Tasting Day: Pumpkin Pie Ale

So today it was time to taste the Pumpkin Pie Ale.  I had some serious sparging issues with this one as I outlined in my earlier Brew Day post.  This was also part of the batch that was infected.  It seemed to have done pretty well showing no real signs of infection so I decided to bottle this and at least get a taste.

I knew something was wrong when I got a final gravity reading of 1.004!  It dried up like a cider.  As you can see from the photo to the left it is very light with no real body or head.

After 3 weeks in the bottle I noticed a small white ring on top of the bottles.  Signs of a small infection.  With all of these things telling me it is probably not right I still needed to taste it.

In the end I am glad that I tasted it.  It is not sour yet from the infection so I think I am getting a good taste of what it could be if I had a more successful brew day.

The main thing about this is that the recipe seems to be right on.  Even though it was 1.004 it was still sweet and had the perfect amount of spices (in my opinion).

I can only imagine that my stuck sparge probably caused a chain reaction of how the sugar was converted and thus fermented.  Maybe it resulted in nothing but simple sugars which fermented completely out causing the 1.004 reading.  I dont focus too much on science of brewing and treat brewing more like I do cooking.  I try, taste and adjust while following general rules.

I am pretty confident that my new brew-in-a-bag set up with my cooler mash tun can handle the tricky sparge for this beer and create a quality pumpkin ale.  The sad part is that we will have to wait until next year to find out for sure.  I only have a small window for pumpkin beer and it is quickly closing.  If I brewed a batch today it wouldnt be ready until the end of December.  We should be in full blown stout season by then!  So we will revisit this next August.