adding canned pumpkin? When?

[Morrey]

I still have trouble finding that pumpkin flavor in pumpkin beers after going to all that trouble.

I tried New Belgium's "Atomic Pumpkin" and it was interesting. Has a pretty nice back burn with some mild heat, plus cinnamon kicks it up a notch.

After talking in detail with Sweetwater and NB brewers, the general consensus is the use of high quality concentrates in most of their standard or what I call 6 pack beers. The barrel aged beers or sours are obviously different as they are racked on real fruit, but the $15 dollar per bottle cost justifies that.

I think I'll look around and see if any companies like Monin make a high quality natural pumpkin concentrate.

 

[Kassad]

I think once you add some pumpkin spice you may as well skip the pumpkin puree. As has been said before most people associate pumpkin with the spice used in pumpkin pie. The pumpkin itself has a very subtle flavor.

For a 5 gallon batch I used 5 cans (75 oz) of puree, oven toasted for an hour and a half with turning, until slightly brownish. Nice aroma! It takes forever to evaporate all that water before it starts toasting. Added it to the mash from the start, with 10 oz of rice hulls and the resulting wort was beautiful orange, with an ever so slight pumpkin flavor.

Boiled, added some hops. At flameout I added 1 Tbsp of pumpkin spice mix from the Amish market. That was waaay too much! All I could taste in the resulting beer was that darn spice. It took a year of conditioning in a keg, stored in my utility room at ambient temps ~70-75F, to become drinkable, at least for me. By the time the keg kicked, ~6 months later, it started to taste really good, most of the spice had faded, nicely blended in, and surprisingly the pumpkin flavor had returned, however so subtle. The color and mouthfeel were beautiful!

Notes for next time:
Use more pumpkin, use way less spice mix, maybe 1/2 a tsp, you can always add more if needed, and count on aging for 6-12 months.

The only commercial Pumpkin ale I've had that I liked was from New Belgium, a few years ago. It had a subtle spice flavor and I would bet I could taste the pumpkin. They must use some sort of flavor concentrate, as I would doubt they mash a metric ton of pumpkin puree.

Have you had Schlafly's Pumpkin Ale...
Hands down the best I've had.

 

[IslandLizard]

Have you had Schlafly's Pumpkin Ale...
Hands down the best I've had.

No, I don't recall I have. I'll look for it, 'tis the season.

I find Southern Tier's Pumpking OK, has a nice mouthfeel, but still not something I would drink a lot. Maybe once a year when sitting outside with a bucket of candy...

While we're on spiced beers, Southern Tier's 2xMas is the most vile beer I've ever tasted, extremely medicinal. Much worse than cough syrup. Now Great Lakes' Christmas Ale is quite appetizing, but seems to fluctuate quite a bit from year to year. Thirsty Dog's 12 Dogs of Christmas Ale is not nearly as good, although from what I've heard they've got the original Great Lakes head brewer and recipe.