Last year’s Pumpkin Porter was too spicy and did not have very much pumpkin flavor. We’re hoping to balance the flavor out this year.

Results

Overview

• Starting gravity (actual)
  • ~1.082
• Starting gravity (expected)
  • 1.078
• Final gravity (actual)
  • 1.022
• Final gravity (expected)
  • 1.014

We had some early problems with carbonation, but this year’s Punkin’ Porter turned out pretty good!

Initial wort tasting notes:

• Very “bready” tasting, probably from the pumpkin
• Full bodied
• Lots of hop bitterness present, hopefully it will settle down during fermentation (it should)
• Less spicy and more balanced than last year
• Doesn’t taste like an allspice beer, but more like a pumpkin beer. Yay!
• When transferring the flavor, according to Jer, is more balanced and Less spciy. The pumpkin is very subtle, but still there.

Recipe

Malt

• 1 lb crushed black patent malt
• 1.5 lbs crushed pale 6-row malt
• 3.3 lbs Light liquid malt extract
• 3 lbs Amber dry malt extract

Hops

• 1 oz Hallertau Mt Hood hop pellets (bittering)
  • 60 minutes
• 1 oz Cascade hop pellets (flavoring)
  • 20 minutes
• 0.5 oz Hallertau Mt Hood hop pellets (aroma)
  • 10 minutes

Yeast

• Wyeast 1056 American Ale Yeast

Other

• 1x 29 oz can of Libby’s pumpkin purée

• 1x 15 oz cans of Libby’s pumpkin purée

• 0.5 tsp allspice (dried/ground)
  • 5 minutes
• 1 tsp cinnamon (dried/ground)
  • 5 minutes
• 1 tsp nutmeg (dried/ground)
  • 5 minutes

Brewing Notes

Timeline

• Brewed
  • September 27, 2011
• Transferred on
  • October 08, 2011
• Bottled
  • October 13, 2011
• Tasted
  • October 27, 2011

This is the recipe from Extreme Brewing with some minor modifications based on last year’s results.

• We used way more pumpkin this time than previously
  The recipe calls for 30oz of canned pumpkin, but we used 44oz (of Libby’s).
  We also included 2L of Justin’s homemade pumpkin water (which tasted nice and sweet) that he made from real, fresh pumpkin that he baked and mashed.
• We boiled the canned pumpkin separately on the kitchen stove in roughly 1.5 gallons (?) of water. We did this separately from the sack of grain, which we steeped in the brew kettle of roughly 3 gallons of boiling water.
• Like last year, we used cheesecloth and a strainer to separate the canned pumpkin sludge that was boiled on the stove prior to mixing it into the pre-boil tea. This time we did not mix the grains with the pumpkin (we did last time).
• Starting volume was roughly 20 quarts (5 gallons).
  Note: I think this was prior to adding the malt.
• We forgot to add gypsum during the mash boil
• We had two boil overs before even getting to the first hop addition 🙁 🙁
• Hallertau hops not available so we used Mt Hood hops instead (again).
• Added spices and aroma hops at the same time
  At 10 minutes before the end of the 65 minute boil, we added both the spices and the aroma hops. Directions said to only add the aroma hops and wait another 2.5 minutes to add the spices (at the 7.5 minute mark)
• Used less allspice than the recipe
  We used 1 tsp of cinnamon, 1 tsp of nutmeg and 0.5 tsp of allspice. The 0.5 tsp of allspice is half of the 1 tsp in the directions because we felt that last year’s batch was too spicy. Unlike last time when we grated fresh spices by hand, we used ground spices this time. We are hoping that by not using freshly grated spices and by using less allspice we can have a better balanced flavor.
• We added extra plain water near the end of the boil to raise the volume.
• The final volume is still a tad low at roughly 4.5 gallons, but the gravity was close enough to avoid screwing with it.
• When transferred to the secondary fermenter the gravity is at 1.024, and we’re down to about 3.75 gallons.