Hello out there, I am back with another question. In a few weeks I will be brewing two fruit beers (well, one is pumpkin), which I have never done before. My wife has requested a Mango wheat beer. I was at Costco this morning and purchased about 5 pounds of frozen mango chunks. The recipes for this beer seem pretty straight-forward: the mango is added to the fermenter after the initial fermentation is done. It is with the pumpkin beer that I have more doubts, as I have seen videos where they add baked pumpkin to the mash, ones where they add baked pumpkin to the fermenter and ones where they do both. Basically, I have three questions: 1. The recipe for the mango wheat calls for a 'clean' yeast, like US-05. How different would a Belgian wheat ale yeast make it? 2. When do I add the fruit/pumpkin? This is really a call out to your experience, as I have read about and seen all kinds of techniques. 3. For the pumpkin ale, I would like to add some rum-soaked oak chips. How long should they be left in, and can they be in the fermenter with the pumpkin (I suppose they could, but not 100% sure). Thanks in advance.
Wit strains are POF+. So there would be some phenolic character. I normally add fruit to secondary, mainly to minimize fruit flavor/aroma loss. Pumpkin is pretty starchy, so if I were going to use it, I'd mash it. But IMO, the key to a good pumpkin ale is the spices. I don't use actual pumpkin in them. To me, it's pretty flavorless. You could add the chips at/near the end of primary, or in secondary. How much wood character do you want? Longer means more.
For pumpkin, I add roasted pumpkin , minus the seeds and rind, to the mash tun and mash it with the grains for 1 hour. When I oak I rack fermented beer to a secondary then add wood. No experience with your yeast question and mangos, but I did try a pumpkin ale with Belgian yeast instead of my usual Nottingham. I did not like it as well. Good luck.
FTFY OP, so far as the rum-soaked oak addition, is it rum flavor you're looking for, or wood flavor? If it's just rum, just add some rum at packaging. You don't get too much spirit character from soaked oak, maybe just a touch, but you'll mostly get wood from it. So far as timing when using oak, it's really just a matter of tasting regularly, and when it tastes good to you, package. Also, oak cubes or spirals will take longer to get character from than chips, but they will give you a larger margin of error on timing. Very easy to overdo it with chips if you aren't prepared to package quickly after it's to your liking. Oak is one of those things that it's better to have too little of than too much, IMHO.
This is exactly what I was wondering - it's not vanilla oakiness I'm after; it's a rum barrel characteristic. If I can get this from adding a few jiggers, that would be much simpler.
Short answer: YES Long answer: to be exact, you will need a graduated cylinder and pipette to do a tasting, dumping the cylinder every time you taste to record a perfect ratio of rum to beer, writing down thoughts the whole time, and once you hit the golden ratio for this beer, do some math to scale up I think that if you just dump a cup of rum into the bottling bucket, you will be happy, provided your base beer turns out well.
Also, for a pumpkin beer, looking more for a "rum barrel" character, you should make sure that you're using a barrel-aged rum. A lot of darker rums just get their color and/or sweetness from molassas or caramel added at bottling. My (somewhat affordable) choice would be El Dorado 8yr. Ain't exactly cheap, but has a nice caramel sweetness to it, as well as a bit of oak characteristics without being hot or somewhat funky. I feel that whenever you're using a spirit, it's a showcase beer, so drop the bills on something to make it worthy of being a showcase.
Regarding test dosing, here's a cheat sheet: http://sonsofalchemy.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Flavor_Sample_Dosing.pdf
Great advice from all. Thanks! I want to get a balance of rye (grain), pumpkin spices and rum so that none overpower the others.
