overwhelmed by oak. This beer has a giant, meaty, gourd-like, pumpkin flavor going on. And it rocks. At 10.31% ABV, this is a sipper...and, indeed, I sipped this beer during football on Sunday. With the 750ml bottle, I poured a glass during the noon game, the late game, and Sunday Night Football. This is a full-bodied beer, has a sticky and dense mouthfeel, and features thin but moderate carbonation. Palate depth is great, and this is fairly complex. Up front are big bready malts, toffee, flashes of pumpkins, bandaids, oak, wood, tannins; this rolls into pumpkin in the middle, with some slight hoppiness, and hints of the underlying spice; the finish is lingering pumpkin and spice, hints of pie, vanilla. There's underlying booze throughout, with some bourbon and rum popping up. Nice stuff.

Rating: Divine Brew 

This is a Decent Divine Brew, and possibly my favorite "Imperial" pumpkin ale from this year. This is just a big, serious beer. And it packs all the desirable flavors I want in a pumpkin beer, including using a subtle approach with the spices. This beer reminds me of a heavy, oak-aged red wine, and would pair well with a heavy stew, a burger and sweet potato fries, candied yams, pumpkin pie, or a nice hearty soup. This is a bit pricey at around 13 dollars per bottle, but it's a huge bottle, and this is a huge beer. If you like things aged in oak barrels, and you like pumpkin beers, you should check this out.

Random Thought: With the increasing popularity of pumpkin beers....Pumking may need to watch out. It's not going to take much to dethrone the king, methinks.