Alright! Halloween is coming up again so we're brewing another pumkin ale! Like last year, we are throwing a large shindig in which our homebrew will be featured heavily, so we're brewing up a storm, and we are being seasonal about it. We brewed this last year and it was really successful, so we just had to see if we could ruin it this year by doing it again.
Brewing
Brew Date: September 22, 2010
Name of beer: 2nd Batch Pumpkin Patch Ale
Type of beer: Pumkin Ale
Quantity: 5gal
Homage Beer: Mary's Marzen. I actually wrote about the drinking of this beer in the previous post, actually published on the day we brewed this one.
Ingredients:
Brewing
Brew Date: September 22, 2010
Name of beer: 2nd Batch Pumpkin Patch Ale
Type of beer: Pumkin Ale
Quantity: 5gal
Homage Beer: Mary's Marzen. I actually wrote about the drinking of this beer in the previous post, actually published on the day we brewed this one.
Ingredients:
4 Relatively small pumpkins. Baked for about 90mins
1lb Vienna malt
1/2lb Caramel Malt
1lb Flaked malted wheat
1/2lb quaker oats
1/2lb quaker oats
6lb amber dry malt extract
1 cup light brown sugar
1oz Mount Hood hps
1/2oz Hallertauer hops
We also added a reasonable amount (maybe a tsp?) of vanilla and autumnal spices (cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg).
Process: We added the pumpkin with the specialty grains, and did a partial mash with that. We put the DME, Mt Hood hops, and brown sugar in at boiling for the full 60min boil. We used dual-stage fermentation, with only a week in each vessel (we need this beer ready by halloween, hence the urgency).
Original Gravity: 1.054
Bottling
"You always take pictures of me when I look fat"
Date: 10/07/2010
Color/Clarity: Dark amber, somewhat cloudy.
Final Gravity: 1.005
Taste: OK, not gonna lie, it tastes pretty weird. But the last one did too at this point, and it ended up tasting great! The spices taste very strong, which is odd given how little of them went in (relative to the size of the batch). This one is quite palatable, and given 3 weeks, some cold, and carbonation I think it will be delicious.
Ready to go
So now we have to wait a little over 3 weeks to open it up and start drinking. That feels like a short time, because usually we have really long wait periods with our beers, but 3 weeks actually used to be my standard wait time. Over the years I've found it to be premature, but I can't exactly push back Halloween, which is when we need it.
We took an inventory of our homebrew yesterday, and we currently have about 12 large bottles of Backsweat Grand Cru, about 3.5 gallons worth of Mary's Marzen, a full batch of this pumkin ale, and a keg plus a couple of bottles (6 gallon batch, 5 gallon keg, oops) of Jacques le Faim, the Belgian dubbel. Life is good!
