BREWDAY: When life drops your butternut, make BUTTERNUT ALE!

Upon the kitchen table that is a family heirloom from when my parents were first married, I had placed two pie pumpkins, and a butternut squash.

I had every intention of making a pumpkin beer in a couple weeks, after pipelining some simple, small SMaSH Pale Ales to feature Cluster and Styrian Celeja hops in two otherwise identical brews. I had even toasted up 8 ounces of malt to a nice, nutty, medium toast, to be divided up between the two pale ales. I had even made up 8 ounces of a home-roasted caramel malt, made from soaking grain and caramelizing it in the oven and then roasting it to dry it out. I had done these things for Pale Ales.

The gods of homebrew hurled my butternut squash upon the ground. It cracked at the top, splitting evenly down the center, and halfway down the fruit.

Immediately, I roasted the squash to make some use out of it. If I had left it alone, it would have just rotted like that.

So... That was not part of our dinner plans, just yet.

Beer gods demanded Butternut Squash Beer.

Interesting fact: Most homebrewers who make pumpkin beer are probably already making butternut squash beer, because most commercial cans of pumpkin puree are actually a type of butternut squash, or a hybrid variety of squash/pumpkin called Dickenson Field Squash. Actual pumpkin, if you made it into a pie, would be a golden yellow color, not the orange we know and assume means pumpkin. Butternut Squash is what people are really thinking about, when they're imagining the flavor of pumpkin in their mind. It's richer, deeper, with a bright orange color, and it's a perfect thing to make beer with on an early autumn day!

I cobbled together a recipe with what I had lying around. Fortunately, I did have some more interesting malts in the brewcloset. (Plus some fresh spices straight from Grenada courtesy of my wife, whose family harvest cocoa, cinnamon, and amazing nutmeg and send it to us from their farm. Nutmeg and cinnamon were both from Grenada!)

This batch turned into a 3 gallon brew when I lost track of how much water I was pouring into the darn brew kettle... The end result was around 3 gallons, right?

I pulled up my edition of iBrewmaster...

BUTTERNUT STOUT!
3 gallons, thereabouts
OG: 1.062
FG: 1.017
30 SRM
(estimated mash efficiency of 86%)

3 pounds of Rahr 2-Row Pale
1 pound of Munich Malt
8 ounces of home-toasted malt
8 ounces of home-made caramel malt, est. at 100L-140L
6 ounces of Caraffa I
6 ounces of Dark Brown Sugar, added to the boil
half of a roasted butternut Squash for about 1.5 pounds, pureed
@60 minutes use 1 ounce of Cluster hops for about 40 IBU
@15 minutes, add one small cinnamon stick, 1/2 tsp of fresh-ground Nutmeg, .25 ounces of grated, fresh Ginger
Include in the full Primary (or secondary instead, if you plan to use one) with 1/4 of the cooked, pureed butternut squash
Pitch 1 full packet of Safale S-04

With Brew-in-a-bag, and a very fine grind, I'm expecting a super efficiency. I also did another overnight mash. In fact, my overnight mash went long because I got pulled away for some stuff for work in the morning, and could not get to the wort after eight hours. It was a thirteen-hour mash, then. I set the oven to 180 degrees when my wort, on the stovetop, was protein resting at 122 degrees for twenty minutes. By the time I got the wort to 154 degrees, the oven had reached 180 degrees. I put my kettle inside to mash overnight, and flipped the oven off. When I woke up, before I got an e-mail from work, I had flipped the oven back on to buy someself some more time, to 200 degrees. I had started the mash at ten o'clock, and didn't mash-out until almost eleven-fifteen.

And, my grind was very small, too. I was really aiming to pulverize this stuff, because I wanted to give BIAB a real go of it with a finer grind.

Anyway, woot for butternut squash! There's still a quarter of the squash sitting in the fridge for my wife.

Of note:

The squash that I put into the primary fermenter was microwaved just before putting it into the primary good and long, to make sure it was completely cooked and to make sure it was completely sanitary. It seemed like the easiest way to sanitize something that likes being cooked in a microwave, right?

Of note: Pictures of a brewday that was messy and spontaneous and fun.

The smell in the primary, just before pitching, was stunning. A milder dark roast, with Caraffa I instead of chocolate and medium-toasted malts instead of dark roasted malts, may not be the "perfect to style" stout, but it does ease into the stout flavors, allowing the butternut pie flavor with the sweetness of the caramel malts, to shine over the top of the dark, thick brew!

It's the sort of thing that makes me want to use exclamation points. Because the squash fell! I can make it into beer! The beer smells really good! Everything is working!

BUTTERNUT STOUT!

Pictures:

Home Toast Your Own Malt to Combat the Madness

Madness, I tell you! Sheer madness! Specialty grains, I've noticed, cast about a buck fifty to two bucks per pound. They are uniform. They are reliable. They are easily scale-able because of their uniformity. This is the route to madness. Where's the magic? Where's the touch of trickery and process mystery that can only happen from hands - human hands - touching small batches of grains and experimenting upon them for delicious beer? With my bulk bags of base malts, one of my plans for these huge sacks of grains involves messing around with them. Someday, I'd like to make my own caramel malts. Why not? John Palmer is convinced it can be done; ergo, I am convinced, too. I know I'd prefer to roast my own roasted barley and chocolate malt, because it can be done from home in exactly the amount needed per batch, utilizing these bulk-bought grains I have sitting in storage, which cost 35 bucks for 50 pounds.

And, more importantly, it is madness to create the same thing, the same way, every single time. It's a trivial pursuit of perfection, when most of the joy of life and cuisine comes from the surprise of the inevitable variation of each moment, ingredient, and process. McDonald's and their ilk pride themselves on uniformity, reproducible outcomes, and machine-like, chemical-laden "food" that is only praise-able, if anything, for it's ability to taste the same in rural China as it does in metro America and every where else in between. This is nothing to be proud of! That's something to be ashamed of, in food and in life! If you are living the same in China as you would in America, process by process, day and night, you are not leading the sort of life I would ever want to live, where my physical location matters not, and I have no connection to what is here, right in front of me, in this moment, variable and mutable and joyful and playful. To celebrate this idea of non-conformity even in the simplest of ingredients, and to celebrate my new all-grain system of brewing, I made one of the ingredients new, by creating my own specialty grain, in my own particular way.

Uniformity is madness.

Toasting malts, for me, was a celebration of the touch of magic that comes from doing things by hand, without the perfect tools, and still producing excellent results that will never, ever be exactly the same time and again.

For my first all-grain recipe, Golden Cloud Ale, I knew I wanted to take a basic Hefeweizen-style of beer to a level I could not achieve with mere extracts. I wanted to do something that had a human touch and a new process, for me, that would take my game to a new level of awesome.

Four ounces of Rahr Red Wheat, and four ounces of Rahr 2-Row were placed in a bowl of filtered water and covered for an hour, not long enough to thoroughly soak them through, but enough to create a lot of moisture in the husk and outer shell. More water meant more sweetness, and lighter-bodied wheat beers shouldn't be too weighed down by sweetness, in my opinion. Still, a little might be nice.

The soaked grains were drained and rinsed. Then, they were spread about an inch thick on a foil-covered baking sheet. The oven was running at 375 degrees to cook some potatoes. When we put the grains in, we turned down the heat to 350. I set the timer for one hour and fifteen minutes...

Ooh, and the house began to smell like good cereal. Like the kind of cereal you'd beg your mom for when you were a kid. I pulled it out occasionally to stir, and attempt to turn over the grains and move them around. I wasn't concerned about uniformity, but I was concerned about burning the bottom and under-toasting the top. The warm, bread-like, sweet smell was something marvelous. Then, I suspect the grains dried out because the smell turned acrid at about the forty-five minute mark. 

At this moment, I added more water straight to the pan, pouring it all over the grains, until the grains were all wet again. I stirred them up as the steam rose from the pan, and added a little more water. I put it back in to toast.

In the end, I pulled it out one last time, moments before my timer would go off.

The water added a sweetness to the acrid roast, but not an overwhelming one. The maillard reaction is the primary aroma, and at one hour and fifteen, it was right on the edge of burning. However, I placed them in a paper bag and let them rest for 24 hours. I still wanted some of the funky acrid-ness, but not too much, so I didn't wait a week, like it said in the book. I waited a day before grinding them up. I let them rest in a paper bag on the counter, quietly becoming my own specialty grains. How often can you find, in your homebrew shop, roasted barley and wheat together for the same level of toastiness and sweetness from both grains? Hooray for non-uniformity! Hooray for experimentation! Hooray for a DiY approach and breaking the rules!

Hooray for instructions from John Palmer's excellent book!

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We shall see if I produce good beer as a result. Next entry: Golden Cloud Ale Brewday.