Pumpkin = PITA

Man, I was expecting a slow sparge, but holy crap! Brewing a scaled 5 gallon version of Yuri's Thunderstruck recipe and having nothing but issues. Recipe uses 60 oz of pumpkin, and I used 1 lb of rice hulls to try to avoid the stuck sparge problems people reported. Well, I've had to dump and reset the grain bed twice already and have only collected about 2 gallons. Using a false bottom in a cooler for a MLT, and when I dump and reset, the last 3 inches or so in the bottom are just one big mass. Hmmm, runoff just stopped again, time to dump and reset the grain bed a 3rd time!

I brewed a recipe with 60oz a couple weeks ago and had no such problems. Do you condition your malt? This, along with 1/2# rice hulls, made my sparge only slightly slower than normal. Maybe i just got lucky.

Interesting. Wonder what the difference is, especially since I used a full pound of rice hulls. I don't condition my malt. I get it milled at my LHBS.

Probably has more to do with how much water is flowing around in there, as well as your draw-off rate, and a handful of other things. Why use pumpkin anyway? Of course it's going to make a mess.

I used the pumpkin because I've had pumpkin beers made without it, and I think it definitely adds to the character of the beer. At any rate, the interesting thing is that all the dumping and resetting seems to have helped my efficiency by about 5% (that was the only difference in my process from normal) Wondering if that says something about my normal fly sparge method. Took longer than normal, but it's bubbling away in the fermenter this morning.

I've posted on a few forums, countless times that you can just put cans of pumpkin directly into the fermenter and rack the wort ontop of it, straight out of the kettle. It works great and solves this slow/stuck runoff issue.

Did you use canned pumpkin or fresh? I assume canned because you said 60oz and well that's what the recipe uses. Eitherway I just recently did a recipe with 60oz but I ended up with a sparge that was just fine. Of course I did all my grain infusion first then I plopped the pumpkin on top the mash. I roughly mixed it in the top half of the grain and it worked perfectly. I will be doing another batch soon I do believe.

I just did a pumpkin beer today but with a different recipe (Samhain). That recipe called for baking the pumpkin for an hour first. It looked real clumpy but this dried out the pumpkin alot. I was worried about a stuck sparge. I added the pumpkin and hot water to my cooler tun (braid) and mixed in the rice hulls real well. I then added grain to that mix as usual. I looked through the pumpkin threads and didn't see this recommendation--figured I'd share FWIW. Sorry to hear about your stuck sparge.

I put 2 large cans of pumpkin in my MLT once, and I will never do that again. It took me about 2 hours to get about 7 gallons collected. Since then, I just don't mash out, I put the pumpkin in my collection pot and drain my wort on top of it. It gets some conversion and I don't have as big of a mess to deal with. It leaves a big mess in my fermenter but I can easily wash that out. This is much easier than dealing the mess in my MLT.

In my case I added 11 lbs of squash to my mash tun along with 1 lb rice hulls and my sparge was smooth as butter. I roasted the squash once when it was in cube form, mashed it up, let it cool overnight in the fridge, then roasted again right before mashing. I batch sparge with a steel braid at about 1.25 qt/lb, it went very well... I get the feeling that canned pumpkin is more 'gooey' and thick. The way I saw it, I may as well work to get the squash meat, I'm doing all the other work anyways. I'll probably try a canned pumpkin eventually to see how it goes.