Souring Pumpkin Sludge?

I started out attempting to made a high gravity porter with a large portion of the fermentables coming from pumpkin. My sparge got stuck, and I still had a lot of pumpkin to use, so I decided to experiment and add it to the boil. What resulted was a nasty sludge of pumpkin goop. It fermented out, but never really settled (as you can see in the picture). I figured the sludge is probably long chains of starch, so I added the dregs of Jester King's Funk Metal (a sour stout with Brett and "souring bacteria").

I figured someone in here will probably know if this is likely to work and could save me from wasting fermenter space for a year if it won't work. Any thoughts?

HA, in all seriousness as long as there was a good amount of yeast/bacteria in the bottle it'll be fine and probably come out awesome.

In the future, though, use a lot of rice hulls... especially if you're trying to use a ton of pumpkin.

I had a similar thing happen with a sour of mine. I made a one gallon test batch of a low-hopped amber ale and racked it onto a couple pounds of persimmons with some JP dregs. They would never settle to the bottom of the fermenter and was a total PITA to rack. The good news is that it was a very good beer (for the four bottles I got).

Well, it's got a nice little pellicle forming now. Hopefully the bugs will eat through some of the sludge. If not, I'll have a long wait for 2-3 bottles...

The moral of this story is: don't put pumpkin purée in your boil to see what happens.

Beernoulli said:

Well, it's got a nice little pellicle forming now. Hopefully the bugs will eat through some of the sludge. If not, I'll have a long wait for 2-3 bottles...

The moral of this story is: don't put pumpkin purée in your boil to see what happens.

Click to expand...

Pics or it didn't happen =)