pumpkin spice

I made a pumpkin ale and am about to transfer to secondary. I tasted and think it could use some more spices. How should I add to secondary?

Add spices to small amount of water, boil, cool, add slowly. Be careful. It sneaks up on you.

+1

roast a cinnamon stick and drop it hot into the secondary. Taste every 3 days or so.

I added appx 1/2 teaspoon of blended spices to my pumpkin ale with 1 minute in the boil, and now, 11 days into fermentation, added an additional 1/4 tsp loose to the fermenter (per Jamil Z's instructions in BCS). I've read many brewers say they boil their fermenter spice additions in water, or make a spice tea in cheap vodka. I hope by following JZ's instructions and adding the spices loose I haven't introduced infection to my beer.

The boil part here is very important. Early in my brewing days I destroyed a batch by not doing so.

cheezydemon3 said:

roast a cinnamon stick and drop it hot into the secondary. Taste every 3 days or so.

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yum.

Rottnme said:

The boil part here is very important. Early in my brewing days I destroyed a batch by not doing so.

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What happened, Rottnme? Bottle bombs? Gushers? Off flavors?

tonyolympia said:

What happened? Bottle bombs? Gushers? Off flavors?

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I would think infection. You probably want to boil the spices then back down to a steep to try to get the flavors out of them like a tea bag.

Roasting a cinnamon stick properly achieves sanitation. drop in with sanitized tongs, no problem.

After reading this thread, I peaked in at my pumpkin ale (which I added a spice tea to last week) and noticed something worth noting.

I made a spice tea with fresh ground spices. When I added the spice tea, I decided to just dump it all in, spices and all. When I opened the bucket today, I saw that the spices had gooped up and floated to the top.

Now, it's not a big deal really. I can siphon around it no problem. But it's worth noting that adding the ground spices along with the spice tea may not be the best idea, and I plan to strain the spices out the next time I do this.

Another way of avoiding this of course is to steep whole spices (unground) which wouldn't goop up in the fermenter.

cheezydemon3 said:

Roasting a cinnamon stick properly achieves sanitation. drop in with sanitized tongs, no problem.

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Well, I've already added my unsanitized spices loose to the fermenter, so what do you think my odds are of escaping infection?

My research on this question is inconclusive. Although most people recommend some kind of sanitation for spices added post-fermentation, a couple of the online forums have discussion indicating that the alcohol in the fermented beer inhibits infection to a degree that adding loose spices shouldn't cause a problem.

In different articles and recipes, Jamil Zainasheff recommends doing it both ways. As I mentioned above, his pumpkin ale recipe in "Brewing Classic Styles" says to add the second dose of spices loose to the fermenter, so that's what I did. In a BYO article on witbier, he said that contamination can be "a concern" if you add spices dry and loose to fermented beer, especially with a moderately alcoholic beer like witbier. BJCP guidelines allow for 4.5 - 5.5% ABV for witbier; my pumpkin ale has fermented down to 5.5%. Do you think the alcohol level will help me, or is my ale still in the danger zone?

Clearly I'm just fretting at this point, and the real answer probably won't come until my beer has been bottled and conditioned. But any and all opinions on this question would be appreciated.

I added spices directly to my primary and I didn't get an infection.

Paulgs3 said:

I added spices directly to my primary and I didn't get an infection.

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Good to hear.