Brew Day: Pumpkin Ale

Pumpkin strike water ready to mix with grains.

Well it's late August early September so that means its the time of year when I foolishly try to make another pumpkin beer.  I have not had success trying to brew these beers.  I don't know why.  If something can go wrong it does.

So why try to make it again.  That's the fun part of home brewing for me - trying to figure things out and create great beer.

This time I found some more blog postings about the Zymurgy article that I tried last year.  I read on one of the reviews that the user would mix the mash every 15 minutes or so to stop the pumpkin puree from turning into concrete.  I figured what could go wrong - everything else has trying to make this beer.

To my surprise this brew day was pretty near perfect.  The beautiful pumpkin orange infused strike water was no match for me this day.  I was able to pull of 6.5 gallons of a nice amber orange wort and give it the full 90 minutes boil.

Rolling boil that caused a boil-over

I did have a little boil over but nothing too crazy.  The only real disappointing thing is that I missed my target OG by a full point.  My Beersmith recipe said it would be about 1.074.  I came in at 1.064.  With all that has happened the past few years trying to brew with pumpkin I figured this was a very minor issue.

I pitched the yeast around 6:30PM last night and when I checked on it at 11am today it was already bubbling away.

Once primary fermentation has finished I will move to a secondary where I will add some more pumpkin pie spice.

Later this week while I am off I will be brewing up a Chocolate Milk Stout.  I will bottle each of it straight and then have a small batch where I mix the two in a tertiary carboy for one week and then bottle.

This time I will be sterilizing the cocoa nibs with vodka hoping to avoid another bacteria infected batch.

UPDATES:

8/30/14
Brewed and yeast pitched yeast. Activity within 12 hours
 
9/3/14
Fermentation is starting to slow down.  I should be able to move this to the secondary and add more pumpkin pie spice by the end of this week or Saturday at the latest.

9/7/14
Racked to secondary.  Added 0.5 Tbsp of pumpkin pie spice.  Gravity reading = 1.011

9/21/14
Bottled 3 gallons straight.  Added a pinch more of spice.  The other 2 gallons were mixed with a chocolate milk stout.