Brewing the pumpkin beer

Now that fall weather is upon us, it’s finally cool enough in my house to get back into homebrewing. I hadn’t made any beer since early June because of the temperature inside, but the past couple weeks have been really nice so I can get away with running the stove for four hours again. Anyway, yesterday I made the second batch of my Drunken Pumpkin fall recipe. Pumpkin beers are a big fall tradition, dating way back to colonial times when grain was expensive in the fall, but pumpkin was plentiful and cheap. Brew with what you’ve got on hand. These days, we brew with pumpkin because it’s tradition and because it tastes good.

I first made this pumpkin recipe last year. It turned out pretty well in color and smell, but the pumpkin and spices (typical pumpkin pie spices, courtesy of Sarah) were hard to make out. This year I made a couple spice and malt modifications to try to get more flavor out of the recipe. I also took a tip from the Smuttynose notes for their pumpkin beer by adding the pumpkin and spices to the secondary fermenter, instead of to the boiling kettle. The brewing went very smoothly, the only problem being I forgot my cylinder was cracked so I was unable to measure the initial specific gravity. That just means I won’t be able to tell how much alcohol is really in it, but that’s always iffy anyway. It actually went a little too smoothly. For a while, I was worried by how easily it was going and how simple it is to do an extract+specialty grain recipe. Perhaps I’m just getting good at this.

This weekend, I guess I will add the pumpkin and spices after giving the base beer a little taste. Then I will stare at the big pile of yeast left over in the primary fermenter and think about brewing up yet another batch to throw right on that so I can save on yeast costs. That’s going to be hard to resist.

Speaking of the pumpkin beer recipe, I got an email from a guy who owns drunken-pumpkin.com who wanted to reprint my recipe on his website. I got a bit of a kick out of that, since I’m starting to get more mail traffic on these beer recipes. You can check out his entry about it over here.