Beer Brewing Blog

Two days ago I brewed up my second attempt at a pumpkin ale and today I brewed up a Dunkelweizen all grain kit from Northern Brewer.

For the pumpkin ale, I read all I could on the methods of other homebrewers and put together my recipe and method from various sources.  When I tried this last year,  I basically took half of the raw pumpkin and put it in the boil with the other half half baked in the oven first and then into the primary fermenter.  The resulting brew was almost undrinkable as it just had this overwhelming raw pumpkin taste and I ended up dumping most of the batch.  This year, I took a three pronged approach.

Since I am doing all grain now, I decided to place a third in the mash, a third in the boil and the remainder inthe primary.  I took a nice 16 inch pumpkin, cleaned it, and cut it into one inch cubes and tossing the skins.  First of all, have you ever tried to cut an entire pumpkin into 1 inch cubes?  It’s a bitch and luckily I started a couple of nights before.  From there, I took a third of the raw pumpkin and ziploc’d it up in the freezer to keep for the boil.  I then backed another third and boiled the final third.  When I baked the one batch, I noticed that the pumpkin lost alot of mass with all of the evaporating water.  However, this time I made sure to bake it at 375 for 2 hours when it came out, there was no raw pumpkin left.  The third I boiled was really out of necessity as I just didn’t have enough time to bake it up that night.  On brew day, I took the boiled up pumpkin and baked it about an hour, enough for the pieces to just start caramelizing a bit. This batch I put in the mash.  The rest of the brew day was straightforward with the thawed raw pumpkin going into the boil and the baked batch from the first night being boiled for 15 minutes, cooled down in the fermenter and then adding the wort into the fermenter on top.

For spices I used one fresh nutmeg and cinamon in the mash and then two nutmegs and a bunch of cinnamon in the boil.  When I tasted the wort going into the carboy I saw that I used way too much cinnamon, hopefully most of this comes out when I filter going to the secondary.  I’m also going to add more fresh nutmeg in the secondary and just a hair of ground ginger.

We’ll see what happens with this batch.   I brewed a bit late in the season for this style, but hopefully there is a nice pumpkin ale to go with Thanksgiving dinner ready.

Today I racked the Drunken Deacon, Scottish Wee Heavy and Belgian Dubbel to the secondary.  The Drunken Deacon and Scottish Wee Heavy just did not have the SG I was looking for, the Belgian Dubbel is more than what Beersmith called for.  I really need to work on efficiency more, it seems to be a major issue since I’ve started all grain.

I went on a brewing binge over the weekend and brewed up two all grain batches.  Both were all grain kits from Northern Brewer.  The first was the Scottish Wee Heavy Ale, similar to the previous Scottish Ale I did but with only 1/4 lb chocolate malt in this batch.   I felt this beer deserved a second chance as I just wasn’t thinking the first time around and put too much chocolate malt into the mash.  The second batch is a Belgian Dubbel.  The kit didn’t include the 1 lb of dark candi sugar so I ended up using just the 1/4 lb I had left and supplemented this with a bottle of dark molasses.  I completed both batches in about 10 hours.  I think I like doubling up batchs as it saves some time and cleaning, both on the brewing and bottling.