Chocolate Chili Pumpkin Porter?

So I am fairly green behind the ears when it comes to brewing, but I have a strong culinary background and am on my 6th batch of homebrew currently. Though not perfect all results have been pretty great. Mostly using recipes although my first was a completely made up porter recipe, bred from mistake and inexperience - Smoked Chocolate Bourbon Vanilla Imperial Porter. It was pretty darn good as it turned out.


***So the skinny of it all and my request for help is as follows:

With October coming around the corner, I want a good spiced pumpkin porter and a good Cider. The latter seems pretty simplistic but my imagination has gotten the best of me and resonates of some pies I've made. I want to make a Double Chocolate Spiced Pumpkin Porter with a hint of Ancho for some smoky heat finish. I am not well versed or practiced enough to know about amounts, timing, etc, and though I am certain there is no tried and true base recipe for this I wanted to see about getting some feedback from those with a bit more brewing experience.

I am doing 5 gal batches with extract, steeping the specialty grains.

Feel free to edit my guestimations PLEASE!

1# Light LME
5# Dark LME

0.5# Crystal
0.5# Chocolate Malt
0.5# British Pale Chocolate
0.25# black/dark malt
0.125# roasted barley
0.125# Smoked Malt
1/2# Brown Sugar

1oz Magnum Hops 60 min
1/2oz Goldings 10min
1/2oz Tehnanger 2-3min

White Labs California Ale yeast WLP001

3-4# pumpkin roasted quartered/peeled
6-8oz cocoa nibs
2 medium anchos
1 cinnamon stick
1 TBSP of pumpkin pie spice.

I am assuming steep pumpkin in seperate grain bag with specialty grains and keep in with boil. Add 1/2 cocoa to boil with pie spice and 1/2 of one ancho. Rack the cinnastick, remaining anchos and cocoa into secondary.

BTW these value are from recipes I have seen and the one's I referenced to create my last porter and are by no means solid but seem like a decent direction. I also was curious about Oatmeal for a better mouthfeel and perhaps vanilla... maybe even bourbon?

Thoughts???

Any feed back would be great - I wanna brew this in 2-3 weeks to drink between halloween and thanksgiving!

Cheers!!!!!

Are you planning on using dried chilis for this? If so, then just two isn't going to cut it. I made a chocolate pepper porter a while back and used three dried ancho chilis, and the heat is barely noticeable until it gets to the back of your tongue, and even then it's quite mild.

If it was me I'd add mo chilli to it maybe ancho or jalapeño but ancho will give it more of a smoky flavor but I can tell you from experience that you are going to need more then 2 in a 5 gallon brew I got very little flavor our of 6 added to a brew I also suggest maybe grilling them to get more of the smoky taste.

I am using dried anchos, or at least plan on it. I want something similar to the flavor of a mexican hot chocolate with pumpkin spice for the holiday. I certainly don't want fire but I don't expect that from anchos anyway. If I were to go with 6 how do you split them between boil and racking? or do you?

Szimdars said:

Dried anchos, yes. That's good feedback. I certainly don't want a spicy beer. I want more smoke and flavor, should I go 4 but all in the secondary?

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If you're looking for smoke and flavor, maybe a mix of ancho and chipotle? You'd get a bit more heat (but not overpoweringly so) and a lot more smoke and flavor.

For my recipe, I'm looking more for heat than flavor from the chilis, so I'll be trying a mix of serrano and ancho chilis next time.

Oh that sounds great mixing chipotle and ancho chill is (ok after 5 retypes you win iPad) one thing like to do when grilling peppers is grill them inside of themselves I.e. Stuff a ancho full of jalapeño or haenaro then grill it.

Any words of wisdom toward the hops schedule or pumpkin and spice?

Looking at your recipe, it seems there's a lot going on and a few bits are a little heavy handed (ex. cacao).

IMHO, I'd use a bittering hop addition only and (ditch the two late additions) so that the flavors you're trying to feature come through.

I also wonder how the pumpkin pie spice will play with everything else.

Szimdars said:

Any words of wisdom toward the hops schedule or pumpkin and spice?

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Maybe include a more florally hop like hallertau or saaz, another then that I like the sound of this only thing i might change is adding some clove but be cautious as clove can vey easily way overpower a beer.

So I've looked at this advice and looked through what some others are doing and also reassessed the spice use and freshness. Here is what I am going to roll with, I think...

1# Light LME
5# Dark LME

1/2 # crystal
1/2# Chocolate Malt
1/2# British Pale Chocolate
1/4# Black malt
1/4# Smoked Malt

1oz Hallertau Hops 60 minutes
1/2oz Magnum Hops 60 minutes

White Labs California Ale yeast


*steeped and carried through boil
3-4# pumpkin roasted/quartered/peeled


*racked into secondary*
4 oz cocoa nibs
4 medium dried anchos
1 cinnamon stick
1 whole nutmeg
2 whole allspice berries

Be sure to let us know how this turns out!

Certainly. One last request for advice where do you get out of season (pumpkin) ingredients so you brews can be appropriate for the season?!?!

Ancho/habanero is an awesome combination. 1 habanero and 4 ancho sounds good to me. Chipotle should be good too, haven't tried that combo but I like the sound of it.

anyone know how to convert this to all grain??? sounds interesting

I hope this turns out great for you, I really do, but personally I don't care for porters or pumpkin and I think it sounds like a waste of ingredients.
Good luck with it and please post the end result.

I did a chocolate chipolte stout that has turned out amazing (if not HOT)

7.50 lb Pale Malt, Maris Otter
1.00 lb Caramel/Crystal Malt - 60L
1.00 lb Munich Malt - 10L
1.00 lb Roasted Barley
0.75 lb Chocolate Malt
0.50 lb Barley, Flaked
0.50 lb Oats, Flaked
17 oz Lactose
1 oz saaz - 60 minute
1 oz williamette - 45 minute
4 oz cocoa powder - flamout (would not recommend as it is still murky due to this)

Primary fermented for 4 weeks

secondary over cocoa nibs and added dried chili concoction to secondary (added dried habanero (2) and chipolte (3) and ancho (3) to everclear overnight, poured resulting liquid forever to be called firewater in).

ended up pouring too much (1 cup) firewater in....so now it sits in the corner being punished until it learns to play well with others. (6 months in waiting so far for the heat to subside) Next time I will cut liquid down to 1/2 cup maybe less.....yeah it's spicy!!!!!

subscribed, very interested in this.

Yeah I certainly want to know how this turns out and am certainly interested in what your pepper bill is.

Szimdars said:

Certainly. One last request for advice where do you get out of season (pumpkin) ingredients so you brews can be appropriate for the season?!?!

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There have been a number of pumpkin discussions lately. I believe in terms of a canned answer to your question, a number of people use Libby's canned pumpkin.

It might be a good idea with all that heat, to warm the pumpkin in a sauté pan and add spices to the pumpkin before adding it to the boil. This will help even the heat and still allow the fall spices to come through, in addition to what your adding to your kettle.

StoutattheDevil said:

It might be a good idea with all that heat, to warm the pumpkin in a sauté pan and add spices to the pumpkin before adding it to the boil. This will help even the heat and still allow the fall spices to come through, in addition to what your adding to your kettle.

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I don't think you want to boil the spices for that long.

bovineblitz said:

I don't think you want to boil the spices for that long.

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Yeah you'll get more flavor adding them to the secondary in my opinion

I am looking for less heat so I think I may avoid the extra chilis, but theat could be a future variation if you want to go that route. I feel as though some smoked malts with the addition of chipotles should do very well.

Also giving it some thought, I will likely use ~2/3 cup of bourbon to soak/sanitiza my chilis and spices and toss the whole kittenkiboodle in, liquor and all into my secondary.

I will certainly keep everyone posted, and give a cleaned up play by play after I organize all of my feedback; I plan on brewing 8/22-ish.





****Further Question is Libby's the preferred brand of pumpkin pulp? and if unavailable what dop you look for to avoid contamination of preservatives from the canning process etc?

****If using pulp and not pumpkin from scratch, does the procedure change? I assume there is a volume adjustment but how do you filter out the 'nasties' from the boiled grainy pumpkin flesh? I am imagining thickness like pulpy orange juice, and though I like cloudy beer I don't like chewable beer. ..... Thoughts?

So any word yet on how this went!

Sorry to everyone subscribed, took a while to get everything in order to move on this. There ended up being variations once again, hashing out practicalities of everything but brewed this yesterday and it already smells, looks, and tastes awesome.The pumpkin spice porter which went into the primary tastes like pumpkin pie and is black, the foam which formed is burnt orange and it is incredibly aromatic.

Anywho, so I made my own pumpkin pie spice with ginger, allspice, cinnamon, and nutmeg 2.5 heaping tablespoons in the boil following a schedule of 1-60m, 1-30m, .5-5min. I used 45 oz of pure organic pumpkin puree (in lieu of Libby's and purchased from central market).

We plan to keep this in the primary for 7 days, and rack to the primary for 14 days, the age in bottles for quite some time; tentative sampling date of halloween and probably drink some for thanksgiving and christmas and stock the rest for next year.

For the 5.25GAL batch, I have 14oz of Jim Beam kentucky Straight Bourbon steeping 8oz of hickory smoking chips, two cinnamon sticks and 3 ancho chilis; all but the chips (including the liquor will go into the secondary)

The OG is 1.056.


So here we go, I'll get pix when the time comes and possibly get the recipe on here too.

This has turned out to be DELICIOUS and a favorite from everyone. Thanks for the imput!

Hello All - Under a new alias since I lost my password and let that other email address go by the wayside but I wanted to revive this thread and update for 2012.

So taste notes on the 2011 Gourd Almighty - Ancho-Smoked Pumpkin Pie Porter after drinking my final bottle of reserve the other day:
- The maltiness and body has subsided through aging to become a bit dry and thin, not great for style
- Flavor is even better: pumpkin is still a *bit* muted for my tastes but for more prevelant than it originally was
- The heat is there on the back palate but barely, rather there was a pleasant smoky peppery flavor at the end and dissolves into lingering ginger and pumpkin
- The pie spice though balanced seemed to linger with dryness - I can only attribute this to ground spice and no crash chilling to remove it all, biggest complaint.
- Everyone else seemed far less critical and really enjoyed it.

That being said I have already got my 2012 AG version in the primary fermenter and am posting a thread about that below and I believe ai have nailed the issues to hone it in a bit better. Please feel free to jump in there as well though it may be too late for my personal adjustments, I think I can give a vote of confidence to all who were interested and say that - Yes, the flavors overall played very well together. This time I will make sure to get pics beginning secondary transfer, etc.... PROSIT!

New Thread: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f36/ancho-pumpkin-pie-imperial-porter-ag-2012-a-359930/#post4483366

This year I doubled the pumpkin and dialed back the spices some but I'm interested to hear how yours turns out

It was pretty awesome. This year I actually upped the spices but only as a secondary addition. I have also added lactose and more pumpkin so it should have much more depth.

In reading some threads about brewing with ancho chilies, I can across yours re: Spiced Pumkin Porter. How did the final recipe you posted back on 8/10/11 come out (if you can remember back that far)? Any chages since then? Thanks

It did really well; it was an immature and perhaps over-zealous attempt at a fairly complex beer for my early stages of brewing but it was a fan favorite. I think due to inconsistent conditioning temperatures and perhaps too much conditioning sugars in the bottles it aged to be thin and have a lingering taste of dry spices.

I am prepping (late in the game for 2013, I know) to brew this likely next weekend (or the next) in a third itteration and I think I may scale back the dry spices and adjuncts to let the yeast do some real talking. I am mulling around with some simplifications as well as some more complexity to the brewing process ( why not go both ways ).

here is a link to the 2nd gen post: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f36/ancho-pumpkin-pie-imperial-porter-ag-2012-a-359930/#post4483366

I have one more bottle of this one but won't open that in time for a side-by-side but I will be able to make some assumptions based on other long-aged homebrews and thier recipe assessments.

This year, I am looking at using a Saision yeast; with the adjuncts I will be using 3 Large whole (seeds but no stems) anchos soaked in (home-infused)pumpkin spiced bourbon ~48hours with 6ish vanilla beans, 60 ounces of pumpkin (10 first wort and 15ish for each of the first ten minutes of the boil). Using the lactose really made it a bigass chewy beer and the goal is to simulate a smoked pumpkin pie or a spiced mexican hot chocolate. we shall see what develops and I can revive this for anyone interested.

Here is the 2013 edition, brewed yesterday:



Recipe Specifications
--------------------------
Boil Size: 7.25 gal
Post Boil Volume: 5.25 gal
Batch Size (fermenter): 5.25 gal
Bottling Volume: 4.5 gal
Estimated OG: 1.074 SG
Estimated Color: 34.7 SRM
Estimated IBU: 25.7 IBUs
Estimated ABV: 8.9%
Brewhouse Efficiency: 67.9 %
Boil Time: 90 Minutes

Ingredients:
------------
Amt Name Type # %/IBU
8 lbs 4.0 oz Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM) Grain 1 66.7 %
1 lbs Oats, Flaked (1.0 SRM) Grain 2 8.1 %
8.0 oz Roasted Barley (300.0 SRM) Grain 3 4.0 %
8.0 oz Caramel/Crystal Malt - 40L (40.0 SRM) Grain 4 2.0 %
4.0 oz Chocolate Malt (350.0 SRM) Grain 5 2.0 %
2.0 oz Smoked Malt (9.0 SRM) Grain 6 1.0 %
0.25 oz Newport [16.30 %] - First Wort 90.0 min Hop 7 15.2 IBUs
1 lbs Candi Sugar, Dark (275.0 SRM) Sugar 8 8.1 %
0.25 oz Mt. Hood [6.80 %] - Boil 60.0 min Hop 9 5.9 IBUs
0.25 oz Mt. Hood [6.80 %] - Boil 30.0 min Hop 10 4.6 IBUs
2.00 Items Whirlfloc Tablet (Boil 15.0 mins) Fining 11 -
1 lbs Milk Sugar (Lactose) [Boil for 15 min](0 Sugar 12 8.1 %
1.0 pkg Belgian Strong Ale Yeast (White Labs #WL Yeast 13 -
3 tsp Yeast Nutrient (Primary 3.0 days) Other 14 -
60 ounces Libby's Pure Pumpkin Other
1 ounce Fresh Grated Ginger
1 whole Nutmeg, Fresh Grated
8x Vanilla beans
3x Cinnamon Sticks
2 ounces Ancho Chilis
10 ounces Bourbon


---------------------------
Name Step Temperat Step Time
Mash In 153.1 F 60 min
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