Pumpkin homebrews

Just finished brewing a ag pumpkin ale, went pretty good although it was pretty hot and humid outside today. Recipe was pretty simple, some 2 row, 60L and special roast, pumpkin in the mash and boil, some brown sugar and hallertauer hops. Some pumpkin spice in a fo, the sample tasted great

 

Yeah. I have two split beans sitting in spiced rum. Will be adding in secondary soon.

 

I don't think you will have time to do an Imperial before this Halloween. Must of the recipes I've seen recommend aging for about a year.

I'm still working on my recipe, but it will probably be a cross between the "The Great Pumpkin" recipe in this months Zymurgy and "Ray Spangler's Pumpkin Ale" from Radical Brewing. It will probably lean more toward the Ray Spangler's one, just because that one sounds closer to what I want for a final product.

If I come up with any significant changes I'll post my recipe, but probably wont be 'till next week sometime.

 

Thought I'd post in here with some of my own empirical evidence from our brew day yesterday... We mashed with 120 ounces of canned pumpkin (10 gallon recipe). I caramelized the pumpkin first with some brown sugar in the oven. On brew day, I made a slurry from the pumpkin by adding some water thinking it might help it mix better into the mash. Used 1# of rice hulls.

Doughed in, then stirred in the pumpkin slurry. We currently have a RIMS setup (recirculating mash with a heating element). The recirc starts off fine, I leave the garage and come back to a stuck flow. Now, considering our setup (the mash tun being stainless and not built to hold heat), we had to direct fire the mash and keep it in a range between 152-156ish - meaning every 10 minutes or so I had to turn the heat back on, stir and get it back up to around 158 and let it drop. Not ideal and of course it be as sweet as I was hoping, but it got the job done. We came up only a couple points short on our pre-boil gravity which considering he trouble we went through, I'll take it.

Sparging wasn't horrible though believe it or not, just poured from the tun to the kettle using a strainer between the two by gravity with a fairly constant flow. Upon inspecting the mash tun when it was empty, I found a layer of pumpkin with the consistency of peanut butter covering the grain bed. My wild guess is that since we had a fine sparge yet a stuck pump for our recirculation, that this layer of pumpkin-butter (really sticky, the grain stuck to it) might have created some sort of loss of suction, enough to hinder the pump. Maybe?

tl;dr - beware of using a recirculating mash with pumpkin (at least the canned stuff).

In the future I might steep the pumpkin in a cheesecloth or something and use the water in the mash. I'm definitely not mashing with straight up canned pumpkin again.

 

Care to share the recipe?

 

Perhaps, but I still think in the future I will find another way to add pumpkin to the mash.

 

We defiantly had a thin mash and also actually have a false bottom. Layering in some hulls at the bottom sounds like descent idea.

Anywho, do you use a pump for recirculating? Just using gravity, the wort poured mostly fine out of the mash tun faucet. Like I said, it was the pump that failed in this case. I don't really know a lot about the physics involved but after some more thought and reading, my guess is the suction from the pump compressed the settled out grain/pumpkin bed enough that it failed to stay primed. I tried again halfway through the mash to get it going, still no luck.

The pump itself did work fine for whirlpooling, so no malfunction there.

 

Heh, the more I think about it, the more it makes sense...

As I said a layer of pumpkin wound up on top of the grain bed (either pumped in the initial recirculation or maybe it's just lighter?). Once on top, the pumpkin formed an air-restrictive layer, and coupled with the vacuum compression that the pump naturally creates, resulted in a loss of suction. Just like when you punch two holes in a can of juice and put your finger over one - the flow is hindered.

 

Rice hulls would definitely be helpful, just brewed mine last week and had my first stuck sparge with 40 oz pureed pumpkin in the mash. Other than that, it was my first pumpkin ale so I'm excited for it, added some late addition Amarillo hops for a bit of citrus/fruit flavor. Just added pumpkin pie spice and 3 oz spiced rum this morning, smelled great. Should be ready for kegging next week.

 

Slightly OT: Anybody used persimmons in a recipe? I presume it would be similar to using pumpkins, but I'd rather find out form someone that actually did it before trying it myself.

 

I haven't brewed with them, but I can tell you that persimmons don't taste anything like pumpkins.

 

Having eaten both, I find they are somewhat similar, but persimmons are a milder flavor with a little more peppery character.

 

I don't get the similarity at all, except for color and shape (depending on variety), and the fact that persimmons sometimes have flavors associated with pumpkin pie (sweet, cinnamon-y), but absent in actual pumpkins. But how similar do you find them? Like... Would you eat a raw persimmon? And would you eat a raw pumpkin?

 

Have done so. They're not super similar, but it's the closest I can think of.

So... anybody ever brew with them? Looking for some voices of wisdom that can share the pitfalls so I don't have to reinvent the wheel...

 

Ive made several different ales with Persimmons. Several places make recipe kits too:

http://www.hophero.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=4_6_14&products_id=212

 

A little late to this thread but I brewed a pumpkin ale on August 11th that I fermented with the Fantome base yeast, Wyeast 3725, and added sour dregs from a few bottles of Fantome and Jolly Pumpkin. OG was 1.091 and FG was 1.004 so after bottling I'm looking at around 12 % abv, but the Pediococcus took over after bottling and am still waiting for the Brett to clean things up... Should be ready in about 6 months or so... God Dammit... Aww well, looks like I'll have a nice sour Pumpkin beer to drink next fall.