Beer Forum

Starting to put together a Pumpkin ale recipe and looking for feedback, Here is what i have so far.

Amount Item Type % or IBU
10 lbs Pale Ale (Golden Promise (1.7 SRM) Grain 83.33 %
8.0 oz Biscuit Malt (23.0 SRM) Grain 4.17 %
8.0 oz Caramel/Crystal Malt -120L (120.0 SRM) Grain 4.17 %
4.0 oz Pale Chocolate Malt (270.0 SRM) Grain 2.08 %
33.15 gm Willamette [4.80 %] (60 min) Hops 19.3 IBU
12.0 oz Milk Sugar (Lactose) (0.0 SRM) Sugar 6.25 %
1 Pkgs Irish Ale (White Labs #WLP004) Yeast-Ale
4 lbs twice baked pumpkin meat in mash
.5 lbs Rice hulls

Mash 154F

Spice tea added post ferment
nutmeg
cinnamon
clove
vanilla bean
Ginger

Looking for a beer with full body and a hint of spice flavor but not so much to take away from drinkability Also not sure on amounts of each spice in the tea. Following Gordon Strong's procedure from Brewing Better Beer.

Looks nice to me... You could do each spice separate in the spice tea, then dose them together and taste for what you like before scaling up (ie, 2 drops nutmeg tea:5drops cinnamon: etc, etc), then the amount you use doesn't matter because you will be tasting and basing it off that. Just keep track of how much you add in how much liquid for the tea, so you can reproduce it.

spiderwrangler wrote:Looks nice to me... You could do each spice separate in the spice tea, then dose them together and taste for what you like before scaling up (ie, 2 drops nutmeg tea:5drops cinnamon: etc, etc), then the amount you use doesn't matter because you will be tasting and basing it off that. Just keep track of how much you add in how much liquid for the tea, so you can reproduce it.

+1!

Looks great!

I have had better results and a much easier time boiling the pre-cooked pumpkin pulp for 50 or so minutes in the wort boil with a large 5 gallon mesh bag. Mashing the pumpkin was a huge PITA even with rice hulls and I NEVER got any gravity points from adding the pumpkin in this manner. Boiling the pumpkin gave me a better pumpkin flavor and aroma in the beer than mashing as well. You may think that the pumpkin will haze your beer up, but within 2 wks of cold conditioning, the pumpkin ale was pouring perfectly clear.
Just be sure to keep "knocking" the pumpkin pulp in the boiling bag back into the wort for best results. Let us know how it turns out!

With the spices, if you keg you might want to consider putting the spices in a hop sack so that you can sample as you age the beer and remove once you have enough flavour.

Or adding a small amount at a time and add on until you have the flavour you were looking for.

Cheers.

Brewinhard
how much pumpkin do you normally use in the boil? I have tried both method of using pumpkin. I like adding it to the mash mostly because it is easy clean up. But I question the amount of flavor i got. When i used pumpkin in the the boil, I was new to brewing and i also used pumpkin halves in the fermentor it was a mess and have avoided it since.

Around 5# of pumpkin pulp that has been pre-roasted the night before. For me it was just much easier boiling the pumpkin than dealing with a possibly sticky mash. Just be sure to pull the pumpkin sack out and let it drip drain into your kettle with about 10 minutes left so you don't have to deal with it at knockout and can get your beer cooling quickly to retain any last minute spice additions you may have made.