I was once told that water at 99 °C would froth and shake a bit and was good for making teas, coffee, etc… but it was practically useless when it came to making steam…
At 100 °C, water could power up a steam engine or an entire electric plant…
The difference is 1 °Degree…
… and I’m constantly looking to find that one degree difference to make beers a little bit better…
Sometimes what I do works and sometimes I fall flat on my face…
… but when I find the little tweaks that DO work, boy does it pay off…
Today I want to talk about my pumpkin beer recipe, which I originally came up with last year…
I did an experiment to find if it was better to mash the pumpkin or add it during the boil… I even tried adding to primary…
I didn’t find much difference between all three methods frankly… though I did notice that the beers brewed by adding pumpkin to the boil and the primary, had little to no head retention because of the oils of the pumpkin…
For that reason alone, I decided to stick to mashing the pumpkin…
I was very happy with the results and the recipe that I decided to keep it and now I’ll be looking to improve on it…
This year, I made a couple of changes… I used Czech Saaz hops and possibly the change I am paying more attention to is skipping the protein rest…
9 lbs American 2-Row Barley
1.25 lbs Munich (20 L)
.5 lbs American Wheat
.25 lbs Crystal (40 L)
2 Sweet Pie Pumpkins (roughly 24 oz of pulp)
1 oz Czech Saaz 5.5% AA (60 min)
.5 oz Czech Saaz 5.5% AA (30 min)
1 tsp Cinnamon (5 min)
1 tsp Nutmeg (5 min)
1 tsp Ground Allspice (5 min)
1 tsp Pumpkin Pie Spice (5 min)
WLP001 California Ale Yeast (1 L starter)
RO Water
105 ppm Ca
132 ppm Cl
76 ppm SO4
The thought behind this is to see if skipping the protein rest will increase the creamy texture of the beer…
The beer just started fermenting and will be sitting there for the next 3 weeks, so I’ll give you an update when I keg the beer…
You can watch the video of this year’s brew here:
Pumpkin Beer Recipe
… and you can watch the original post from last year here: https://brewbeeranddrinkit.com/how-to-brew-a-pumpkin-ale/
