Stewing Over Brewing: Mashing Pumpkins

Sorry this is late – I was meaning to get this published much sooner (Monday), but it didn’t happen.

What an epic brew weekend! We like to call these some sort of basketball term when we do them. This weekend was dubbed the triple single batch.

I drove down Friday night after work, getting in Eugene about 7:15. We tried to catch some Pliny the Elder at 16 Tons before we brewed, but of course with my luck they ran out about a half hour before we got there. I was somewhat OK with this because I got to try some Full Sail “Lupulin Fresh Hop Ale” which I mentioned in a previous post. It was fantastic! My nemesis Pliny would have to wait. From there we went and got some food and then proceeded to brew up a batch of Citra, all the while sampling and critiquing the ‘Mystery batch’ that we were to brew up again on Saturday. Every single time we brew we either have a slight disaster or we learn something – most of the time both. You’ll see from the pictures below that the gravity fed cooler system is very ‘rigged’ to make it all work. I was also very excited to try out my newly constructed wort chiller (the garden hose coil thing) that I had made two weeks prior. It worked very, very well – saving us about 30 minutes of cooling time. We pitched our yeast – which I did NOT forget, for those of you who were reminding me – and then headed to bed around 2:30am.

Woke up around 10am (we were shooting for an early day starting at 8am – Ha!). Guzzled down our extra strength 5 hour energy (these things are gross – I don’t recommend them) and started packing up.

The pumpkin process was a bit more challenging than we thought. I can’t really speak for the experience because Danny definitely took over this part while I was getting things squared away with the ‘mystery batch’. You’ll see the pictures below of the cooking/cutting/spicing process. Starting around 12:30pm, I don’t think we wrapped up things until 11:30 that night. The ‘mystery batch’ was a breeze – pumpkins however – not so much. We decided to bake the pumpkins whole in the oven until the skin would come off with the scrape of a fork. Then they were cubed up and baked again with seasonings until mushy-soft. I started the mash water around 6pm and the pumpkins were ready by about 6:30pm to be mashed. We decided to go with a mash and boil for the pumpkins so we’d extract as much pumpkin flavor as possible – not that wimpy taste you get from the Blue Moon Harvest Ale. The mash smelled absolutely fantastic! My only regret with that is not putting rice hulls in the grain bill to allow easy draining for the wort. The sugars extracted from the pumpkin really clogged up the grain bed and made it hard to strain, but we managed to get enough wort through. We then started up the boil and 20 minutes in we added the same pumpkin from the mash into the boil. I really wish we could have bottled the smell and sell it. We added a half ounce of cascade and a half ounce of citra right at the start of the boil to give it a little kick of hops, but not a whole lot. The spices we added were cinnamon, ground ginger, nutmeg, all spice, sweet orange peel, and clove – all the last 5 minutes of the boil. All in all we’re really looking forward to this one. Check out the photos below (click to view full size)!