The story on pumpkin beer in the Sept/ Oct Zymurgy got me thinking: if you can (as the author did) put pumpkin straight into the mash, couldn’t you also (since I don’t do all grain) put pumpkin juice straight into the pot? I thought I’d give it a try, but am finding that, well, no one makes pumpkin juice. When I searched on it, I did find some recipes for it, most of which involve mixing canned pumpkin with another juice (apple, pineapple).
Provided I strain the homemade “juice,” is there any downside here that I’m not seeing? I’m obviously going to need to control for the sugar content in the juice. Isn’t that just a matter of calculating the sugar content of the juice and reducing the DME proportionately?
I imagine determining sugar content in a juiced pumpkin will be difficult. There is also a lot of starch and fiber in pumpkin that can make a mess of your brew kettle, depending on the process you use for juicing. One other advantage of putting the pumpkin in the mash is that you might get some starch-to-sugar conversion out of the pumpkin.
If you do go the route of reducing DME and adding pumpkin “juice” to the kettle, take a gravity reading before flameout to determine if you are where you need to be. You might need to add some of that DME back in (if using a hydrometer, be sure to adjust for the temp of the wort).