Fairytale Pumpkin Ale

[BrewFrick]

Well we took the kids to the pumpkin patch today and while at the farmer's market patch, really big spread and they grow a lot of their own, I spoke to the gentleman that handles the pumpkin stocking and sales. He recommended a breed called "Fairytale" for any and all cooking applications. He cut one open and showed me the insides of it. The rind is fairly thin, a very brown toned deep orange color, the meat of this thing is like 3 times as thick as a regular grocery store pumpkin and is a beautiful deep orange color, not yellow. He said he had cut one up and fried it like french fries in the deep fryer they have there and it was like eating fried sweet potatoes. So I bought a 20 pounder and decided I was going to make me a pumpkin ale and put it in the mash and maybe in the secondary as well. I have the pumpkin roasting right now and have the grains bought to make this recipe. I will do the pumpkin roasting tonight and brew this first thing in the morning, so any suggestions would be appreciated.

Fairytale Pumpkin Ale
10 lbs. Marris Otter Malt
2 lb. Munich
2 lb. Vienna
1 lb. Crystal 20
1 lb. Flaked Barley
2 lbs. Rice Hulls
One 20 lb. Fairytale pumpkin cut in half and roast in the oven skin side up at 350 for two hours with a little water in the bottom of the dish and some aluminum foil over it, not tightly. Scooped of the roasted meat and then pureed so that it can be added to the mash.
2 oz. Mt. Hood Hops (60 Min)
1 tbsp Pumpkin Pie Spice (30 Min)
1 oz. Mt. Hood Hops (10 Min)
1 tbsp Pumpkin Pie Spice (10 Min)
Irish Moss
Nottingham Dry Yeast

 

[BrewFrick]

Well the pumpkin roasting is all done, looks like I got a total of about 5.5 quarts of pureed roast fairytale pumpkin. Looks nice and tastes sweet, good stuff just by itself. It is strange to me that it smells like nothing you would want to eat when raw, but when cooked it totally transforms into something tasty. Hit me back with comments and suggestions on the recipe, or else I will follow through with this madness come morning.

 

[FishinDave07]

Nice score! Its a good idea to use a lot of rice hull, but still remember to drain SLOW.

I would also recommend checking some of the pumpkin recipes in the recipe database for spices used, because you might get better results mixing nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger root, clove, etc. instead of using premixed.

Also, i would cancel out the 30 min. addition and bring the 10 minutes addition at flameout. If you could smell the aroma from adding the spices that means that very little stays in the brew.

I'm getting ready to bottle Yuri's Thunderstruck Pumpkin Ale which i added spices in the last 5 mintues and while they are present in the beer, that are kinda faint. I might go ahead and add a spice tea to the bottling bucket at small increments to get the right combinations.

Oh, and i would recommend only adding a bittering hop addition to all the aroma comes from the spices.

 

[BrewFrick]

Well all the pumpkin processing went well. And warming it up to around 160 in the oven this morning was ok, just a waiting game. I mashed in with it at around 152 and gave it an hour. The runoff was bad. I didn't use all the two pounds of rice hulls like I said in the original recipe, but I don't know if that would have helped or not since I had so much pumpkin in there. Never have experienced one that ran this slow and I had to stir around the bazooka screen a lot to get it to drain.
I am in the last 10 minutes of the boil now and I did not use the 30 min. addition of spices and will not be adding aroma hops, I will be adding in all the spices at the end. I used an ounce each of Perle and Mt. Hood in the boil for the entire time. Added some pectic enzyme just to be safe on the pumpkin.
The wort is really really orange, not just kinda, but totally. Should make for an interesting brew.

 

[UncleBennysBrew]

Did you stick with the pumpkin spice blend, or go the individual route?

Can't wait to see how this turns out!

 

[KingBrianI]

sounds good man! i think it was a good decision to add the spice in the end instead of an addition at 30 mins and another good decision to skip the aroma hops. you want the pumpkin spice and malt to dominate the palate and aroma here. did you happen to take any pictures of the wort? id like to see the totally orange color!

 

[BrewFrick]

No pictures, though I did think at several times during the whole deal that pics would have been really neat to show the process. I don't have the ability to post them anyway, I'm a cheapskate and won't pay for a membership.

 

[McKBrew]

No pictures, though I did think at several times during the whole deal that pics would have been really neat to show the process. I don't have the ability to post them anyway, I'm a cheapskate and won't pay for a membership.

Even a cheapskate can host photos somewhere else like photobucket or picasa.

Definately let us know how this brew turns out.

 

[adamjab19]

In this month's zymurgy magazine the guy says just to roast and then boil the pumpkin with the wort instead of mashing since mashing to is to get the sugars, which there won't be a lot coming from the pumpkin anyway. I am no expert but it made since to me. Plus it would help to avoid the nightmare at run off time. I'm going to give it a shot this weekend this way.

Your recipe above sounds good though!

 

[BrewFrick]

Well I don't know what the pumpkin would provide as far as sugars, but I would think that it contains both starches and sugars in the cooked form. I was hoping by mashing that I would get flavor, non-fermentable sugars, and some starch conversion from the grain enzymes as well. If this does not get me what I was wanting then I might have to try it in the boil as well in a later batch.

 

[beesy]

It's interesting to observe the number of people who said they have issues when it comes to the run off when using pumpkin in their mash. I made 3 different pumkin ales this year and I have used up to 4 lbs of pumpkin puree in my mashes and have had no issues. I did not use hulls in any of them. Maybe i should just keep my fingers crossed! Cheers

 

[BrewFrick]

Well just like the last few brews I have done I did a full AG on the pumpkin ale and then did a second beer from the leftover third sparge. Both the first and second sparges were terrible. I have never had that kind of issue with slow runoff before in the other 10 batches of AG/partial mash I have done this year. Hell it was the first time I have used rice hulls because I anticipated a stuck sparge issue, it could be those nasty things clogging up my bazooka screen for all I know at this point. I don't think I will be using them again in the future, they suck.

 

[beesy]

From what i read you used 5.5 quarts. Do you know the lbs that converts to? It would seem you used A LOT more pumkin than I did, which may have lead to your issues. If you ever get a pic up, let us know, i would love to see the color of it. I did use 4 lbs in a 3.5 imperial pumpkin gallon batch, and it turned out quite orange (and quite strong at 8.5% )

 

[adamjab19]

Well one draw back of boiling the pumpkin is straining the **** out! What a pain in the ass I had tonight. Should have used a hop bag and then just dumped the pumpkin filled wort into the carboy to settle out.

 

[BrewFrick]

I racked this stuff over to secondary and it was a total pumpkin apocalypse in the last gallon of the fermenter. I lost that last gallon because it was like a thick McDonlad's shake consistency, would not flow in the autosiphon. The pumpkin and spice flavor was what I was looking for but the loss of beer is not acceptable. I think this will be my last pumpkin brew using real pumpkin but the spice blend and overall grain bill seems a good brew just by itself so I might do this one again without the pumpkin and just call it a spiced ale.

 

[adamjab19]

The clear beer fairy visited my pumpkin ale yesterday and all of the sludge dropped to about a 4 inch heap in my carboy! Really impressive!