I'm an unabashed pumpkin beer enthusiast. I know, I know: We've hit peak pumpkin; it's not cool; blah blah blah. To go with the basic nature of the beast, the recipe I chose was... the top hit on Google. This was my first foray into hybrid extract/BIAB brewing. I made several modifications to the recipe for various reasons, which I catalog below... as far as I can remember: Yup, I took terrible, terrible notes.

And since this is going to be our Thanksgiving beer, we lovingly named it for the thin mint that takes out Mr. Creosote (totally NSFL link) in Monty Python's Meaning of Life.

Ingredients in this batch

  • 6 lbs Muntons Liquid Malt Extract (amber).
  • 0.48 lb dry malt extract (amber)
  • 1.5 lb caramel 40°L malt, ground
  • 0.5 lb chocolate malt, ground
  • 2 lbs of pie pumpkins from Van Groningen & Sons, peeled and cleaned, diced, and baked at 350 degrees for 60 minutes with a sprinkling of brown sugar, then cooled. The weight shown is the final weight of the cleaned, roasted pumpkins.
  • 1 oz Willamette hop pellets at :60
  • 1 oz Willamette hop pellets at :30
  • A bit over 0.25 oz total of ground ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg, all from Penzey's
  • 1 pack of White Labs WLP001 California Ale Yeast
  • 5 gallons of plain grocery store water

Brew day: 9 October 2016
Bottling Day: 30 October 2016
O.G.: 1.049
F.G.: 1.017
estimated ABV: 4.25%

Yield:

  • 32 x 12 oz. bottles
  • 4 x 22 oz. bottles
  • 1 x 1 L bottle
  • 1 x 500 mL bottle

Total: about 532 fl. oz., or about 4.1 gal.

Instructions

I made a few tweaks based on advice from the wonderful folks at the local homebrew store: I omitted rice hulls and Irish moss, since the grains were going in a bag (and I'm not terribly concerned with clarity at this stage in my brewing career). I replaced 0.6 lbs of liquid malt extract with the equivalent amount of dry and the Victory malt with caramel (I think? I really should take better notes). I switched out the yeast based on availability. And I always, always use more spice than the directions say; life's just too short.

Beyond this, I followed the directions in the recipe as closely as I could: Mashed the roasted, cooled pumpkin and specialty grains with 1.5 gallons of water at 152 for one hour, then strained into the brewing bucket and back and rinsed with 0.5 gallons of 170-degree water. I brought the volume to 3.5 gallons and boiled the wort for one hour, adding hops per the schedule in the recipe. I whirlpooled, chilled, and transferred the wort to a sanitized 6-gallon bucket, added the spices, and pitched the yeast (likely closer to 80 degrees). SG was only 1.049.

Observations

  • 2016-10-10T19:00: Fermentation took off nicely, but never produced much foam or volume the way we've seen with our hoppier beers, and leveled off to almost nothing within a week.
  • 2016-10-30T18:30: Added ½ cup corn sugar to ½ cup water and tossed it in for priming, then bottled.
  • 2016-11-21T19:00: There's no nice way to say this: I hate how this batch came out. There's an overwhelming dish soap flavor for me, although Patrick tells me he doesn't taste it. There's a harsh, overly roasted flavor, as if some of the malt was burnt. And the beer has absolutely zero body. I really hope some of our friends will like this stuff more than I do, or I'll still be glaring at bottles of it in 2019. On the plus side, this one seems more evenly carbonated and less yeasty than my Wench Saison.