I found a great looking Pumpkin Ale recipe online the other day at BYO (http://www.byo.com/component/resource/article/1289-pumpkin-beer). I was thinking about brewing a holiday (Halloween) themed beer for a while now and wanted my second batch of all-grain to be something special as well as a little more difficult than the average brew. The recipe is not all that crazy but it caught my eye when I saw that it required 5-6 pounds of pumpkin! That, along with the pumpkin pie spices, should make this a pretty tasty beer.
As I mentioned earlier, this is my second all-grain batch of beer. Before this I mostly brewed extract or partial mash but mostly extract. The first batch of all-grain that I brewed was a recipe that I attempted to modify and ended up forgetting to perform the modifications… So, in about two weeks, ill sample it and hopefully it will have turned out ok anyway. It was just a regular Blonde Ale recipe but it was the first time that I brewed all-grain and it ended up taking me about 7 hours straight to finish the beer. That was a long night as I finished at 1am. Yuck!
Moving onto all-grain, I figured that I would take the extra time to make a starter for my wort now that I was taking the time to eliminate the extract. I started making the starter tonight around 8 pm and finished at about 8:50pm. Not too bad considering I made frozen pizza too. Who says I can’t multitask?? : )
To start my starter, I first sanitized all of the equipment that I figured I would need to use and that would not be boiled. Boiled equipment just needs to be cleaned off. My equipment list consisted of a two piece air-lock, the flask for the starter, a bung, the vial of yeast, a quart sized measuring container and a funnel.
While the equipment was sanitizing, I started boiling a quart of water in a 2 quart pot. Once that reached a gentle boil, I added the half cup of dry light malt extract. The yeast need to have something to eat and mashing such a small amount of grain would not be worth it. Maybe later if I ever get crazy enough to do it.
After boiling and sturring the wort for about 10 minutes, I took it off the burner and put it in a bath of cold tap water and sturred it with a boil sanitized spoon until it was about 75 degrees. This took about 10 minutes or so from what I remember and was a pain in the butt. One drop of sink water in there would have ruined the whole batch for sure. I also got some help from the brew pups.
Once the wort was at the correct temperature, I added it to the flask and proceeded to add the yeast to it as well. One thing to note is that rubber bungs don’t need to be dry to stick to glass properly but foam-rubber ones do. If they are not dry, they will slide all over the place and be a pain in the ass until they finally are dry enough to stick. Again, lame. I made sure to put a towel under the flask so that the bookshelf it was on would not draw heat away from the brewing beer starter. This was a tip from my local home brew store.So, now that the starter is created, I will be able to finish the batch on this Sunday. See you then…
