Stack Brewing PIPA

This can't be stressed enough - support your local brewery. Do it for entirely selfish reasons. It sucks to find out after the fact that you missed Secret Beer, so shop brewery-direct and go early and often.  
PIPA (Pumpkin IPA, naturally) existed for all of three days, and it would have been a genuine shame to miss it. Where most beers of this type lean heavily toward "spice" over "pumpkin", PIPA is much more pumpkin-dominant, and in general one curious specimen of a Hallowe'en concoction.

PIPA presents as a West Coast inspired IPA with a promise of something slightly unusual on the nose - cloudy and amber-orange, it leads with a burst of Seville-peel hops and a milder scent of sharp, tart yeast. The pumpkin flavour comes almost as a surprise once the impact of the hops fades, with characteristics both of sweet pumpkin flesh and the oddly compelling sugary char from the down-side of the roasted skin. Spice flavour is more of a suggestion, bringing a general "spicy" flavour with none particularly distinct. The restrained use of spices may in fact account for an expected characteristic that was missing - despite the strong hopping and the inherent waxiness of pumpkin, PIPA avoids any unpleasant soapy or scented traits. I suspect that, more than anything else, it may be an excessive use of ginger in conjunction with heavy hopping that imparts these. Update: I went to the brewers for the scoop on this one - this year, Stack used a single one of those enormo fall-fair pumpkins for the entire run of both Last Bite and PIPA, and those have much less waxy/vegetal flavour to impart than their smaller cousins.
After breathing for a few minutes, the yeast - with a slightly sour pizza-dough tang similar to New Ontario Brewing Company's Sour Sumac* - becomes more evident, and the pumpkin flavour even more distinct. The bitter orange aroma of the hops fades slightly behind them as the beer loses its chill, still strong but more complementary to the unique backing flavours. This is a beer you can walk away from for a minute provided you have more trustworthy cats than I do. Hopefully, Stack considers a proper run of PIPA next year - I'm not sure one more pint of this is going to be enough for me forever.
*Just a few days after writing that a sumac beer could potentially be brilliant, I was proven right when this appeared on draft at the pub and was seriously fresh-a-licious. I never thought I could accept a 3% beer, but this new crop of light sours is seriously changing my outlook.