The Pumpkin Porter Cometh

Left: Roasted pumpkin cooling on the stove.  

Right: Pumpkin Porter after a night of vigorous fermenting

On September 10 I brewed my sixth 1-gallon batch of beer.  As I wrote in an earlier post, Pumpkin Beers are Coming, I wanted to brew a pumpkin beer for the fall, but I was also feeling a porter coming on as I've recently allowed myself to become reintroduced to the darker styles.  A friend moved this summer and left me the beer contents of his fridge which consisted of porters and stouts, and I'm thankful for free those darker brews.  Coming out of college I was a porter, stout, and lager guy.  I think it was the low hoppiness in those styles that lead me that way because you couldn't get me to drink Stone's Arrogant Bastard if you paid me (well, maybe if you paid me, but I wouldn't have enjoyed it).  My wife recently told me that she watched me become the pale ale and IPA man I've been for the past 5 years.  I thought I had transitioned into those hoppy styles before I met her, but I guess I was still hankering for a dark coffee stout when we first met.  And I find myself with those yearnings again.  In addition to this, I've been growing weary of IPAs.  Don't get me wrong, I love a hopped up ale more than most, but I've noticed that that's mostly what American craft breweries offer and a recent request for a porter at a favorite local bar coughed up only one: Stone's Smoked Porter w/ Vanilla, an amazing drink to be sure.  Those events lead me to the path to brew my own darker beer, but I still wanted to crank out something with America's favorite gourd-like squash, PUMPKIN!  As detailed in my earlier post, I stumbled upon a recipe for a 1-gallon batch of spiced pumpkin porter and was in heaven: exactly what I wanted in one recipe!

A Blast Through My Homebrewing Past!

I brewed the Pumpkin Porter last night, the brew I talked about in my second post, and it was a blast.  I'll have a fuller entry about that later, but first I want to post links to the FB photo galleries of my previous five batches.  My brewing experiences range from "chicken with his head cut off" (during my first brew), to "I got this, this ain't nothin'!" (the two most recent), I've had varying success in bottling (better now that I've gotten used to syphoning), and I'm learning about environmental control during fermentation.  Since I'm kind of blogging through photos and comments on FB, but now have this separate blog, I do want those who aren't on FB to experience what I share there.

I Went to Milwaukee for a Wedding and Visited a Brewery, Imagine That!

Milwaukee Brewing Company variety banners.

This past weekend my wife Lauren and I drove to Milwaukee for a wedding.  Arriving Friday evening, with the wedding Saturday evening at the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center, we had Saturday morning and day to entertain ourselves in that great Midwestern City.  And great it is!  Our day started with a walk to Lake Michigan with our host and their dogs.  Then we had lunch and coffee and a brief Bible study at an Alterra Coffee on the Lake near the Milwaukee Art Museum.  We wanted to visit the museum but time constraints and the idea of spending the little time we then had indoors in an art museum when that's all we'd be able to do in Milwaukee pushed us to do something a little more authentic: visit a brewery!  After a driving tour of downtown Milwaukee, UW Milwaukee, and the adjoining neighbourhoods, we headed to the Third Ward, a revitalized warehouse district, to the Milwaukee Brewing Company (abbreviated MKE).