Price
Meter
High!
So get this: I love pumpkin beers, and I love RJ Rockers beers. So you’d think that it would be a natural for me to adore Gruntled Pumpkin Ale, the fall seasonal from RJ Rockers Brewery of Spartanburg, South Carolina, right? Well yes you would, and yes I do. But I just may never buy this beer again. Does that make sense? It will shortly.
RJ Rockers has been around since 1997, before I even thought of moving to the south. I’ve enjoyed a number of their beers on draft and in the bottle. Currently, you can buy their beer in South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee. I just loved the label on Gruntled Pumpkin, and couldn’t pass it up. I grabbed a six-pack right away-and then I saw the price.
I was extremely surprised to see this beer going for $11.99 a six-pack, way overpriced even in these days of runaway expensive brew. So, I put it back and got a single instead.
From the website:
Gruntled Pumpkin is the perfect beer to accompany the highly anticipated cooler weather and the beginning of another football season. This beer is a well balanced blend of both pumpkin and spices that will take your taste buds on a trip to your grandmother's kitchen right as she pulls a freshly baked pumpkin pie out of the oven. 11 lbs of pumpkin per barrel of beer. Enjoy our new Fall seasonal, kick back, and GET GRUNTLED!
Eleven pounds of pumpkin per barrel? Then too, this is a bigger pumpkin beer than many at 7% alcohol by volume. That sounds promising! Let’s see how the beer turns out, shall we?
RJ Rockers Gruntled Pumpkin pours to a bright orange color with a thick creamy head of tightly packed bubbles and a rich nose of rum, sour fruit and vanilla. Taking a sip I like the richness of body here as the beer starts smooth with very light caramel and segues nicely into squashy, meaty, stringy pumpkin flesh flavors. You really can taste the pumpkin in this one. Then the spices arrive, very dry nutmeg and cinnamon are what I get, perhaps some clove. They become very drying in the finish and mix with a hint of the rum and vanilla the nose promised as well as candied fruits. There’s a gentle alcohol warmth as well.
All in all, I would probably rate this one 4.5 stars-it’s that good. It’s incredibly complex. The deal breaker here then is the price, at $11.99 a six-pack, it’s about $3 more than it should be. At that price, as much as I like it, I wouldn’t buy it again, at least not in the six-pack. Perhaps if I see it on tap at Taco Mac I’ll order it up, but as much as I like it there are others out there for less money that are just as good.
And remember, try a new beer today, and drink outside the box.
*Pricing data accurate at time of review or latest update. For reference only, based on actual price paid by reviewer.
(B)=Bottled
(D)=Draft