Hop bag the pumpkin?

[etrain666]

I am playing around with the idea of brewing an Oktoberfest with pumpkin. It sounds like the best method is to mash with canned pumpkin. However, that method comes with the cost of a difficult sparge.

Has anyone tried putting the pumpkin in a grain or hop bag and throwing that into the mash?

 

[BrewThruYou]

I've made two pumpkin beers last year with Libby's canned pumpkin and didn't have a big sparge problem. I did use 1# rice hulls in the mash. The mash does get more dense with that pumpkin...I actually broke a plastic mash paddle on a high gravity pumpkin ale.

You could try the bag in the mash, but as long as you include some rice hulls, I don't think you'll have a sparge problem.

 

[kingwood-kid]

As discussed here: http://www.themadfermentationist.com/2008/11/chocolate-pumpkin-porter.html
pumpkin has very little starch. You can just add it straight to the boil. You could even treat canned pumpkin like any other canned fruit and add to secondary, the problem would be getting it to dissolve. I added 3 cans of pumpkin to the boil for a 2 gallon batch; there was an ungodly amount of trub, but it fermented just fine. It did remind me that pumpkin without pumpkin pie spice doesn't have much taste.

 

[deezy]

I'm gonna brew another pumpkin beer soon. Mine stuck real bad mashing 2lbs last year so gonna bag it and throw into the mash.

 

[edmanster]

tried a long time ago with the puree and it doesn't work with the paint strainer bags.. don't know about the hop/grain socks.. seems like nothing even came out of the bag to add flavour/color..