Pumpkin ale first all grain adventure. Maybe i should have chose something else? Hodge podge recipe, i took stuff off different sites and books that i thought looked good.
Day after Brewday comments:
Cleaning
This s- took me roughly 11 hours from clean to ferment. Went fairly well started out cleaning everything with regular dawn and sanitizing with 1gal water to 1 tablespoon bleach for roughly thirty minutes. This included fermenter, lid, spoon, wisk, airlock and the brew pot for no reason at all.
The Pumpkins
We found two pumpkins at the farmers market(literally the only two pumpkins they had). they were average sized pumpkins one of which was green so i dont know how that will effect the taste. I popped the stem out and cut them in half then pulled the guts out and cleaned it well with spoon. We baked them for 1 hr. 30 min. at 375 directly on the rack. Cleaned out the skin. The pumpkin we got out was very stringy im not sure if the pumpkins were immature or thats just the way it goes but the pictures of other pumpkin ale pumpkin seemed to be of a thicker consistency. We later stored them in the fridge while i brewed so they wouldnt spoil. We added the pumpkin to the boil pot at 60min. It smelled great we ended up having around 7 or 8 lbs. of raw pumpkin to throw in the boil pot.
The Grain
We used 9 lbs. Briess 2 row brewer malt (mild malty, L 1.8), .5 lbs. Briess white wheat malt (sweet, malty wheat, floury, L 2.5), and .5 lbs. Muntons crushed crystal malt (sweet, pronounced caramel L60). That being said i didnt exactly know what i was looking for nor did I pay much attention to anything other then " we need 2 row, oh that says two row and we need crystal malt, oh that has the words crystal malt on it." So i do not know if those crushed crystal grains were meant for steeping, but i just added them to the rest of the mash. I started out thinking i was goin to use the ole rolling pin and plastic baggy mehthod then I realized that might take five weeks, then i decided to try and use my moms 120 year old grinder and that may have taken five hours on its own. So my genius gfwalked in and said just try the blender. I must say i thought that it worked fairly well. It wasnt perfect i just pulsed the grain a couple of times and then stirred it with a spatula and pulsed somemore. It was a little fine but i figured fine is better then big. I grinded everything but the crystal malt because that was already crushed. Another thing I now look back on is the vast difference in L degrees. I don't know if that means anything or not I just figured that all of the tastes the package described sounded pretty good to me for a pumpkin ale.
The Spices:
I rounded up all my spices pre brew; 2 lbs. brown sugar, a titch of cloves, around 2 tablespoon cinammon, some nutmeg, and a couple tablespoons of vanilla. i wasnt exact with this s- because, other then the brown sugar, it didnt seem like there was much of it anyways. I added the spice at 60 minutes of the boil. The smell was amazing. Next time i might add some more spice, but we must see how it tastes on the back end.
Hops and Adjunct
1oz. mt hood 60 min, .5 oz cascade and irish moss at 15 min. I knew i didnt want the pumpkin ale to be too hoppy because the star of the show is the pumpkin and spice, but i did still want it to taste like beer. When i first threw in the mt hood i took a sniff and worried a little that there wasnt much to those hops. then i opened the cascade and thought ok this is what im talking about. Nice hoppy smell and it appeared to bring the wort to a good beer aroma. But I really dont know s- yet so it might still taste like pumpkin sugar water. Oh yeah and the irish moss smelled like irish nut sack.
The Yeast
Wyeast 1272 american ale II. I got f-ed up friday night and forgot to pop the smack pack. I had planned on giving the smack pack about twenty four hours to get its freak on, but s- happens. So i woke up about ten the next day and wacked it then ( not my wiener). I pitched at about ten pm so i had a good twelve hours and that thing was ready to blow after about 4 or 5. The package says it only takes three hours, but stupid me got on the internet and looked at what all the "experts" had to say about it. So in short id like to keep it around 10 to 12 hours but 4 or 5 appears fine in a pinch.
Strike Water
First off I broke my awesome digital probe thermometer when i was cleaning stuff downstairs and accidentally wet down the digital read out part. So my old lady ran up and got me a meat thermometer digital deal and i almost melted that one too. I heated water to 170 just like i planned on the propane stove outside. I did use tap water dun dun dun (it worked with my last batch, stl best water 2008)
Mash In
What a nightmare. So I am staring at my mashtun that i had just made yesterday. It was a five gallon rubbermaid type deal from home depot. I keep thinking its too small i need a bigger one. ole girl says well that huge green coller is ours. I start f-ing with it and we can't get the spicket out the side. We were beating on the thing with a hammer, trying to pry with screw driver and vice grips. finally we get it through. I go to put the filter in and the tee needs to be oriented north south instead of east west. So i start to take the fittings apart and find i can't get the damn spicket off the brass nipple and vice versa with the tee. It took 25-30 minutes of cursing and f-ing with it until i finally got that s-t together to find we cracked the cooler a tad and there was a small leak. well at the end of the story it did work and the leak was extremely minute. we mashed in at 170 added our grain and stirred. the temp came down slowly to 158. We let sit for one hour. I was a bit nervous about the fine grain chop i had. The first run off was very polluted, but the second run off was crystal clear. We did a third for good measure. We had one stuck sparge. Kate stirred it up a bit (dont know if youre supposed to do that) and everything started flowing as usual. We heated our sparge to about 160 while we waited the last thirty minutes of mash. I was initally worried about the leak but the malt actually plugged up the minute hole. Also when the flow slowed we put something underneath the bottom of the backside of the tun to try to get more pressure. Lesson learned dont do that the grain shifts with the water, duh. We only sparged about 2 gallons on the grain bed. Ending with a around five and a half gallons.
The Boil
We collected our wort in the boil kettle and cranked up the juice on the Propane. We had a couple boil overs. After i got the hang of it I kept a watchful eye and medium heat and we were good. Added all of our pumpkin, spice, hops, moss and ****ty wort chiller to boil. The beer smelled amazing I cant emphasize that enough. the only concern is that we kept the boil very low because the wort level was closely approachign 6 gallons and we didnt have much room for error so i dont know if that will make a difference. After the boil we used a fine strainer to take out most of the big chunks of pumpkin again it was stringy so it wasnt easy.
The Chill
The chill did not go well. It took a little over an hour so we may have some cloudy beer. i used my shiny new wort chiller that i constructe, a twenty lb. bag of ice, filled the tub with water, and also used the drain end of the chiller to try and cool the upper edge of the outside of the pot. I dont know if its because i only used 20 ft. of copper or not enough ice or maybe even the fact that i covered with foil which i later removed towards the end to get the ***** to cool down but i do need to figure something out especially if i want a nice clear lager. I May possibly try removing everythign from the fridge and use the chiler and all that crap. Very dissapointed in the wort chiller. Oh yeah and i dropped the freaking hydrometer and beaker and broke them so i never got an og. Which really sucks id like to know that oh well.
Pitching:
I pitched the yeast around 78 becaus i was tired of waiting on my flawed chilling attempts. Before pitching i wisked the wort for about a minute. I dropped the yeast in and hoped for the best.
Fermenter
I use my ail pale or whatever the f- its called. I did forget one thing from the last brew. the rubber stopper where the airlock is inserted has a wierd like defect on it and i need to get it replaced. Currently im nervously wondering if this f-ed up stopper will f- up my beer. i put water in my airlock up to the line and some of it started to go into the beer woops. i filled it again and more want in woops again. next time i need to get the pale in the spot i want it and then put the lid together with the airlock on and when its stationary fill the airlock.
Closing Thoughts
Frustrating at times, but i really did have fun. i just hope it turns out well*captain obvious*. The plan is to primary ferment for about eight days. Then begin secondary (8/27) for 10-14 days. where we will begin bottling (9/10 or 9/11 take that osama) with 2/3 sugar boiled and allow to condition for 2 weeks. Then drink on 10/1. I am also still debating on whether i will add some spice (cinnamon sticks, cloves, vanilla, nutmeg) during secondary. Now I am currently trying to find something good to brew for winter/christmas.
Day after Brewday comments:
Cleaning
This s- took me roughly 11 hours from clean to ferment. Went fairly well started out cleaning everything with regular dawn and sanitizing with 1gal water to 1 tablespoon bleach for roughly thirty minutes. This included fermenter, lid, spoon, wisk, airlock and the brew pot for no reason at all.
The Pumpkins
We found two pumpkins at the farmers market(literally the only two pumpkins they had). they were average sized pumpkins one of which was green so i dont know how that will effect the taste. I popped the stem out and cut them in half then pulled the guts out and cleaned it well with spoon. We baked them for 1 hr. 30 min. at 375 directly on the rack. Cleaned out the skin. The pumpkin we got out was very stringy im not sure if the pumpkins were immature or thats just the way it goes but the pictures of other pumpkin ale pumpkin seemed to be of a thicker consistency. We later stored them in the fridge while i brewed so they wouldnt spoil. We added the pumpkin to the boil pot at 60min. It smelled great we ended up having around 7 or 8 lbs. of raw pumpkin to throw in the boil pot.
The Grain
We used 9 lbs. Briess 2 row brewer malt (mild malty, L 1.8), .5 lbs. Briess white wheat malt (sweet, malty wheat, floury, L 2.5), and .5 lbs. Muntons crushed crystal malt (sweet, pronounced caramel L60). That being said i didnt exactly know what i was looking for nor did I pay much attention to anything other then " we need 2 row, oh that says two row and we need crystal malt, oh that has the words crystal malt on it." So i do not know if those crushed crystal grains were meant for steeping, but i just added them to the rest of the mash. I started out thinking i was goin to use the ole rolling pin and plastic baggy mehthod then I realized that might take five weeks, then i decided to try and use my moms 120 year old grinder and that may have taken five hours on its own. So my genius gfwalked in and said just try the blender. I must say i thought that it worked fairly well. It wasnt perfect i just pulsed the grain a couple of times and then stirred it with a spatula and pulsed somemore. It was a little fine but i figured fine is better then big. I grinded everything but the crystal malt because that was already crushed. Another thing I now look back on is the vast difference in L degrees. I don't know if that means anything or not I just figured that all of the tastes the package described sounded pretty good to me for a pumpkin ale.
The Spices:
I rounded up all my spices pre brew; 2 lbs. brown sugar, a titch of cloves, around 2 tablespoon cinammon, some nutmeg, and a couple tablespoons of vanilla. i wasnt exact with this s- because, other then the brown sugar, it didnt seem like there was much of it anyways. I added the spice at 60 minutes of the boil. The smell was amazing. Next time i might add some more spice, but we must see how it tastes on the back end.
Hops and Adjunct
1oz. mt hood 60 min, .5 oz cascade and irish moss at 15 min. I knew i didnt want the pumpkin ale to be too hoppy because the star of the show is the pumpkin and spice, but i did still want it to taste like beer. When i first threw in the mt hood i took a sniff and worried a little that there wasnt much to those hops. then i opened the cascade and thought ok this is what im talking about. Nice hoppy smell and it appeared to bring the wort to a good beer aroma. But I really dont know s- yet so it might still taste like pumpkin sugar water. Oh yeah and the irish moss smelled like irish nut sack.
The Yeast
Wyeast 1272 american ale II. I got f-ed up friday night and forgot to pop the smack pack. I had planned on giving the smack pack about twenty four hours to get its freak on, but s- happens. So i woke up about ten the next day and wacked it then ( not my wiener). I pitched at about ten pm so i had a good twelve hours and that thing was ready to blow after about 4 or 5. The package says it only takes three hours, but stupid me got on the internet and looked at what all the "experts" had to say about it. So in short id like to keep it around 10 to 12 hours but 4 or 5 appears fine in a pinch.
Strike Water
First off I broke my awesome digital probe thermometer when i was cleaning stuff downstairs and accidentally wet down the digital read out part. So my old lady ran up and got me a meat thermometer digital deal and i almost melted that one too. I heated water to 170 just like i planned on the propane stove outside. I did use tap water dun dun dun (it worked with my last batch, stl best water 2008)
Mash In
What a nightmare. So I am staring at my mashtun that i had just made yesterday. It was a five gallon rubbermaid type deal from home depot. I keep thinking its too small i need a bigger one. ole girl says well that huge green coller is ours. I start f-ing with it and we can't get the spicket out the side. We were beating on the thing with a hammer, trying to pry with screw driver and vice grips. finally we get it through. I go to put the filter in and the tee needs to be oriented north south instead of east west. So i start to take the fittings apart and find i can't get the damn spicket off the brass nipple and vice versa with the tee. It took 25-30 minutes of cursing and f-ing with it until i finally got that s-t together to find we cracked the cooler a tad and there was a small leak. well at the end of the story it did work and the leak was extremely minute. we mashed in at 170 added our grain and stirred. the temp came down slowly to 158. We let sit for one hour. I was a bit nervous about the fine grain chop i had. The first run off was very polluted, but the second run off was crystal clear. We did a third for good measure. We had one stuck sparge. Kate stirred it up a bit (dont know if youre supposed to do that) and everything started flowing as usual. We heated our sparge to about 160 while we waited the last thirty minutes of mash. I was initally worried about the leak but the malt actually plugged up the minute hole. Also when the flow slowed we put something underneath the bottom of the backside of the tun to try to get more pressure. Lesson learned dont do that the grain shifts with the water, duh. We only sparged about 2 gallons on the grain bed. Ending with a around five and a half gallons.
The Boil
We collected our wort in the boil kettle and cranked up the juice on the Propane. We had a couple boil overs. After i got the hang of it I kept a watchful eye and medium heat and we were good. Added all of our pumpkin, spice, hops, moss and ****ty wort chiller to boil. The beer smelled amazing I cant emphasize that enough. the only concern is that we kept the boil very low because the wort level was closely approachign 6 gallons and we didnt have much room for error so i dont know if that will make a difference. After the boil we used a fine strainer to take out most of the big chunks of pumpkin again it was stringy so it wasnt easy.
The Chill
The chill did not go well. It took a little over an hour so we may have some cloudy beer. i used my shiny new wort chiller that i constructe, a twenty lb. bag of ice, filled the tub with water, and also used the drain end of the chiller to try and cool the upper edge of the outside of the pot. I dont know if its because i only used 20 ft. of copper or not enough ice or maybe even the fact that i covered with foil which i later removed towards the end to get the ***** to cool down but i do need to figure something out especially if i want a nice clear lager. I May possibly try removing everythign from the fridge and use the chiler and all that crap. Very dissapointed in the wort chiller. Oh yeah and i dropped the freaking hydrometer and beaker and broke them so i never got an og. Which really sucks id like to know that oh well.
Pitching:
I pitched the yeast around 78 becaus i was tired of waiting on my flawed chilling attempts. Before pitching i wisked the wort for about a minute. I dropped the yeast in and hoped for the best.
Fermenter
I use my ail pale or whatever the f- its called. I did forget one thing from the last brew. the rubber stopper where the airlock is inserted has a wierd like defect on it and i need to get it replaced. Currently im nervously wondering if this f-ed up stopper will f- up my beer. i put water in my airlock up to the line and some of it started to go into the beer woops. i filled it again and more want in woops again. next time i need to get the pale in the spot i want it and then put the lid together with the airlock on and when its stationary fill the airlock.
Closing Thoughts
Frustrating at times, but i really did have fun. i just hope it turns out well*captain obvious*. The plan is to primary ferment for about eight days. Then begin secondary (8/27) for 10-14 days. where we will begin bottling (9/10 or 9/11 take that osama) with 2/3 sugar boiled and allow to condition for 2 weeks. Then drink on 10/1. I am also still debating on whether i will add some spice (cinnamon sticks, cloves, vanilla, nutmeg) during secondary. Now I am currently trying to find something good to brew for winter/christmas.
