Expiration date on pumpkin beer?

[Roadie]

My son had a couple of his beer buddies come over last week to watch the KC Royals game and have a couple of beers. They had tasted an IPA (keg kicked) I submitted to my first competition a couple months ago so were excited to see what I had in the (8 tap) keezer. As our house is up for sale I haven't been brewing much of late and so the keezer is kind of bare. I had an old raspberry wheat, an old wheat, and old IPA, a conditioning RIS and an old pumpkin beer I brewed last September - are you noticing the OLD theme? After my old beer warning they tried a little of the IPA - yep old. They tried the RIS (Kate the Great from this site) I brewed in January and were blown away by how good it was - redemption.

Then they wanted to try the pumpkin which was the first pumpkin beer I ever brewed (September 2014) and was going for a pumpkin pie tasting beer. It came out good but was a little thin and I thought the spices needed tweaking. No one has drank the beer since probably Thanksgiving and I figured it would just taste old/nasty by now and wasn't going to have any but instead dump it with the other older beers. These guys poured a sample and said it was one of the best pumpkin beers they'd ever had. At first I thought, yeah right, no need to be a d|ck about it I told you it was old, but they went from the sample sized glasses to full pint glasses and kept raving about how much it tasted EXACTLY like pumpkin pie. Ok, you got me, I poured a sample and holy great pumpkin beer Batman it was fantastic. I was shocked! Now this isn't exactly the right season for pumpkin beer but damn, this stuff has come into it's own. I had one last bottle of Schlafly pumpkin left in the beer fridge and opened that to compare against something and yuck that beer was way past it's prime.

So WTH? What type of shelf life should pumpkin beer have? My favorite commercial example was not good but my keg was great? My beer is 8.6% ABV while the Schlafly is 8% so not that big of a difference. Is this a fluke? Should I be brewing pumpkin beer in December for the following Halloween?

Note to self: NEVER dump a beer without taking a little sample first.

 

[Quaker]

If sanitation is good and oxygen was kept at bay, I don't see why it wouldn't last. The extra time probably also gave time for the spice flavors to meld too. I'm assuming it was lowly hopped which also helps, since hoppy beers get ugly quicker with age.

I have a semi full keg of a spiced rye Belgian dark strong for lack of a better descriptor. I haven't had it on tap since Christmas. It'll get sampled again this fall. I haven't needed the keg, so I've let it sit there waiting.

 

[Roadie]

I purge everything with co2 so no oxygen problems. The spices weren't horrible when we drank the beer at Halloween/Thanksgiving but they have transformed now for sure and into exactly what I was hoping for. I used a french press to add a spiced tea to the keg as opposed to dumping spices directly into the beer. It is 22 IBUs. The Schlafly unfortunately didn't age as well.