BREWDAY: Wise Pumpkin Says Dunkel for Halloween

The seasonal brews are one of my favorite things to do. Most brewers don't like pumpkin beer. It is a plebian affair, after all, and you have to like what pumpkin tastes like to like it in a brew. Pumpkin has a flavor. It is not necessarily a pie flavor. In fact, most pumpkin pies are made with butternut squash. Still, for those of us who do enjoy pumpkin, a seasonal brew with the fruits of the autumn harvest is the perfect time to celebrate that pumpkin love.

Ah, pumpkin. Ah, Halloween. Halloween pumpkin. Ah. Yes.

Here's what I came up with from my handy brew closet supply:

3 gallon batch

1 whole roasted pumpkin pie pumpkin (about 2 1/3 pounds, cleaned, in this case)

2 pounds of red wheat malt

8 ounces of 2-row

8 ounces of caramunich

8 ounces of piloncillo sugar

2 ounces of carafa i

2 ounces of quaker quick oats

.8 ounces of Styrian Celeja hops @60

.2 ounces of Styrian Celeja hops @30

1 teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice blend (in this case, McCormick's brand. I did a good strong amount because the container is years old. Were this a fresh batch of homemade stuff, I'd use 1/3 of a teaspoon!)

1/2 teaspoon of Chinese Five Spice (in this case, a homemade blend, about a year old, containing fennel, star anise, clove, szechuan peppercorn, and cinnamon)

Things I did differently this time:

I used 3.75 gallons of storebought spring water to fill my kettle, this time. I want to see if I can isolate either the water or the sanitation process. I kept my sanitation the same, with the bleach and the rinsing of bleach. Let's see if it is (as I suspect) likely coming from the hard, chlorinated San Antonio tap water.

I've had good results with overnight mashing, and I'm going to keep doing it, for now, until I can get a refractometer. I've ordered one, but it is not here, yet.

So, I got my strike water up to 175 degrees, doughed in with my fresh crushed grain and pumpkin, and got the temperature up to about 155. Then, I placed my kettle in a pre-heated oven at 170 degrees. I flipped the oven off, went to bed, and did the rest of the boil in the morning. Simple. 

Pumpkin. I love pumpkin. I could take a cured cinderella pumpkin, slice it up like fine cheese and eat it raw. I could make pumpkin bread, and pumpkin alcohol, and pumpkin cinnamon rolls... I love pumpkin!

How do you process a pumpkin for homebrew if you don't have a food processor? Ours was dirty, and I was too lazy to clean it, so I had to find a different way. I put the roasted pumpkin in a plastic bag, and smashed it up with my hands, crushing it inside of the plastic bag into a gooey paste. It was clean and easy to work with, and seemed to lead to good conversion in the kettle. Time will tell. Time will tell. Refractometer en route.

Anyway, the wise pumpkin says dunkel, because yeast should have a flavor, and the spicy, fruity German yeast will complement the spicy, fruity pumpkin brew. It will not be another commercial amber pumpkin ale. (I could buy that in the store, if I wanted it!) It will be something I haven't seen out and about. And, my hope is that the piloncillo and caramunich will impart a rich caramel flavor to go with the pumpkin and the spice. Caramel pumpkin is a wise combination, no?

Pictures:

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:

Making a Big Mess With Grizzly Grain Mill

So, coming into a few Amazon gift cards and points, my wife and I were able to acquire a little mill for grain. I say "my wife and I" and I am not being truthful. Really, this was for me, all me, and me me me.

It arrived, and I was excited to put it to use, grinding up some grains for my first homebrew. Word on the street was Charlie Papazian still uses a mill just like this one for his grind, and I happen to like the idea of keeping things small, simple, and hand-powered for a while. I like the physicality of the hobby. It connects me to the process in a way that makes me feel like I'm part of a tradition that goes back to Sumeria and before. (I say this, of course, after only milling a single batch for a 2 gallon brew, naturally.)

Still, I was excited!

I pulled everything out of the box. I put it together. I took it apart again. Puzzled, I searched the internet for access to information about this device that came with no instructions, whatsoever.

So... 

Hello, grain. Here you are looking at the grain bill for my first, all-grain brew. This recipe combines two pounds of Rahr Red Wheat with two pounds of Rahr 2-Row, 8 ounces of a special Toasted Malt (I'll cover that next time!), and 4.63 ounces, exactly, of Quaker Quick Oats. Let's cover the grinding today, not the toasting, and not the rest of this simple, little recipe.

I set the Grizzly Mill up on a wooden folding table we keep around the kitchen to use as an extra island. I put in my first bits of grain, to test it out. It seemed too fine. I adjusted to loosen it. And, ker-plunk. The screws on the sides that hold the faces together slipped away. Whole kernels were passing through. The third time was the charm.

First grind achieved. Not a perfect milling, by any stretch, but reminiscent of what I had been accustomed to using the homebrew shops barley crusher. With a BIAB brew, I was confident I wouldn't have to be so finicky about the grind, if I just let it mash a little longer. Or a lot longer. Whatever.

The Grizzly Mill is easy to use, but slippery. I had to remove the rubber spacers to get the mill grinding plates to hold together, and during my grind, I noticed that the wingnuts that hold everything in place are liable to slip out from the sides, throwing all the plates off and making even more of a mess than usual.

Also, the Grizzly Mill is SUPER MESSY. I tried using a bag over it to catch the flying grains, and all I succeeded at catching was the plastic bag in between the grinding plates. Also, the bag made it harder to see when my wingnuts were about to slip out of the sides. In the end, I just placed my free hand over the top, and held the finickiest of the screws in place, and gave in to the mess.

And, a mess it was...

This was the view, looking down at just one side of the wreckage.

How much grain do you think I lost, there? An ounce? Two ounces?

I almost swept this up onto the digital scale to get a reading of how bad my losses were, but I figured I was only seeing half the losses, what with all the powder that was flying up from the plates, and who knows how far things got flung where I didn't see them?

Things I have learned:

1) Wear a Face Mask or bandit-like bandanna when grinding: My sinuses were acting up the rest of the night and into the morning from inhaling all those powdered malts.

2) The Corona-style mill can produce a perfectly acceptable crush, but the mills will be a little crazy by themselves, and probably benefit from the sort of things homebrewers do to mod their equipment.

3) Do this outside. Let the lost grains return to nature, where I don't have to sweep. It's one less step for us during a long process. I see the driveway or the porch in my future, for grinding.

4) I ground my grains the night before brewday, because I expected to be working out kinks in my process. I'm both glad and sad that I did. The initial, fresh-crushed smell was so much better than the next morning's milled grains, sitting out overnight. But, the time saved was HUGE on brewday. Measuring out, and hand-cranking grains and cleaning up the mess takes some amount of time, and I say do it the night before to mitigate the time and stress on brewday.

5) When using a grain mill, up your measured grains about an ounce or two, to compensate for the losses due to cheap mills flinging everything all over the place. 

Speaking of Charlie Papazian, if you are new to Homebrewing, I recommend his excellent book, wherein I learned all about milling and grinding my stuff.