Mashing Pumpkin & Sweet Potato

Berkbeer · 08-22-2009, 08:06 PM

I am making my pumpkin beer tomorrow and had some questions. For those of you who have mashed in a cooler with braid do you think there would be value to puttingthemash into an extra large hop bag and then into the cooler with the rice hulls. I may loose some efficiency but avoid stuck sparge and if I do get stuck I can pull the grain with the bag and clear the drain.

I was also trying to increase pumpkin flavor as much as possible and was thinking about adding pumpkin to the boil but I am worried about starch haze. Does anyone have any eexperience with this being an issue? My pland was to mash the sweet potatos and boil the pumpkin to create depth of flavor. I was also thinking to mash the fresh ginger root any thoughts.

Thanks for the suggestions. By the way it is the Yuri_rage Thunderstruck grain bill with my changes to Pumpkin Sweet Potato and Spices in a 6 gallon batch using 10 gallon igloo brain MLT.

Freddy57 · 08-22-2009, 08:15 PM

I'm going to brew my pumpkin ale myself tomorrow and it works pretty slick. I use canned pumpkin in my mash and it can be a bit messy. I never have any trouble sparging but I drain very slowly out of my MLT and use lots of hot water and keep the mash loose. When it comes down to the end it may clog on you but with a little extra sparge water I have no trouble getting my desired volume. The key is patience, it takes over an hour to collect my 8 gallons of wort.

Berkbeer · 08-23-2009, 08:14 PM

After talking to my HB store I decided to mash both the pumpkin and the sweet potato and leave the boil to hops. I also mashed the raw ginger. Missed my mash temp due to temp offset of the pumpkin and potato so I had to add an extra gallon of boiling water, mashing at 154 instead of 158 now. I am mashing with an extra large hop bag inside of my cooler - we will see how this works.

I included a picture of the sweet potatos, pumkin and ginger.

Berkbeer · 08-24-2009, 12:12 AM

After a slowsparge and a trip to the park starting boil with a preboil gravity of 1.051 seems like I am on track.

Q2XL · 08-24-2009, 01:47 AM

I don't know much about spices, but that is A LOT of ginger.

Berkbeer · 08-24-2009, 02:50 AM

I agree it was a lot of ginger, but it was in the mash and not in the spice tea at the end we will see how it goes. Smelled good going into the fermenter. Long brew day for sure. Starting gravity of 1.064.

**ghpeel** · 08-25-2009, 03:46 AM

Sweet lord, that much ginger would burn the nose hair off a mule. Not sure how much the boil will knock it down, but I think you'd smell it by now if it was too much. Interested to see how it turns out when its ready to drink.