My club is doing an informal pumpkin beer comp.
Personally I have no desire to brew one. If you like them that’s cool, to each his/her own.
It’s one of those things where I think , why would you want to screw up a perfectly good beer by adding a large orange squash. ???
Just wanted to see what others think.
Pumpkin Beer?
Brewing one.
Not brewing one.
MIght brew one.
Will buy some.
Won’t buy some.
Might buy some.
may try a sample if you hand me your home brew but I don’t want a full pint
My wife & I will be brewing one next weekend. I don’t think adding the pumpkin to the beer is such a bad thing as it really doesn’t add much flavor. What usually turns people off to pumpkin beers are the spices. I personally like pumpkin beers this time of the year. I guess it just goes with autumn.
Feels like Autumn, indeed. I’ve been brewing a pumpkin porter every season for the last 4 years. Its a really good beer that comes in around 7.5%-8%. I got the recipe from Sam G’s Extreme Brewing and converted it to all grain. Its a little different from the typical pumpkin ale you find out there. The spicing is low key but you know its there. Its one of the beers I look forward to brewing and having around for the holidays. I usually pour the first pint on Halloween and keep it on through the end of the year.
It does seem that either you love’em or you hate’em with the spices being the sticking point. The cinnamon is what kills me. Its fine as long as its just a hint since that stuff can over whelm it easily.
I’ll be brewing up one as soon as the store gets in some pumpkins which probably wont be until a couple weeks from now. Next year I plan on growing my own pumpkins so I wont have to wait on them.
I can definitely understand how too much cinnamon would be unpleasant. What I tend to find is that most examples, including commercial ones, have too much clove. Even in a pumpkin pie too much clove, or cinnamon, is not pleasant.
I brewed one up and it’s still in the primary, but is almost ready to be racked to the secondary I would say. Another gravity reading today and tomorrow will tell me.
Anyway, I thought I overdid it when I mixed up the spices, but after tasting my hydrometer sample i think I’m right where I want to be. I was debating whether or not to add a small amount of vanilla to the secondary, but I don’t think i want to do that now, it seems really balanced. The base beer is a brown ale.
I had been planning on brewing one this year. I had never had one and the idea sounded appealing as I loves me some pumpkin pie. Last week I saw a local brewery put out their seasonal pumpkin beer, so I picked up a six pack. I took one sip and said “Oh. So that’s what that tastes like…”
Don’t decide based on what may have been a poorly done version of the beer. Try a few different ones and you may find that you like them after all. I recommend Southern Tier Pumking, Elysian Great Pumpkin, and Dogfish Head Punkin.
Really, my problem is that I have a poor “taste imagination” for things I’ve never tried before. Pumpkin pie beer sounded good until I got a taste of one. Now that I have a metric, I can’t imagine any level of pumpkin pie spices that would be good. Except maybe zero. I imagine zero would be good.
I will make an effort to try other pumpkin beers, but until I find one that isn’t gross, I don’t think I want to waste my efforts making one.
