Tis the Season!

[Apparently I never posted this article. I found it on the my system. It still has the original time stamp so I figured it wouldn't hurt to get it up here.]

Time to brew that pumpkin beer... for Thanksgiving... Ok fine. So it's not the season, but it is a season and that calls for a special beer. This is the first time I have brewed with a non brewing ingredient. This beer called for about 3.5 pounds of pumpkin to be added to the mash. However, after talking with the fine folks at the homebrew store, I was persuaded to just add the pumpkin to the boil. This let me avoid a problem that plagues a lot of pumpkin mashes... a stuck sparge.

This brew went smoothly despite the fact that I didn't hit my numbers. The beer ended up a bit low on starting gravity. This was in part because I just kind of went for it with this recipe. The computer that I had Beersmith running on has died. So I am in the dark with my brewing software. For this recipe I tried to make the adjustments to my system without any software and I didn't do a very good job. Hopefully, it will turn out alright.