Something smells like sulfur!

This past weekend I went over to Nick's place and we worked on our pumpkin ale. We also did a cyder that I will write a post about as soon as I get the details from Nick on what we used and what we did.

What I am writing about today though was the pumpkin ale. To bring you up to speed, it was racked twice after the primary to help get rid of some of the traub that developed and in the end, we both had a full 5 gal batch because we planned ahead.

However, when I went to rack my beer from the carboy to the keg, I noticed a distinct surfer smell that permeated the spices. Nick had said that there sulfur smells coming out of the primary fermenters when I was gone, but on our first racking, I had not noticed anything.

This time though, I definitely tasted a distinct sulfur flavor.

After some consulting, Nick advised adding some yeast nutrient to the brew to help get rid of the flavor. He said that he had done some reading and that was one of the suggestions. When I got home, before I pressurized the keg, I added 2tbs of yeast nutrient and then pressurized the keg at serving pressure and let it sit until tonight.

Tonight was going to be my big night of tasting the brew and immediately I noticed something was not right. The brew had a distinct salt water flavor that threw everything off. I decided to take the keg off the tap it was on, shake it around and try it out of my party tap. The flavor was gone (for the most part anyway).

What I think happened was that the yeast nutrient settled at the bottom and when I was drawing off the keg, I was getting a very concentrated amount of that nutrient. The plan is now to shake it around some more and let it sit for a while longer to get fully carbonated.

In the end, I am sure it's going to be great, but it was hard to judge because I cannot get the salt water flavor out of my mouth. It kind of feels like it coats the tongue.

More to come on this!!!

**The story behind the picture was that I have had a few brown ales and I was looking for a "pumpkin carving of Nixon" because I thought with the election season in full swing, it would be fun. However, with little luck on that, I remembered these pictures and decided to include them just the same. That's a little window into how my mind works, scary.

Pumpkin Ale

A few weekends ago, Nick and I brewed up a pumpkin ale. I will make an update on where we are to date with the pumpkin ale but for now, I want to give some input on the brew day that was:

First off, Nick was good enough to volunteer for "pumpkin prep". This consisted of buying, gutting and scooping 8-10 pumpkins. Nick bought 20, because he was not sure what the weight would be after they were all gutted. In the end, we has 12lbs of pumpkin, so 8-10 pumpkins make for 12-14lbs of finished pumpkin product.

To prep, Nick carved the pumpkins in to 6-8" chunks. He placed these chunks on a cookie sheet at 350f for 1 hour (of until beginning to brown). After this he peeled the skin off and was left with the orange mass of the pumpkin. Nick took care of this a few days before our brew day and had it in the fridge. This was good because the process would have been a brew day in it's self.

One the day of brewing, Nick came over with the 12lbs of pumpkin and put it into my 5 gallon bucket and cooked it on the grill. We added enough water to cover the pumpkin chunks and stirred pretty aggressively to prevent burning. This took an hour and in the end, the pumpkin was a chunky orange paste.

We added the pumpkin to the mash tun just after we struck the mash. This got a little complicated because the pumpkin held a lot of heat and made a lot of "hot spots" in the mash. With a little ice and some aggressive stirring, it worked out in the end. However, for people looking to brew this, take into consideration the temp of your pumpkin because there is enough of it there to throw off your reading.



We let the mash sit for 1 hour. We were not able to add water to the mash for a mash out because the mash tun was too full so we pulled some off and did a quick decoction to elevate the temp.





In the end, we hit our 154f for the mash and had it up to 170 for the mashout. We batch sparged and had a little over 13 gallons in the pre boil (the brew kettle was REALLY full). Our goal was to have 12 gallons in the end because of traub loss.

Regarding the spices, we did not have "pumpkin pie" spice so we used my wife's Betty Crocker Cookbook and increased the amount as we saw fit. We were concerned initially because the amount of spice versus the amount of wort seemed as though you would not taste the spice. However, once we added it, we realized that a little spice goes a long way.

We used a London ESB for both brews because my American Ale yeast that I was going to use did not take the way that I had hoped.

Currently, both 5 gallon batches have been been racked over twice. There was a lot of traub from the primary to the secondary, and from the secondary to the third vessel, it was much less. We had both seen a lot of input from folks saying that the starch from the pumpkin caused a lot of yield losses that we didn't want. In the racking from primary to secondary, Nick took the extra and put it in a 3 gallon carboy he had and topped it off with some DME wort he threw together.

We did that Sunday and we are considering bottling/kegging this Sunday while we brew a cider (cyder?).

In racking it over I had a few little sips, this is a damn fine brew. It's pretty dark for the style, but not too crazy.

The OG was 1.048 and the FG was 1.011.

More to come...

Smashed Pumpkin Ale

Tis the season for a nice harvest pumpkin ale! This weekend Nick and I are going to be brewing our first vegetable beer.

Nick is in charge of preparing the pumpkin. He is going to cook chunks of 15 lbs of pumpkin for a while, peel the skin off and make it all into a chunky, loosely held together pumpkin mash.

Saturday, we will break out the pumpkin and add it to the mash like an adjunct. I have added rice hulls to the mash to hopefully prevent a stuck mash because I guess the pumpkin is pretty thick. Nick said that he has heard that brewers loose a lot of volume in traub with these beers, but I am assuming that must be when it's added to the boil because if it's in the mash, it shouldn't change the traub volume dramatically (at least I think, any input would be greatly appreciated).

So here is the recipe as we have it now:

Recipe Specifications
--------------------------
Batch Size: 12.00 gal
Boil Size: 14.84 gal
Estimated OG: 1.041 SG
Estimated Color: 17.9 SRM
Estimated IBU: 24.0 IBU
Brewhouse Efficiency: 59.0 %
Boil Time: 60 Minutes

Ingredients:
------------
0.50 lb Rice Hulls
12.50 lb Pilsner
5.40 lb Wheat Malt, Ger
2.20 lb Munich Malt
0.75 lb Roasted Barley
0.40 lb Cara-Pils/Dextrine
0.25 lb Carafa III
2.00 oz Mt. Hood
1.00 oz Hallertauer
0.36 lb Brown Sugar, Dark
0.25 lb Maple Syrup (pure)
**1 Pkgs American Ale (Wyeast Labs #1056) and London ESB


Mash Schedule: Single Infusion, Full Body
Total Grain Weight: 22.00 lb
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Name Description Step Temp Step Time
Mash In Add 6.88 gal of water at 170.5 F158.0 F 45 min
Mash Out Add 2.75 gal of water at 196.6 F168.0 F 10 min


Notes:
------
The .36 lbs of brown sugar is 1cup. 1/2 cup of maple syrup. 1 teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice mix (cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, mace)

**I have proposed that since we have two yeasts that we are considering reusing, one of us use the ESB and the other the American Ale. Then, since they are both from the same batch, we can observe the characteristics of the two yeasts head to head.

We are using a pretty basic single infusion so this should not be a big deal. Since Nick is preparing the pumpkin, we should be able to brew in our normal time.

Sounds like a fun one, cheers!