On Pumpkin Ale and Stuck Sparge

Here begins the next part of the Pumpkin Ale saga. So we brewed last weekend (read: I wrote this post three weeks ago and didn't finish it till now) and it went… as it normally does with screw ups and hang-ups. Here is a brief summary of the ingredients (sans hops which I can't find the list of right now):

5lbs canned pumpkin (roasted 1hr on a baking sheet)
lager malt
Crystal malt
Ginger
Cinnamon
Allspice

We use lager malt because the pumpkin is going to add a lot of body to the beer and had we used our regular base malt of 2-row barley it could have resulted in an overly thick beer. The idea is to get some of the flavors of pumpkin pie not to make it as thick as pumpkin pie. As for the spices I will leave that up to your own personal taste. This is the blend we used last time and it turned out well. Other brewers will leave out the ginger or will add spices like cardamom, but again it’s personal taste.

The hop choice comes mainly out of availability. This is a completely different hop blend than we used last time but our LHBS was out of every variety of hops we used previously with the exception of Willamette.

We roasted the pumpkin for one hour in the oven on a baking sheet. After roasting we added the pumpkin to the mash after 30 minutes. It smelled delicious.

The mash went well until it came time for lautering and sparging. Our mash tun setup consists of a metal braid in the bottom of our converted cooler which can lead to some issues. I am talking issues like the kind an old man with an enlarged prostate gets. Weak stream. On the lighter beers such as pale ale or IPA this is never a problem, but with the pumpkin or stout it becomes a problem. The pumpkin makes the wort extremely thick even after the addition of hot water for the mashout and the flow of wort slows to a mere trickle. Not to worry though. Having faced this exact situation in the past we have come up with a surefire remedy. Make a mess. A huge mess. More on this later.

The first step once our sparge was clearly stuck was to try and stir things up a bit with our paddle. Hopefully this would blend the cement like mixture enough to allow the wort to flow again. However, the downside was that it disturbed our grain bed which had given us nice clear wort up until this point. It got to be so that we had to stir every minute or so in order to continue even a modest flow of the now cloudy wort. Then came our next brilliant plan.

We found our solution in a grain bag left over from our time before the mash tun. So with great care taken to spill as much wort as possible over ourselves (hot wort, very hot wort…) we transferred the mess of pumpkin, grains and wort to another container, placed the grain bag inside our mash tun and then promptly transferred the mess back and into the grain bag. Messy enough? Not by Midnight standards. What followed was a steady process of pouring more sparge water over the grains and then as the flow out of the mash tun slowed we would pull the entire grain bag out of the mash tun to get the flow going again. Two things I should point out here: #1 The grain bag is also very hot, as in 170° F hot so whoever lifts it is getting a little burned. #2 All the grains plus pumpkin plus all the water it was holding is not only heavy, but the bagged mass has swollen to fill the whole mash tun, sealing itself in. The result is that pulling this out is like trying to pull the sword from the stone... with no arms.

In the end it worked. We had somewhat cloudy wort for our boil but hopefully we didn’t pull too many tannins into our finished beer.

Lessons for those who may try this:
#1 If you are using the El Cheapo mash tun as we were with the plumbing braid in the cooler, you are in for some trouble. The pumpkin comes out of the can as a paste and when you add this to your mash it creates a mixture with the consistency of fresh cement. I would suggest either upgrading your mash tun as we will or perhaps adding the pumpkin to your primary or secondary. This will open you up to the possibility of some contamination so be careful.
#2 It is a good idea to rack this brew into a secondary and let it condition and clarify. We had a very cloudy brew and one week in the primary didn't clarify it quite enough.
#3 Should you attempt this recipe have some homebrews on hand. I would suggest one case worth at a minimum. Let me tell you this would have REALLY eased the stress of trying to get this brew moving faster than a turtle... a 100 year old turtle... also the turtle is dead.

All jokes aside it was nonetheless fun as always and the brew should turn out delicious. On that note, crack open a homebrew of your own for you have made it through another of my blathering blog posts. Cheers!