Beer Spice Addition ?'s

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Jhubbard9

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Hey everyone,

I'm looking at making a pumpkin beer for my next beer and I have some questions.

When would be the best time to make an addition of spices to the beer that wouldn't adversely effect fermentation but still carry a good flavor threshold over to the finished beer? Also what type of beer should I shoot for as a base beer? I want it to be pretty spicy but I also dont want to have that certain beer style overpower the overall taste. I was thinking like almost an IPA type of base style with limited hops so the spices shine more than the hops would.

If anyone has any knowledge or experience of what malts to use and what yeast and when to throw some spices in I would love to know. Thanks everyone and as always cheers!
 
Check this tread out: Thunderstruck Pumpkin Ale. Made it the two years back with extract and AG last year. Came out great both times. Guys at work have been asking about it since July so I have a batch clearing now and I'll be brewing another this weekend or next. Somebody in the thread said it is an amber base and I think somebody else said english brown.

I have used wlp002 and wy1968(ESB) and prefer the 1968. For the spices I make a tea and add it after the active fermentation stops and it starts to clear. I've heard it doesn't make much differnce over adding them to the boil but I worry about losing some of the aroma during fermentation like with hop aroma. Some add it at bottling time. If you make the tea, you can pull some beer from the fermentor and add the tea in measured amounts to the sample to get the spices where you want then scale up to the volume of the batch. Never done it, usually say eff it and dump the whole thing in, but I can see how it would be useful as the spices can get overpowering quickly. I use about a tea spoon of spice mix for a 5 gal batch.

Hope this helps. Good luck.
 
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