Autumn is Ausumn

Spooky Christmas is again almost here,
so it's time once more for our favorite beer.
Brewed with four pumpkins thrown into the mash,
we'll later add spices but, please, just a dash.
A fistful of caramel and another of chocolate,
a pound of roast malt to make a sweet stout of it.
Just enough fuggles for bittering hops,
we swear that you'll scream, 'this is the tops!'

Batch #65
Pumpkin Stout
8 lbs Maris Otter
1 lb British Roasted Barley
1 lb White Wheat Malt
6 oz British 70/80°L
4 oz British Pale Chocolate
6 lbs Pumpkin flesh (cooked, smushed)
8 oz Rice hulls
1.5 lbs Molasses (10m)
4 oz Lactose, 10m
1 oz Fuggles, 5.1%AA (60m)
1 oz Fuggles, 9.2%AA (20m)
1 tsp calcium chloride (mash)
1 tab whirlfloc (10m)
Safale US-05, 11.5g dry
OG: 1.064
FG: 1.016
ABV: 6.3%
IBU: ~25

Get up earlier than usual. Split, scrape out the seeds, and bake your pumpkins at 300F for an hour to 90m (want the skin to be a little saggy and the flesh to caramelize a bit). Pie pumpkins are best (sweet taste as opposed to just big). I had four pumpkins, weighing almost 17lbs total, to get the 6lbs of flesh (cooked weight). Once cooked, scrape out the flesh and save in a bowl for the mash.

Mashed in with 4 gal water (162F) to reach an initial infusion of 146F (difficult to calculate thanks to the pumpkin and rice hulls (pumpkin = starch, rice hulls = no stuck mash, please). Added tea kettles full of near-boiling water after 15m and 30m mash time to reach 150 and 153F, respectively. This was not my plan. I initially wanted a single infusion at 154F, but the pumpkin threw me off.

Boil 60m, adding hops and adjuncts as indicated. Cool to fermentation temp (I like 68F) and pitch yeast.

mmmalt

Update 8/11 - Tapped, a few bottles prepped for comps. Gelatin is amazing. A little gritty in the first pour, but is brilliantly clear now!
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Update 8/4 - Kegged. Trying gelatin as a fining agent. It's pretty cloudy now since I missed the clarifier during the boil and haven't been seeing great cold breaks lately. This might be going to competition, and it might not be. We'll see.
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I've been meaning to brew an altbier for a while. It's essentially a German amber ale. Clean, dry, yet still malty and complex. This recipe is inspired by the Kaiser Alt recipe over at Braukaiser.com. I saw Kai speak at the AHA conference and in checking out his website found the recipe (and one for Brezels!). I've also wanted to try a decoction just to see how it turns out. Lucky me, Kai's all about traditional German technique, and his recipe recommends a step mash with a single decoction at mash out. So here we go.

Batch #62
Altbier (Kaiser Alt)
--8lbs Munich
--1lb CaraMunich
--1.5oz Carafa II
--2oz Hallertauer 4.2%AA (60min, pellet)
--1/4 tsp gypsum (mash)
--WLP008 East Coast Ale
OG: 1.048
FG: 1.012
ABV: 4.7%
IBU: 25

Mashed in to 132°F, held 20m. Raised to 149°F, held 45m. Decocted ~40% of mash and boiled for 20m (heat slowly to a boil, ~5°F/m). Returned decocted portion to main mash to hit 168°F, held 10m. Collected 7.25 gallons wort. Boiled 70m, chilled to 64°F and pitched yeast.

Wry Rye

By request from a fan of the beers (...but no one's actually paid me yet...), a witbier. With rye, because...why not?

Batch #31
Wry Wit
--5lbs Belgian Pils
--5lbs Flaked Wheat
--1lbs Flaked Rye
--5AAU Vanguard 4.4%AA, pellets (60min)
--1/2 oz Sweet Dried Orange Peel (5min)
--1/2 tsp coriander powder (5min)
--WLP400 Edinburgh Ale yeast, 1L starter
OG: 1.050
FG: 1.010ish
ABV: 5% or so
IBU: 20ish

Mash-in at 104F in 7qts water, rest for 20min (lots of unmalted wheat!). Added ~7.5qts water to raise temp to 152F, rest for 40min. That was the plan. For whatever reason, the saccharification rest wouldn't maintain temp. So it ran low at around 148 in the middle of the mash for about 50min. I extracted a total of 6.5gal wort at 1.045 (batch sparge...drained, added 3.5gallons, drained,...ended up adding one more gallon to get to volume) with sparge water at about 170. No mash-out. Works out to around 73% efficiency. Woohoo!. Thanks, 1/2tsp of gypsum in the mash water...and acid rest, I suppose. Again, too many variables to really tell. My next batch should be all malt, so I'll skip the rest at 104 and go straight to the final rest temp. That should make it easier to determine the role of the gypsum. Pitched the yeast around 2pm or so, saw a bubble come through the airlock around 8 or 9pm. Nice kräusen the next morning.

A slightly bigger lager.

Update 1/7/09 - SG at 1.012 already! Wow. That was fast. The sugar, I know. After some discussion on the B3 board, I've decided not to call this a doppelbock anymore. I don't know what it is. Bock? We'll see. I'm going to start lagering as soon as I have an empty keg...hopefully in the next day or so.
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Used my brand new grain mill today. Looks like my efficiency in the mash was about 65%. It was the first time I've done a step mash, so I'm not ruling that out because I didn't really know what I was doing, but I'll try for a finer crush on the next batch.

I was going to make one of Papazian's recipes today, but decided that his doppelbock, while it sounds good, was a little lighter than I want. I was going to make the B3 doppelbock, but the shop was OUT of Munich malt. What?

So I'm making a scaled down version of the recipe for Samichlaus found in the BYO clone issue.

Batch#29
Doppelbock
--14lbs Ger. Pilsner
--1.5lbs Am. Vienna
--1lb Crystal 75-80L
--1.75lb Turbinado sugar
--1.5oz Glacier 6.0%AA (60min)
--3/8oz Sterling 6.0%AA (15min)
--0.5oz Vanguard 4.4%AA (2min)
--1/4tsp Supermoss (10min)
--WLP838 S. Ger. Lager, trub from Dortmunder Lager
OG: 1.080
FG: 1.013
ABV: 8.8%
IBU: ~25

Mashed in at 0.75qts/lb to 110F. Rest 25min while heating water for next infusion. Added about a gallon of water at 190F, mash raised to 135F for 10min. Added remaining 3 gallons of near-boiling water to reach 158F. Mashed 40min. No mash-out (tun full!). Recirculated until clear, collected 3.5 gallons wort while sparging with 170-180F water (2 gallons). Stirred the mash, recirculated until clear, collected another 3.5 gallons. 90 minute boil. Checked on the beer after 8 hours, healthy kraüsen and a couple bubbles per second! Reusing yeast cakes is the way to go.