Beer Forum

Just listened to the podcast of the CBC show and was wondering if I caught the ingredients of the Great Pumpkin Ale correctly. From what I heard, they use 150 lbs of sugar pumpkin, 5 oz of cinnamon, and 5 oz of allspice per 10 barrel batch. By my math, this would be 2.5 lbs of pumpkin and less than 0.1 oz of each spice per 5 gallon batch. This doesn't seem right, especially the spices part. Can anyone clarify?

I had this beer in September, and I didn't notice any pumpkin flavor (not shocking, I know), and the spices were very subdued. So, those numbers sound reasonable to me. I brewed Jamil's pumpkin ale, and I thought it was a tastier beer (stronger malt backbone with more spice character).

I'm surprised that you tasted any spices at all. How much is 0.1 oz of cinnamon in terms of teaspoons?

I'm intrigued by the idea of brewing a pumpkin seasonal ale next Fall, so I have time to do more research. I'll take a look at JZ's recipe.

JLem wrote:I'm surprised that you tasted any spices at all. How much is 0.1 oz of cinnamon in terms of teaspoons?

Using the generic conversion from the first website off google: 0.6 tsp. But that's only a vague guideline (ignoring the material we're weighing). And the freshness of the spices you have can make a big difference on the taste (hence Jamil's advice to hold out some of the spices and adjust the taste late in the fermentation).

So it looks like the CBC beer might use about the same amount as Jamil's recipe, but I found the flavor much less prominent in the CBC beer (and in the interview, the brewer emphasized that he liked to keep the spicing subtle). Now I'm curious about how spices scale up to large batches.