By now, the lore has calcified into sticky, cinnamon-drenched legend: Elysian Brewing’s 2016 Great Pumpkin Beer Festival was not so much a beer fest as it was a gourd-baptized maelstrom of spice and glory, a swirling autumnal hallucination with the soul of Hurricane Matthew and the scent of nutmeg regret. Yes, it rained. Yes, it blew. Yes, the line to get in stretched somewhere past purgatory and looped back around through a puddle of wet wool and chai despair. And yet: we came. Of course we came. Because if you haven’t stood soaked to the marrow waiting for a barrel-aged imperial pumpkin stout while a costumed brass band honks apocalyptic jazz at your face, have you truly lived?
Rumor (and a few resigned shrugs from overworked staff) suggests the storm scared off a number of volunteers, leaving the beer lines long and the cider even longer. But what is a little chaos compared to the chance to sample Avery Rumpkin, Breckenridge Nitro Pumpkin Spice Latte, or Jolly Pumpkin’s Black Parcela while dressed like a Victorian squash demon under the brooding shadow of CenturyLink Field? What is time, even, when you’re queuing for a 13% pumpkin ale brewed inside a several-hundred-pound pumpkin that has been gutted, scorched, beered, sealed, and blessed like a pagan cauldron of fall itself?
The DJs from KEXP spun from on high, perched like caffeinated druids above the orange-tinted madness, while bursts of steam hissed from the scaffolding every 15 minutes like a pumpkin god exhaling approval. Below, The Chaotic Noise Marching Corps stomped and screamed, delightfully unhinged, a sonic riot of brass, booty, and bliss. And everywhere: pumpkin people. So many pumpkin people. Glittered, fishnetted, onesied, sequined, vine-draped weirdos chasing the dream of being seen, judged, and rewarded with beer and glory.
And yes, there were victors. Jeanette and Donovan DeWitt of RetroTech Plumbing in Sumner took the costume crown, presumably for channeling some unknowable, squash-based magnificence that silenced all competition.
But in the end, we weren’t there for medals. We were there for the madness. We were there for the burnt sugar haze, the vanilla fog, the molasses prayers, the sensory riot that is GPBF. The beer? Secondary. The lines? Transcended. The rain? Part of the baptism. We came searching for chaos in orange, and oh yes—we found it.
