I am a newer brewer. I am on my 5th batch. First 4 I followed the recipe and they came out great. This batch I am not so sure and could use some guidance. I bought a kit for a pumpkin spiced porter. The kit only had pumpkin spice and no actual pumpkin. Me being the bold one I decided to add two 29 oz cans of pumpkin tin the boil and threw is a quarter cup of gram cracker crumbs for the hell of it. I used 2.5 gallons of water and everything went well. When my boil ended I chilled it down with a wort chiller. Here is where it went sideways. I have a funnel with a screen. I usually can transfer the wort and maybe have to dump or clean the screen once to clear it. Well this wort was so thick that when I started to pour it just would not go through the screen. I finally decided that it wasn't worth it so I poured the whole batch into the carboy. It was churned up form trying to pour earlier that I got a ton of trub and stuff into the fermenter. I topped off the batch to 5 gallons pitched the yeast and am praying. I was so frustrated I didn't even take a OG reading. My thought is to let it ferment as is for 2 weeks and then transfer to a secondary fermenter. Should I have added a little more than 5 gallons since I have so much stuff in there? Should I have added some water to the wort before transferring? Was adding the pumpkin or gram cracker crumbs the culprit? Any help, advice or calming words of encouragement will be appreciated.
1. Meh. Maybe, maybe not 2. Probably both. But whatever Take the whole batch through the whole process. Don’t ever count an unfinished beer as undrinkable (unless you know for a fact it has been infected). May the odds be in your favor, my brother
There are plenty of people who toss everything from the kettle into the fermenter without a thought given to filtering out the hot/cold break, hops, etc. Some argue that some of that material acts as nutrient for the yeast, providing for a stronger fermentation. Can't say I know the science behind it, but they all say they make great beer. In fact, as I think about this, I remember I was having issues with my funnel screen a few months back when I made a porter, so I ended up pouring the last half of the beer in without filtering it. That beer came out quite nice, even if it's still a little young yet.
Welcome to the BA site, Rapalazz, and to the Homebrewing forum. We're glad that you're here. I'd say that the pumpkin and graham cracker were your culprits in the thickness of the wort, and they probably would have settled out so that you could have siphoned the wort into your fermenter. But you are where you are, and will have to go from here. You may have to wait a few days after fermentation is complete to give the trub time to settle out, but I don't think you'll need to use a secondary fermenter. You could add boiled/cooled water to your wort now, but I'd wait until you can transfer to your bottling bucket and know for sure how much beer you have, thus how much water you need to add. Or, if the beer tastes great when you are ready to bottle, don't add water at all. You'll have a higher ABV, but that can be your choice. If you add water at the time of bottling, boil your priming sugar in it to create your priming solution and then gently mix it thoroughly to incorporate it evenly in the beer.
So at the risk of being blunt, I'm going to say that you need to learn to walk before you run. There are brewers out there who do all kinds of crazy stuff, and it sometimes works out great. But they're doing it after gaining mastery of the basics, so they know what the trade-offs are, and where the red lines are. By analogy, think of the painters who learned to paint classically before they started painting abstract shapes. Like, I don't know, Mondrian I guess. Anyway the key thing that jumps out at me is that you dumped pumpkin and graham crackers in the boil. That's not right! Those ingredients are full of complex carbohydrates and need to be mashed. The best case scenario is that the gunk will settle out and you will be able to rack your beer off of it. But that's far from ideal, for the reasons you've already identified and also for other reasons. The goods news is the beer might be fine anyway, you've learned your lesson, and we all make mistakes like this when we're starting out. But I would strongly recommend picking up a copy of How to Brew by John Palmer and giving it a read before you do any more experiments. (It seems that you can already brew from a recipe just fine, so by all means keep doing that in the meantime.) So the short answer is, yeah, you shouldn't have done that. But the bigger, more important answer is, you should put yourself in a position to spot these issues before the fact. It's like if someone said, "Should I not have stopped my car in the middle of the interstate? Was that dangerous?" On one level, the answer is, "Right, you should drive at the speed of traffic, it's dangerous to be too fast or too slow." But the more important answer is, "Stay off the interstate until you've got the basics down!" Again, sorry to be blunt, I just think the answers so far have been of the "Yeah, stopping your car on the interstate was the problem, here's how to safely get back into traffic" variety, and I think what you really need is to get the basics down.
