Pumpkin Beer

My friend and I are wanting to brew a pumpkin beer. Often times during this time of year coffee stands will have a pumpkin flavored drink from a syrup they use. Is there anything wrong with using a pumpkin flavored syrup like that during the boil? It would give all the flavor of the pumpkin spice we would be going for and the sugars would ferment out during the fermentation process right?

Any advise would help. Thanks

I've never tried it, but I don't think there'd be anything wrong with using it. It would more than likely give you that strong pumpkin pie flavor as opposed to more subtle pumpkin and spiced flavors, but that's just a matter of preference. I do love me some pumpkin pie.

I'd say it'd be a safe bet to just go for it. The hard part is figuring how much to put in to keep it from being overpowering and still having some good beer flavors to it.

Why not use the syrup in place of the priming sugar when you bottle?

Pennsyltucky said:

Why not use the syrup in place of the priming sugar when you bottle?

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Is there enough sugar in it to use for carbonation? I don't know the syrup in question but you might end up having to add an awful lot of it to get enough sugar for the carbonation. My biggest worry there would be you end up with a beer that tastes like fizzy pumpkin syrup.

I don't know... That stuff seems like flavored corn syrup, but I've never looked into it. It seemed like an option worth considering; to use the product and retain the most of the flavor.

Edit: just stopped in the local convenience store... the only flavor that wasn't sugar free was honey... it contained 20g of sugar (corn syrup) per ounce. Other ingredients were water, honey, and some chemical preservatives. Biggest problem I see is the preservatives interfering with what little healthy yeast is left.

Just throw a can of pumpkin in during the last 15 minutes of the boil.