Halloween Pumpkin Ale

97.08.09

Pumpkin can be an extremely tricky thing to mash since even very small amounts can create an extremely sticky mash.  This recipe was brewed with my buddies Claude and Andrew, and it was the first time any of us had mashed pumpkin.  So for the sake of experimentation we did two separate mashes - one with the can of pumpkin right in the mash, and for the other we mashed the pumpkin separately with enzymes.  If you plan to mash pumpkin and can get your hands on rice hulls or oat hulls, we would strongly recommend their use to avoid runoff problems.

Can you use pumpkin without mashing?  We don't recommend it.  See here and here for details.

We did 2 separate 5 gallon mashes for this one, then ran them off and boiled them up together. Here's the recipe we used for each of the 5 gallon mashes :

• 250g wheat
• 2 lb 6Row
• 6 lb 2Row
• 1 lb Munich
• 1 can pumpkin (only ingredient is pumpkin)

For one mash we mashed in to 153F, then brought the pumpkin up to that temp in a pot on top the stove, and finally just stirred the pumpkin into the top 1/4 of the mash. We didn't want to go too deep with the pumpkin in order to avoid runoff problems.

For the other mash we mashed the pumpkin on top the stove with purchased enzymes, then mixed it into the top 1/4 of the mash in the other cooler. So for runoff purposes, the only difference was that one cooler had a Phils in it, where the other had my home-made copper manifold (circular), cut with slots.

When the time finally came to sparge, both were running very freely up until the last 10 or 15 minutes, when the Phils kept flowing freely, but the home-made manifold started running more slowly. We did manage to run it off fine, but it was starting to make us nervous. Unfortunately we didn't keep the runoff separate, so we don't know if we got higher extraction from one or the other. Looking back this would have been a good idea. In order to run the same amount of water through both, we just counted how many litres of water we put into the top of each, and kept the two the same.

The notes are sketchy, and I don't exactly recall how we hopped this thing. It was on the high end of lightly hopped is all I recall at this point.

• 97.09.17 kegged. Put in potion
• 97.09.15 - kegged. But accidentally kegged cherry ale
• 97.09.20 - bottled 1/2 with 125g sugar

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