• The author recommends “small cheese pumpkins” as the best variety to use: a variety also called “Long Island cheese pumpkin” that is of the same family as the butternut squash. (I’ve seen another source recommending butternut squash as a better source of actual “pumpkin” flavor for use in a beer.)
• No mention of the pumpkin in the mash: this article advocates adding pumpkin directly to the boil instead, possibly the first article/recipe I’ve seen to do this exclusively. I brewed up my annual pumpkin beer a couple of weeks ago and I actually split the pumpkin between the mash and the boil (for the first time) so I found this interesting.

Incidentally, I brewed the beer on Monday (Labor Day) and it’s still fermenting with activity in the primary, five days later.

Both recipes use real pumpkin that you’ll have to roast and chop up yourself (which makes it even more special!).

Extract-based pumpkin ale recipe: I first published this back in 2004. It uses some specialty grains along with the malt extract.

All-grain pumpkin ale recipe: this is assuming a standard all-grain single-infusion mash setup, and I’ve included notes for batch sparging as well.

Both of these recipes should result in beers that are between 5.5 and 6% alcohol by volume.

The usual competition rules apply: two unlabeled bottles and $6 per entry, brewed according to BJCP guidelines, you need to fill out the official forms, etc.

But COHO has organized a really great Best of Show prize this year:

It is my pleasure to announce the winner in Best of Show for the 2011 COHO Spring Fling will be brewed at Silver Moon Brewing and will be served at Bend Brewfest, The Brew Shop, Abbey pub, Bend Brew Werks, and Silver Moon!

If you want to enter your beer, you have a deadline of this Saturday the 21st to turn them in (or May 27th if you’re in Bend and can drop it off at the Brew Shop).

…thinking of ingredients that taste similar to PB&J sandwich. At its base, these would be bread, peanuts, and fruit—the type of fruit you would typically find in a jelly: I’m thinking either berries or grapes. Along those lines my first thought would be something like a toasty, nutty ale with peanuts or peanut butter added somehow, and then fruit added to the secondary. Maybe a “nut brown” base using peanuts as the “nut”?

Quoting:

Once again thanks goes out to everyone that works so hard on getting this law changed.  In review SB 444 allows the following:

• Eliminates the restrictions on the transportation of homebrew
• Eliminates the restrictions on where homebrew can be consumed
• Eliminates the restrictions on where homebrew can be made
• Allow clubs to charge dues
• Allow entry fees and prizes at competitions
• Allow homebrew to be served at club meetings held at pubs or other licensed premises
• Allow homebrew club members to participate in small-scale professional brewing at pubs
• Allow people who teach homebrewing classes to be paid.

There’s no word on when that will happen, though in Oregon the Governor must sign (or veto) bills within five days of transmittal or they automatically become law. Since a veto is almost impossible to consider at this point, it’s apparent the law is as good as passed.

I saw the story locally first, though it’s hitting other news sites as well. Interestingly, the last line in the KTVZ story I linked to says (about the bill):

Additionally, home brewers and winemakers can receive a tax deduction or credit for donating beer, wine, or fermented fruit juice to a nonprofit organization.

That seems like a new wrinkle, one I’ll have to read up on a bit more closely. Imagine the possibilities, though!

Many of you are likely aware that the Oregon Liquor Control Commission determined last year that under existing Oregon law, homebrew cannot be consumed outside the home where the beer was produced.

The American Homebrewers Association is supporting an effort by the Oregon Home Brewers Alliance (OHBA) to resolve this issue. The OHBA has been working with Senator Floyd Prozanski, a homebrewer, on Senate Bill 444 along with the already filed amendments to SB 444. While there are other bills addressing homebrewing, the OHBA and the AHA support SB 444 as the most comprehensive of these in restoring to legality all of the activities homebrewers participated in prior to the Oregon Liquor Control Commission’s revision of their interpretation of homebrew law last year, including entering homebrew competitions and sharing homebrew at club meetings.

How Can You Help?
Senate Bill 444 is being scheduled for a hearing before the Senate Business, Transportation and Economic Development Committee Thursday, February 10. We ask you to take a few minutes to call or email the members of the committee and politely urge them to support the passage of SB 444 along with Senator Prozanski’s amendments to the bill. The committee members need to hear from you if this bill is to succeed. Contacting legislators is quick and easy, and every contact they get from homebrewers will help ensure our success.

Senate Business, Transportation and Economic Development Committee Contact Information:

Sen. Lee Beyer, Chair
sen.leebeyer@state.or.us
Capitol Phone: 503-986-1706

Sen. Jason Atkinson, Vice-Chair
sen.jasonatkinson@state.or.us
Capitol Phone: 503-986-1703
District Phone: 541-282-6502

Sen. Ginny Burdick
sen.ginnyburdick@state.or.us
Capitol Phone: 503-986-1718

Sen. Chris Edwards
sen.chrisedwards@state.or.us
Capitol Phone: 503-986-1707

Sen. Fred Girod
sen.fredgirod@state.or.us
Capitol Phone: 503-986-1709
District Phone: 503-769-4321

Sen. Bruce Starr
sen.brucestarr@state.or.us
Capitol Phone: 503-986-1715
District Phone: 503-352-0922

Thank you for your support of homebrewers, your action could make the difference in whether or not this legislation becomes law. Please forward this message on to any other Oregon residents that you feel would be interested in supporting this bill.

This recipe is formulated for a five-gallon batch of homebrew, assuming a standard 75% extract efficiency for a typical single-infusion mash and sparge. (Since I’m doing batch sparging, I have some notes on differences below.) The target original gravity (OG) is 1.055, and the Beer Recipator informs me that this recipe will have 21 IBUs. Final gravity (FG) will depend on the yeast, but I’ve had good results with the Wyeast 1272 I list in the recipe.

Ingredients: Fermentables

• 9 pounds American 2-row malt (90% of the grains)
• 0.5 pounds 40°L Crystal malt (5%)
• 0.5 pounds wheat malt (5%)
• 6-10 pounds roasted pumpkin
• 6 ounces molasses (about ½ cup) (optional)

Hops and Spices

• 1 ounce Mt. Hood (4.6% alpha acid) for 60 minutes (bittering)
• 0.5 ounces Mt. Hood for 15 minutes (aroma)
• 1 teaspoon Irish Moss for 15 minutes
• Pumpkin pie spices for 5 minutes/steeping

Yeast

• Wyeast 1272 American Ale II

Process

• Single infusion mash with a target of 152°F for 1 hour or until conversion
  • Mashing grains and pumpkin together
• Sparge and boil for 60 minutes, with 1 ounce of Mt. Hood hops the full duration for bittering
• After 45 minutes, add the remaining 0.5 ounces of hops for aroma, and the Irish Moss
• Add the spices when there are 5 minutes (or less) left
• Chill, transfer to your primary fermenter, aerate thoroughly and pitch yeast

Notes

Roasting the pumpkin. I used a baking pumpkin and a pie pumpkin that yielded about seven total pounds of pumpkin meat for the mash. To roast, I split the pumpkins in half, discarding the stems, and removed the seeds and strings (I kept the seeds and roasted them separately to snack on). Placing them face down on foil-lined baking sheet (sprayed with non-stick spray for good measure), they were roasted in a 325°F oven for about an hour and a half, or until nice and soft; they came out with nice caramelization on the edges as well. You can easily scoop the meat out of the shell and mash it up.

In my extract recipe, I spoke against using canned pumpkin for the mess you’d end up with; however, the treatment above leaves the pumpkin in a similar state and when doing a proper all-grain mash, you’ll have less messy results than you would for an extract-based recipe. This is because the alternative techniques you may employ to get the pumpkin in the beer for an extract recipe, I believe (and experienced), don’t leave you many options for filtering. In other words, for an all-grain approach, you could get away with canned pumpkin just fine.

Mashing. I’m using the batch sparge technique outlined in How to Brew, so my grain amounts are more that what I listed above due to the lower extract potential batch sparging yields: the adjusted numbers call for a total of 15 pounds of grain rather than the base recipe’s ten. This means I used 13.5 pounds of 2-row, 0.75 pounds of Crystal malt, and 0.75 pounds of wheat.

I heated the pumpkin up with the strike water so it wouldn’t affect the mash temperature (since you already need to account for the temperature of the grain when you mash in)—I found this to work really well and though my target mash temperature was 152°, I hit just above at 153°. This didn’t seem to effect the overall efficiency too much though—when I racked it to the secondary this weekend the gravity was 1.008.

With both the pumpkin and the half pound of malted wheat in the mash, I did encounter a bit of a stuck sparge—not enough to set me back significantly, but enough so that I think I would use a pound of rice hulls in the mash next time to help the filtering.

Miscellaneous notes. I only had three ounces of molasses instead of six on my brew day, so that’s what I went with. Molasses is of course completely optional; I rather like the subtle character it lends to the beer but you could omit it entirely or substitute with a variety of other sugars—some of the natural brown sugars like Demerara or Turbinado would work very well.

For my spice mixture I used 1½ teaspoons of cinnamon, ¼ teaspoon of ground ginger, and ¹/₈ each teaspoons of nutmeg, cloves, and mace. (Allspice would work as well, as an addition or possibly substitute for the mace.) You could add vanilla also—my extract recipe calls for an optional half teaspoon but I didn’t use it this time.

If the spices are too subdued to your liking—especially after a vigorous primary fermentation that can effectively “scrub” them away—you might consider adding them to the secondary (and I do recommend a secondary fermentation/rest). You could use the (powdered) mix similar to what I listed above, or you might even considering using some whole spices—cinnamon sticks, whole cloves, that sort of thing. Simply add these directly to the secondary.

Bottle with ¾ of a cup of corn sugar when ready. And enjoy!