Sunday, November 11, 2018

Nightmare Before Pumpkin Ale

So with the change of the seasons and the holidays approaching quickly, I thought it was only fitting to try my hands at a fall classic, pumpkin beer.
After some researching, I found a great recipe off HBT that I ended up manipulating a bit. (see recipe page for my recipe)
So I thought this brew was gonna be pretty simple, besides adding the oven baked pumpkin to the mash, but I still was worried.  ...Well I should've been!
This ended up being the most frustrating brew ever for me! Everything went wrong. Missed my mash temp by a few degrees, stuck sparge (even with almost 2 lbs of rice hulls) and then to top it all off the immersion chiller's fittings came loose and squirted water everywhere (including my already boiled beer.)

Anyways, I made the best of it, still was able to get 10 gallons and hit a 1.052 original gravity.

Below are a few pics of the brew sesh.













Update: Beer has been in primary for 2 weeks now and has cleaned up nicely. The gravity is a constant 1.014. I will be transferring to secondary this weekend and racking to keg and adding the spices after about 5 days of secondary. Really hoping to get this one carbed up for Thankgiving!

1 comment:

  1. Glad it worked out for you SP. Also I am glad you are thinking about keeping 2 different kegs of the beer and not blending it all.

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