So I tried something a bit off-the-wall and it actually worked out. I wanted to brew something for my wife, who hates beer and dry cider. She says "Well, in Harry Potter they're always drinking pumpkin juice, and Halloween is coming, so how about that?" The trick was, in order for her to actually like it I had to make it both sweet and fizzy. Here's my quick and dirty recipe.
How To Pumpkin Your "Juice":
Ingredients for pumpkin mixture:
Two 15 oz. cans of natural pumpkin (lists only pumpkin in the ingredients)
3 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger
3/4 tsp allspice
1 clove, ground
6 oz. light brown sugar
Mix ingredients, spread on parchment in a sheet pan, bake for 20 minutes at 350F. Allow to cool.
Place the pumpkin mixture in your brewing bucket or carboy with 5 gallons of nothing-special store bought apple cider (I used Treetop brand, and it worked fine). As long as you sanitize well there's no need to boil the cider. It's already pasteurized. Mix well and add a packet of rehydrated Nottingham yeast. Ferment at 68F.
Once your airlock bubbles slow to about one bubble every 7 seconds (about 5 days for me) it's time to rack to secondary. Make another batch of the pumpkin mix with the addition of 1 oz. of granulated Splenda and rack the contents of your fermenter onto it. Add 1 oz. of oak chips. Allow to sit at 68F for two days and then bottle.
In order to decide when to pasteurize the bottles I used the following method. I bought two plastic 16 oz. bottles of soda and drank one, then filled the empty bottle while doing the rest of my bottling. With this I could tell by feel when the pumpkin "juice" had pressurized to the same as the soda bottle (this took about a week for me but results may vary).
At this point I pasteurized the bottles using the method laid out in the sticky post on this forum, then I let the bottles settle for about 3 days.
I have to say, the result was better than I expected. I ended up with a hazy bright orange beverage with a definite pumpkin dominant flavor. It was moderately sweet and quite fizzy, but it produced no head at all. I estimated an ABV of about 6%, but it was hard to gauge with the late additions of sugars and the unknown quantity of sugar in the pumpkin. Either way, it turned out to be popular. I've gotten nothing but good reviews on it.
How To Pumpkin Your "Juice":
Ingredients for pumpkin mixture:
Two 15 oz. cans of natural pumpkin (lists only pumpkin in the ingredients)
3 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger
3/4 tsp allspice
1 clove, ground
6 oz. light brown sugar
Mix ingredients, spread on parchment in a sheet pan, bake for 20 minutes at 350F. Allow to cool.
Place the pumpkin mixture in your brewing bucket or carboy with 5 gallons of nothing-special store bought apple cider (I used Treetop brand, and it worked fine). As long as you sanitize well there's no need to boil the cider. It's already pasteurized. Mix well and add a packet of rehydrated Nottingham yeast. Ferment at 68F.
Once your airlock bubbles slow to about one bubble every 7 seconds (about 5 days for me) it's time to rack to secondary. Make another batch of the pumpkin mix with the addition of 1 oz. of granulated Splenda and rack the contents of your fermenter onto it. Add 1 oz. of oak chips. Allow to sit at 68F for two days and then bottle.
In order to decide when to pasteurize the bottles I used the following method. I bought two plastic 16 oz. bottles of soda and drank one, then filled the empty bottle while doing the rest of my bottling. With this I could tell by feel when the pumpkin "juice" had pressurized to the same as the soda bottle (this took about a week for me but results may vary).
At this point I pasteurized the bottles using the method laid out in the sticky post on this forum, then I let the bottles settle for about 3 days.
I have to say, the result was better than I expected. I ended up with a hazy bright orange beverage with a definite pumpkin dominant flavor. It was moderately sweet and quite fizzy, but it produced no head at all. I estimated an ABV of about 6%, but it was hard to gauge with the late additions of sugars and the unknown quantity of sugar in the pumpkin. Either way, it turned out to be popular. I've gotten nothing but good reviews on it.
