Another Pumpkin Pale Ale - now in Secondary!

[nutty_gnome]

With inspiration from Yuri's Thunderstruck pumkin beer and some useful information from the Pumpkin Porter recipe from Sam Caligione's book Extreme Brewing, I decided to get going on a pumpkin ale with the following goals:

Goal: Brew it with pumpkin - Achieved
Goal: Use pumpkin spice judiciously - Pending Outcome
Goal: Start with a simple, balanced extract kit - Achieved
Goal: Try a partial mash - Achieved
Goal: Keep it light for the BMCer - Achieved (its not too dark)
Goal: have it ready to drink by holidays, and give 6'ers to esteemed family members. - Pending Outcome

The beginning:
It started when I looked more closely at the Thunderstruck pumpkin recipe.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f76/thunderstruck-pumpkin-ale-ag-extract-versions-26699/

I thought, and posted the following:

This thread has inspired me to do the following:

1. Buy a very mellow english-style pale ale extract kit with steeping grains (willamette bittering hops, fuggles aroma hops)
2. For a 5 gallon batch: Mash one 30-ounce cans of pumpkin with around 2 pounds of 6 row and the kit's steeping grains. Strain everything through a paint strainer and sparge with a bit of hot water.
3. Brew the pale ale kit as a full volume boil using the kit hops.
4. Ferment with dry nottingham.
5. Add the spice tea to secondary as suggested.

Next: A log of what I did.

 

[nutty_gnome]

I decided to start with a pale ale extract kit that I'd used before and liked: Wind River Brewing's Gopher Pale Ale - http://www.windriverbrew.com/lightales.html
The kit includes: 3.3 lbs. Gold malt extract, 3.3 lbs. Amber malt extract, 1/2 lb. Crystal 10°L & 1/2 lb. Carapils grain blend, 1 oz. Willamette bittering hops, 1 oz. Fuggles aroma hops, yeast and priming sugar.

To this basic kit I added:
2 pounds 2 row, crushed
45 oz of libby canned pumpkin, baked
Pumpkin Pie Spices - 1 tbs at 5 mins
Irish Moss
another Danstar Windor Yeast pack

So thats simple enough.

The Extreme Brewing book details how to mash canned pumpkin for the pumpkin porter. I followed that process. I took the following sequential notes/narrative as I did it.

NOTES:
This is my first pumpkin beer. Process was as follows:
1- Take 1.5 cans (30 oz per can) of libby pumpkin. Spread out on tin foil lines baking sheet. Sprinkle pumpkin pie spices lightly on top (1 tsp). Bake 30 mins @ 350, till darker, then ‘rake’ and bake 10 more mins.

2- Take steeping grains, crushed 2 row, and pumpkin and put in 2 gallons of warm water. Bring to around 155 as best you can and keep it there for 55 mins. Tough to do in a stove pot.

3 – Run mashed mixture through sieves to get clear-ish wort from mash. Was sticky and tough to do right. I used the muslin bag over a colander, on top of a triple layer of cheesecloth on the BBQ shrimp colander over a 5 gallon paint strainer bag. In the end, after a frustratingly slow drain, I dumped it all in the paint strainer bag, then took the bag out and dunked it in 1.5 gallons of hot water to sparge. Added hot water to runnings and brought it out to the kettle.

4- Topped off to 6.5 gallons and got kettle up to a boil with the turkey fryer burner. Upon boil I added the liquid malts.

5 – Added hops, started boil. Followed schedule. NOTE – This is not a no-chill. At flameout I stirred for a bit and then left to get 4 bags of ice.

6 – Brought cooling kettle inside and had the first real issue. The 7 gallon pot is too tall to cool 5.5 gallons of wort in the sink. Only bottom half of kettle cooled and top half stayed really hot. Temperature stratification occurred? After 3 hours, I poured it all out into sanitized bucket and covered. Wort temp was in high 80s to low 90s.

7 - I let it sit at room temp for 6 hours and pitched the yeast at 7am on the 10th. 2 packets of dry Danstar Windsor. Primary went into ice bath in basement to keep it cool (in the mid 60s).

Thoughts so far: No chill sure is simpler. I should really get some winpacks and a spigot to make this happen. Also, Irish moss kicked ass and left a nice hop sludge and gunk pile in the kettle.

Sept – 11 Morning using ice to keep it in the 60’s Fermentation is not vigorous but is proceeding. Afternoon review proved more vigorous and temp in the upper 60s.

 

[nutty_gnome]

Time passes, I keep the primary generally cooled to the upper 60's with an ice bath.

Sept – 28th. Moved high-clarity beer to secondary. Smelled good, no pumpkin pie note in the aroma…. I think I’ll need to add a tea of spice to the bottling bucket. Otherwise it looked good. The beer had a thick yeast-trub cake that looked a bit like brown bermuda grass, it was a bunch of separate but coherent rectangular blocks. Closer examination revealed that some pumpkin fiber had been in primary. No big deal though. Racking went well, looks good.

The recommendation for the spice tea comes from the HBT Thunderstruck ale thread:
“During clearing stage, add a spice tea of 1-1/2 tsp "Pumpkin Pie Spice" or Pampered Chef "Cinnamon Plus." Steep spices in 1 cup hot water for 10-15 minutes, cool then add. Consider adding the spice tea a little at a time to achieve the desired flavor profile.”

So thats where I'm at. We'll see in two weeks what needs to be added to the bottling bucket. Maybe I'll just add a tablespoon of spice to the boiled priming sugar/water mixture before it goes into the bucket.

 

[ManyBrews]

my thunderstruck just got bottled....what a disaster!?!

accidentally boiled my steeping grains, threw in extra pound of brown sugar, stupid...way over shot og at 1.07, didn't strain before going into primary, should have used secondary. there's about an inch of pumpkin and yeast on the bottom of each bottle. tasted real sweet and alcoholic. 7% abv. oh man. hope a long wait will do something to this.

yours sounds great. awesome notes.

 

[nutty_gnome]

Wow Manybrews. Thats a bummer.

 

[nutty_gnome]

More time passes.

I bottled this batch on Oct. 24th. Got only 46 bottles, likely this is due to the amount of pumpkin/trub left behind during transfer from primary to secondary.

I tasted the beer prior to priming and found that it did not have enough 'oomph' in the pumpkin pie taste department. So, after bringing 2 cups of water with 5.5 ounces of corn sugar to a boil for 5 mins, I killed the heat and added 1.5 tsp of pumpkin pie spice to the priming solution. I let that cool (pasteurize) for 10 mins then put the pot on ice to bring it too room temp and then added it to the bottling bucket and racked the beer on top.

Bottling proceeded as usual. The solid spices sank to the bottom of the bucket. I'm hoping that enough of the volatile spice flavor absorbed into the beer.

Time passes. On November 2 I opened a bottle to see what was going on in there. Carbonation had started, so the yeast were alive and well. It tasted great! A nice level of malt/bitterness/spice. The extra alcohol is evident in the burn you can feel in your gut after drinking. But you can't taste a hot alcohol taste. My wife liked it and thats saying something; she is very finicky about anything darker than Corona. The beer was sampled at room temp.

I'm proud of this beer. Next time I will add more ginger and a vanilla bean to get a better match to Southern Tier's Pumking seasonal (which has a distinct gingerbread/pumpkin pie taste). I will likely also forego mashing the pumpkin and substitute more base malt and dextrin malt to simulate the contribution of the pumpkin. I will also add a handful of carared to the brew to bring out a more copper hue.

I'll check back in after serving this on T-day. N_G