I seem to have to repeatedly pull out this info on pumpkin. I don’t see any benefit to mashing.
From another forum
[quote]The nutritional information for Libby’s canned "100% pumpkin says per serving it has 9 grams total carbs, 5g fiber, 4g sugars. This doesn’t leave any room for starches. The USDA, however, for the same serving size lists 9.27g total carbs, of which 3.5g is fiber, and 4.03g sugars. This leaves about 1.74g other carbs per 122g serving, or about 1.43% of the total weight of the (canned) pumpkin.
Given that, and that most of the recipes for pumpkin ale I’ve seen call for at most 3 lbs. of pumpkin, that will give you about 19g of starch for the entire batch. Even assuming all of this is converted to pure sugar, I’d rather skip the trouble of mashing it and lose out on that insignificant amount. Adding it to the kettle will still get me the 45g of sugars, but really I’m using it for color and flavor. When I did the math earlier, I found that (raw) pumpkin had a potential gravity of something like 1.002."
The math for fresh pumpkin is a bit different, because of the processing, and because the data doesn’t specify the type of pumpkin. (I suspect it’s not the small “pie pumpkin”.)
There are also lots of variables when you’re dealing with fresh pumpkin. You don’t know how long it’s been since it’s been picked, etc. I think I may end up using canned pumpkin, although it’s generally against my principles to used canned over fresh, but we have an organic, preservative-free canned pumpkin here in NC. Canned pumpkin been shown to have a greater nutritional content than fresh, anyway, which is true for a lot of fruits and vegetables.
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Here’s what the complex carb data boils down to, per
100 grams:
Raw- 4.64g starch (71.4% of total carbs)
Boiled- 2.78g starch (56.7% of total carbs)
Canned- 1.89g starch (23.4% of total carbs)
Now, even assuming you’re using an average raw pumpkin (the highest starch content above), and you use 8lbs (the maximum I’ve seen in a batch), AND it all is converted to sugars, you’re talking about 168 grams of sugars, or 0.37 lbs. By my math, this gives you a net increase in gravity of about 0.002. If you use 3 lbs canned pumpkin, as I’ve typically seen, this goes down to around 0.16 lbs of sugars. This gets me 0.001. I’m not sure I would go through the troubles of mashing for that.
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