Doctors bury their mistakes; journalists print theirs.

The instructor told us this joke years ago when I was doing a copy editing course. I probably hadn’t given it a moment’s thought in three decades. What brought it back was the pumpkin ale we made last fall.

We thought it might be good to do a seasonal beer. So we worked up recipe involving commercial ale yeast, a mixture of malt extract and some specialty malt, and pumpkins from the farm. The last of these we roasted in the oven to sterili...