Back Sweetening Pumpkin Ale

Hey all.... looking for some suggestions.

I brewed a pumpkin ale about 2 weeks ago and took a gravity reading last night. It ended up finishing much lower than I was shooting for (1.002 from 1.060). It's going to get another 2 weeks aging before I keg/bottle it. Anyway, I am going to need to do some damage control and back sweeten to get alittle sweeter beer. What would you all suggest for this style? I was kicking around the idea of lactose, but I don’t really want to end up with a milk pumpkin ale. The only thing I have used lactose in is sweet stouts and they taste milky.... Would it do the same for a pumpkin ale? Is that a bad thing?

I was also thinking about killing off the yeast in about 2 weeks with Camden tablets and using brown sugar to sweeten it up.

I have heard that in some beers, splenda can leave some off flavors, so unless someone can convince me otherwise I was going to avoid that route.

What would you do?

Camdem tablets won't kill off the yeast.

Lactose adds way too much in the way of mouth feel and body imo. The best non-fermentable sugars you're likely to get are malt leftovers (duh) and xylitol. Xylitol isn't great, but it's better than Lactose and Aspartame which just taste awful imo. It's expensive though. This is the easiest way...

If you keg, then backsweetening isn't much of an issue. You need to add K-Sorbate and err, something else - I forget what - to stop yeast reproducing, and even then it's not "dead" and there's a chance of it restarting fermentation, but I've never had an issue with it. Then if you force carb, that should be all good, just make sure it's stirred in properly.

As for bottling, you'll need to bottle it with the sugar and all, then start cracking bottles after a week or two to see how the carb is going. Once it's ready, you'll need to pasteurize the bottles - there's a thread in the cider forum. It's time consuming but it works a treat.

Of course, you could just make a brown sugar solution, keep it in the fridge and add it to the glass when you're pouring. Not great but, meh.

I added about 8oz of lactose and 8oz of maltodextrin to my AHS Pumpkin Ale and it turned out great. Its nice and creamy just like a good pumpkin pie with cool whip. :fro: