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!
I set out Saturday morning, September 8, with a friend in tow to The Brew Mentor. My labmate and fellow homebrewer told me about this place, and my first visit was so good that I've decided to make it my go-to for ingredients and brewing guidance. Previously I shopped at Warehouse Beverage in Lyndhurst, OH on Mayfield Road. That place is geared toward alcohol purchasing and carries the basics for homebrewing and vinting, if that's your fancy, but it's not someplace to go and fiddle over a recipe with a local expert. However, that's what I wanted to do, so I made the trek to Mentor, OH. I had with me the grain bills and hop additions for three different porter recipes I've been eyeballing and wanted to get help finalizing my recipe. Don, the local expert who helped me (and professional brewer at Willoughy Brewing Company; I found myself in good hands), guided my recipe building: UK Pale malt instead of American 2-Row, enough but not too much rolled oats, Crystal 60L for sweetness, chocolate malt for flavor and color, and just a pinch of Carafe III malt to ensure the dark color desired for a porter. He confirmed my desire to use Northern Brewer hops over Cascade for bittering as the latter is too high in alpha acids for a porter, but fine for flavor/aroma when added at the end of the boil, and suggested I use Safale-4 yeast for fermenting as that strain will leave malted sugars to allow some sweetness to remain in the final product. I also picked up a fermometer to adhere to the outside of my glass 1-gallon fermenter for easy temperature readings and a grain bag for easier mashing. My interaction there took about 30 minutes and cost me $17. My friend, not a homebrewer, was quite interested in my discussion with Don and was amazed at how he spent an half an hour with me for just a $17 purchase: that's the power and bond of homebrewing. From there my friend and I walked over to Mentor Beverage, a non-descript yet amazing beer store where one can purchase single bottles of beer, and I found four different beers whose single bottles I wanted to try; that might be a later blog post.
Our errands in Mentor completed, my friend and I drove to Patterson's Fruit Farm so I could buy a baking pumpkin for my brewing. With that, a bag of gala apples and yummy donuts for the both for my wife and I, we headed back to Cleveland Heights. I had all the ingredients needed to brew the Pumpkin Porter and was ready to go, but first I had to clean bottles and bottle my Cascade IPA which still sat in the fermenter. I cleaning the 17 bottles I collected with an off brand OxyClean solution. This got rid of their labels and cleaned out their interiors, and bottling the IPA the next day went well, leaving the fermenter empty and waiting for another brew. Now I had to prepare the pumpkin.
After several phone calls with my mom, she from whom I've gained much of my kitchen knowledge, and studiously scouring the internet for pumpkin preparation, I cleaned, halved, and seeded the 4.6-pound pumpkin, cut it into palm-sized chunks, and placed it in the oven to roast. Meanwhile, I cleaned the pumpkin gunk from the seeds and prepped those for roasting. The pumpkin came out of the oven fork tender and sat on the stove to cool before I removed the rind and cut it into roughly 1-inch cubes. These I put in the fridge as I wasn't brewing that day and focused on roasting the pumpkin seeds, which prompted more phone calls to mom and resulted with perfectly salty and crunchy pumpkin seeds. Now I had everything ready for brewing.
Look at all that pumpkin! Some will flavor my beer, some will flavor my muffins.
Mashing in a grain bag: easy!
Instead of straining the pre-wort from the mash through a colander and strainer, I simply lifted the bag out of the first runnings, set it in a colander over that liquid to allow more of it to drain from the mashed grains, and then dipped the whole thing into the heated sparge water, steeping it for 10-15 minutes to allow extraction of more sugars. I mixed the two liquids, the first and second runnings, into my 3-gallon stock pot for the boil and I dumped the grains out of the bag, setting it aside for later cleaning while I continued brewing.
3/4 lb pumpkin in 1-cm cubes boiling in the wort.
Hydrated yeast ready to go into sanitized fermenter with cooled wort.
The final step before the full fermenter can be hidden away for a week before racking (syphoning out the fermenting beer to clean out the used yeast to allow more yeast and sediment to fall out of the beer) is cooling the wort. After the 60-minute boil the wort is at 212°F, and before pitching the yeast it must be at room temperature or cooler (depending on if you're brewing an ale or lager) or the heat will damage or kill the nascent yeast cells. You can allow the wort to sit on the counter, but that will take hours to cool to 70°F. Instead, amateur and professional brewers both forcibly cools the wort, but with different techniques. Pros use a fancy-sounding device called a heat exchanger, but that's nothing more than a long length copper with larger, thin fins to more easily and rapidly remove heat from the wort. Large-scale homebrewers use coiled copper tubing, inserting it into the hot wort and running tap water through it until the wort cools down. For 1-gallon homebrewing a bucket of ice is the simple, effective solution. Brooklyn BrewShop's Beer Making Book directs the brewer to fills their sink with ice and cold water, and I've dutifully done that for five batches, but that makes my sink unusable for a time and uses a lot of ice; I buy one 22-lb bag every time I brew. I used my cube cooler as a fermenter cooler during my previous batch, and my recent familiarity with it lead me to think it would be a more economical size for chilling the wort in my 3-gallon stock pot. Lo and behold, it was!
Wort chillin'...
I used a bit too much ice and water and had to remove some of it lest the stock pot holding my precious wort tip over as the ice melts into water and buoyancy causes ill effects. But overall, the wort cooled in about the same time as before, 20-30 mintues, and then pitched perfectly into the fermenter with the yeast. Now I know I can buy less ice and not block the use of my kitchen sink for cooling the wort for yeast pitching; w00t!
Pouring wort into the ready fermenter. Hours of joyful work coming to an end.
I pitched the yeast around 8:40 PM, and by the time I went to bed that night primary fermentation had started. The next morning it was going strong, and continued in that manner for another day or so, the CO2 being pushed out of the blow-off tube thumping against the bottom of the bottle of sanitized water. I haven't had a batch yet that has disappointed me during primary fermentation, and I hope to keep that issue to a minimum. I racked this weekend, one week later, and the beer in fermenter is sitting in the blue bin I use for my "cool, dark place" and spill catcher until I bottle this weekend or next week. Then, because it's a darker, richer beer, it has to bottle condition for at least a month, giving me pumpkin beer by Halloween, which was my goal.
I'm already planning my next batch and the previous batch hasn't even been tasted yet! But that's what happens, as soon as I get wort in the fermenter I start thinking about the next batch. I still want to brew a more traditional pumpkin beer, which seems to be a brown ale (that's what Dogfish Head's Punkin is, and it's amazing!), and since this beer will be in bottles by October, I'll have plenty of season left to buy another baking pumpkin for brewing. But who knows? I might stumble upon an interesting recipe in the next couple of weeks and will want to brew that instead. I don't have to brew everything I want to brew now, but it's sure tempting to try.
And for completeness sake, I present the basic recipe for my Pumpkin Porter, with thanks to the author of the recipe I found online and Don at The Brew Mentor for all his help putting it together.
Grain Bill:
2.25 lb English Pale Malt
6 oz Crystal 60L
4 oz Chocolate Malt
2 oz Rolled Oats
0.7 oz Carafe III Malt
12 oz fresh pumpkin, seeded, peeled, roasted, 1-in cubes
Strike 4 qt H2O at 153°F for mash. Sparge with 3 qt H2O at 170°F
60-min Boil:
0.2 oz Northern Brewer hops @ 60 min
12 oz fresh pumpkin, seeded, peeled, roasted, 1-cm cubes @ 30 min
0.2 oz Cascade hops @ 5 min
1/2 tsp each cinnamon, allspice, pumpkin pie spice @ 5 min
Hydrate and pitch 1/2 packet Safale-4 yeast. Bottle with 1.25 ox priming sugar.
Now you can brew what I brewed, and we can compare the results! If you're going to be in the Cleveland area around Halloween and want to try the Pumpkin Porter, contact me. It might be good. Check out the fb gallery for photos from brewing this batch.
Until next time friends, happy brewing!
UPDATE: Oct 28, 2012
Bottled this batch Sept 24 and put it away to sit for one month. I read in the Beer Craft book that porters need 1-2 months of bottle conditioning, so I held strong for one month, not touching the bottles once but to move them to the fridge after the third week so they could cold condition for a while before tasting. Opened the first bottle Friday night, Oct 26. My patience paid off!
Pumpkin Porter FTW!
Look at that head, and the dark body! The flavor is good if not a little overpowered by the spices, but that's ok. And there's a kick! My palate is so used to alcohol content correlated to the flavor and bite of Pale Ales and IPAs that I didn't notice the strength of this brew until I stood up from my meal. I don't have an SG measurement as I didn't started doing that until the next batch, but I can say that the Pumpkin Porter is no weakling.
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