pumpkin only infusion - how long?

[jamsomito]

I'm brewing a pumpkin beer, all grain, BIAB (as I only have my boil kettle and fermentation buckets).

I've heard that the pumpkin can really plug up lautering. While doing BIAB might alleviate some of these problems, I have to hold the grain bag while it drains (no hoist or anywhere to hang it). Because of this, and not knowing how the pumpkin will change my mash chemistry, I thought I would do two infusions - one for the pumpkin, let it drain, keep in fermentation bucket - then one for the grains, let it drain, then mix the two for the boil.

My question is this... how long should I "mash" the pumpkin for? The recipe calls for a 90min mash with everything all together. I was going to do that for the grain still, but with the pumpkin seperate, I have to imagine that would extract more quickly than the grains. Would 30 min be enough? Thoughts?

 

[william_shakes_beer]

Mashing turns starch to sugar. Not sure if the starches in pumpkin are able to be converted by the enzymes in the base malt, someone smarter thn me will need to answer that. As far as draining the bag goes, I went through a few different ideas and finally setled on this one:

1. Buy a 5 gallon homer bucket
2. Drill a bunch of 1/4" holes in the bottom.
3. Place the perforated homer bucket into a 7.5 gallon fermenter.
4. Pull the grain bag out and drop it into the Homer bucket. (latex gloves helps delay burns)
5. The weight of the grains will press additional wort out of the grains into the reservoir
6. If you still need additional volume, pour some water over the grains to sparge.

 

[jamsomito]

Hmm good point. I never even thought the mash w/ grains might convert pumpkin starches to sugar. In my head I just thought the water would take out whatever "flavor" from the pumpkin it has, but it may be more complicated than that.

Another thought would be to "mash" my pumpkin and use the resultant pumpkin water as my grain strike water.

 

[mkyl428]

Mashing turns starch to sugar. Not sure if the starches in pumpkin are able to be converted by the enzymes in the base malt, someone smarter thn me will need to answer that. As far as draining the bag goes, I went through a few different ideas and finally setled on this one:

1. Buy a 5 gallon homer bucket
2. Drill a bunch of 1/4" holes in the bottom.
3. Place the perforated homer bucket into a 7.5 gallon fermenter.
4. Pull the grain bag out and drop it into the Homer bucket. (latex gloves helps delay burns)
5. The weight of the grains will press additional wort out of the grains into the reservoir
6. If you still need additional volume, pour some water over the grains to sparge.

+1 That's exactly what I do

 

[SquidPope]

Not sure if the starches in pumpkin are able to be converted by the enzymes in the base malt

The Northern Brewer guys have a video on adding pumpkin to one of their extract kits with a partial mash, so at any rate they seem to think it's possible. I haven't tried their method myself yet, but I plan to modify it to make a parsnip beer down the road

 

[jamsomito]

So looking around, I found the ultimate pumpkin thread started in 2009. One guy towards the end of that dissolved the pumpkin in the strike water before adding grain... I had no idea you could do that. But, I suppose I'm going for a similar effect.

Now I'm leaning towards using my pumpkin "wort" as my grist strike water. The question is just how long I should leave the pumpkin in that water. I'm guessing 2lb won't completely dissolve in 4gal, but I don't know much...

 

[jamsomito]

The Northern Brewer guys have a video on adding pumpkin to one of their extract kits with a partial mash, so at any rate they seem to think it's possible. I haven't tried their method myself yet, but I plan to modify it to make a parsnip beer down the road

Cool, thanks. I found the video and watched it - good stuff. They're adding the pumpkin to the mash though. I'm wondering about doing the pumpkin solo in just water, or possibly in the wort after the mash before the boil.

Here's a link to where the guy dissolved the pumpkin in the strike water:
http://hollisbrewco.blogspot.com/2011/09/pumpkin-ale-brew-day.html

 

[jamsomito]

So apparently, according to this, not mashing the pumpkin leaves more unconverted starches which could increase risk of infection later on. I have no reason to do one way or the other, so I guess I'll mash the pumpkin.

http://forum.northernbrewer.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=23932&start=30

I'd still like to avoid doing it all together if I can, so I'm going to "mash" the pumpkin to dissolve/extract what I can, pull out the mush, then add my grains for a regular mash. This way, whatever starches are in the water have a chance of being converted in the mash, and I still don't have to deal with the gunk of the pumpkin.

 

[jamsomito]

Whelp, brewed this up today. Went pretty well except for burning a hole in my grain bag :/

As far as the pumpkin mash, I heated to 190 on accident, let it cool for 30 mins with the pumpkin down to 170 deg, then swapped bags to my grain bag for the mash.

I added 1lb of rice hulls to my 2lbs of pumpkin. With this method, I don't know if it was really needed. It seemed like the pumpkin just dissolved more or less in the water. There wasn't much left in the bag besides rice hulls when I pulled it out.

The strike water definitely smelled like my pumpkin though. Really good. Now to see if any if that flavor carries through to the final beer.

Oh, and I also baked the pumpkin for 45 mins drizzled with agave nectar (we were out of honey). I definetly suggest this to get the most from the pumpkin... It really brought it to life and brought out the aroma and taste.

 

[afrnmsn]

We made an ale two days ago. We added two cans of pumpkin purée to the wort and did a 60 min boil. Can you think of any reason that this would not work? I will say I have never seen a beer take off like this before. We are using a blow off tube and it is constant bubbles nonstop no breaks at all. Should I be worried?

 

[jamsomito]

Nah, you're good. If you use the pumpkin in the boil, you might not be able to syphon all the beer out of the fermenter because you'll have a lot of trub (if you dumped the whole boil kettle into the fermenter). But there's some loss there on every batch anyway so that's normal.

If it's fermenting that vigorously, that's a really good sign that the yeast are doing their job and you have a healthy batch. Mines bubbling away like crazy too, but I'm not using a blow off, only a 3 piece air lock. Usually you need a different kind of lid rather than just a different air lock type to prevent an explosion from a bucket if it gets to that point so I don't bother and just keep an eye on it.