B2A2: Jolly Pumpkin

There is a version of B2A2 that never comes here. Jolly Pumpkin at 311 S Main St is a brewery famous for its sour ales and a restaurant known for its wood-fired pizza. The series has spent six entries asking who makes the best burger in this region. Nobody putting together a shortlist answers that question by writing down a sour ale taproom.

I put it on the list anyway, for a specific reason. We already know the kitchen can cook. We covered the pizza in our Slice entry on the Dexter taproom and found a wood-fired program that takes the food as seriously as Ron Jeffries takes the fermentation. The Ann Arbor location runs from the same playbook. A kitchen with a functioning wood-fired oven, a commitment to technique, and no particular reason to coast on the beer's reputation. The question B2A2 wanted answered: does that kitchen have a burger worth caring about, or does the burger exist because the menu expected one?

This is entry seven. The burger is real.

The Burger

The Jolly Pumpkin burger is listed on the menu as a single composed item, not a build-your-own situation and not a bar staple tucked below the entrees. House-ground beef, a brioche-style bun, some combination of cheese and sauce that varies slightly with the season. Under $20.

The wood-fired oven changes the sear. This is the same thing that made the Echelon smash burger the top of this ranking for a long stretch: when you cook beef over live fire instead of a flat-top or a conventional grill, the Maillard reaction runs faster and hotter, and the surface develops a char that has depth rather than just color. Jolly Pumpkin's kitchen is built around that oven. The pizza is built around that oven. The burger comes out of it with the same logic.

The patty is not a smash. It has some thickness to it, enough that the center stays pink while the outside takes the char. That is a harder thing to execute than a smash burger, where the thin patty is forgiving because the entire surface is in contact with heat. A thicker patty requires timing, and this one was right. The outside had a slight char crust. The inside was still giving off steam when I pulled it apart.

The cheese was melted properly, not plastered on cold or dropped on too late. The bun had enough structure to hold the whole thing together without compressing into a mush of bread. The sauce was restrained, which is the right call when the beef already has smoke character. Nothing competed with the sear. Everything supported it.

I ate the whole thing and thought about ordering another one.

The Beer Pairing

Every other entry in this series has a drink note: Raven's Club gets a cocktail, Blimpy gets a can of pop, Echelon gets a brine martini. Jolly Pumpkin makes the pairing question easy and hard at the same time. Easy because the beer is genuinely excellent. Hard because the beer is sour, and not everyone knows what to do with that alongside a burger.

La Roja is the obvious answer. The amber sour with its dry, fruity tartness is the flagship for a reason, and when you drink it next to a burger that has smoke and char on it, the acidity does something the carbonation in a lager can't do: it cuts through the fat without washing out the flavor. The sear and the tartness play against each other rather than blending together. After a few bites of burger, a pull of La Roja makes you want another bite of burger.

Bam Biere, the lighter farmhouse ale, works better for people who are not sure about sour beer. Less tart, more funk, still dry. It does the same palate-reset job at a lower volume. The Slice entry on the Dexter taproom made the same point about the pizza pairing, and it holds here: Jolly Pumpkin builds food to share a table with its beer, and the burger is no exception.

If you have been coming to Jolly Pumpkin for the pizza and ignoring the burger, the La Roja pairing alone is worth the visit.

Where It Fits

Seven entries in, and B2A2 now has a clear hierarchy at the top, a few different ways to spend your money in the middle, and some entries that are there because the series needed to ask whether they counted.

The Echelon smash burger held the top spot in the mid-series rankings because of precision. Wood-fired sear, restrained toppings, a chef who has opinions. Jolly Pumpkin is competing in the same lane. Both kitchens use a wood-fired setup. Both produce burgers with char depth that a flat-top cannot match. The difference is that Echelon built its reputation around the food and the burger is a statement of intent. Jolly Pumpkin built its reputation around the beer and the pizza, and the burger is a quiet bonus.

That context matters for the ranking. A burger that earns its spot in a series this deep, at a restaurant that was not trying to make the burger the reason you come in, is doing something the other entries are not. Blimpy Burger doesn't need to explain itself. Echelon is trying to win. Jolly Pumpkin is not competing, and the burger is good anyway. I find that more interesting than I expected.

Current picture: Echelon holds the technical top. Sidetrack holds the pub burger position. Raven's Club is the cocktail-bar standard. Jolly Pumpkin is the wood-fired oven entry that you would not have predicted would matter, and it matters.

This is part of our ongoing series. Read the full tracker: Best Burger in Ann Arbor (B2A2): The Running List.

Jolly Pumpkin is at 311 S Main St, Ann Arbor, MI 48104. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Bori Korean Kitchen & Bar is upstairs in the same building.