These days Christmas decorations pop up before the jack-o'-lanterns rot. But season creep has one benefit for beer lovers.

Oktoberfest/Märzen-style brews, spiced pumpkin beers and strong holiday ales have become infinitely more available than in years past. These seasonal brews once sold only for a few weeks each year are now available as early as a month before the holidays they commemorate.

September kicks the holiday months off with a slew of Märzen-style lagers ranging from traditional treatments like Hacker-Pschorr's Original Oktoberfest Märzen and the more heavily hopped Samuel Adams Octoberfest to the in-your-face monster put out by Avery called Kaiser Imperial Oktoberfest, which comes in at an incredible (for the style) 8.9 percent alcohol by volume.

Late October and November bring the official dessert of Thanksgiving in liquid form. Pumpkin beers have exploded in popularity in recent years. Microbreweries have experimented with the style, prompting major brewers like Anheuser-Busch to follow their lead. Locally there are two excellent examples you can find.

Dogfish Head Punkin Ale is spiced brown ale brewed with baked pumpkins, cinnamon, nutmeg and brown sugar. While most brewers use just the spices, Dogfish Head adds pumpkins, which gives it a fuller body.

Shipyard Pumpkinhead Ale is a wheat beer spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg. It is light in body, and the spices complement the base beer very well. Pumpkinhead Ale is an excellent beer to wean your pals off cheap, mass-produced lagers because the flavor profile is familiar to most palates.

Mid November to early December marks what is arguably the best time of year in the brewing industry because breweries release their Christmas beers. There are no hard and fast rules for what constitutes a Christmas beer except that ideally it should only be brewed once a year and should have a slightly higher alcohol percentage than the breweries normal offerings - the better to warm your body through those cold winter nights. That's why imperial stouts are often released during the winter months.

Also, the names should either remind you of a line from a Robert Frost poem or be quaintly funny. Take Wychwood Bah Humbug, a spiced English strong ale, or Ridgeway's Lump of Coal, a chocolaty foreign stout-style ale that is dangerously easy to drink.

From Belgium there comes Delirium Tremen's festive sister Delirium Noel, a maltier version of the former with a delicious caramel and spice flavor profile. Mendocino Winter Ale is one of the few porters brewed as holiday ale and it is so good it should be a year-round offering.

Tampa Bay Brewing Company in Ybor has released its imperial stout and it is a treat for the palate. Other notable holiday beers to look for: Shipyard Prelude Ale, Shipyard Longfellow Winter Ale and Lost Coast Winterbraun.

You can find these beers at local specialty shops like The World of Beer in Clearwater, Beverage Castle near USF, Hyde Park Express in South Tampa and Total Wines and More on Dale Mabry near the interstate. - Joseph J.M. Redner is a Tampa resident and world beer traveler.