Saturday, September 25, 2010

Pumpkin Transfer

I transferred my Pumpkin Pie Ale to the secondary fermenter today 9/25/10. The bubbling had slowed down to one bubble every 3 minutes so I decided it was time to transfer after 6 days. I tasted it and it was disappointingly pumpkin-less. I measured 1/2 teaspoon exactly to add to the primary boil I have a feeling that was too little. To make up for the lack of Fall taste I added an additional rounded 1/2 teaspoon of pumpkin spice to the secondary fermenter and placed it in the brew closet. Hopefully this will be enough to elicit the taste of pumpkin pie and Thanksgiving.

UPDATE: September 29, 2010. Tasted the beer again today and determined not enough spice yet. Added an additional teaspoon. Bringing total to 2 teaspoons of pumpkin spice.

UPDATE: October 1, 2010. Tasted beer for final time and pumpkin aroma is adequate so I bottled today. I have not covered bottling on this blog since I have always had kegs. But recently I have been spending too much money on brewing so I decided not to buy my final keg for the kegerator. I will cover my bottling methodology in a post coming soon. I measured my final gravity since it is good to track of gravity readings and I have been lazy up to now. This won't really tell me anything because I did not keep get the original gravity but I need to get in the habit of documenting original and final gravities.
FINAL GRAVITY: 1.025

UPDATE: October 1, 2010 PM. Foamed my first keg, the bottled blonde. So, I could have kegged the pumpkin ale. This is fine since I have not bottled in a while and it would be nice to give out some pumpkin pie ale. I have also wrote up a post about my theory on bottling.

3 comments:

  1. I had the same issue with mine pumpkin ale last year not tasting like pumpkin pie. I think I ended up putting in about 4 times the amount called for and it still did not seem to do much. Were your spices fresh? After about 6 months spices lose their potency.

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  2. Well define fresh... I went to the store and bought them that day. But who knows how long they had been sitting on the shelf for.

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  3. If you bought them that day they should be fairly fresh. I was mainly talking about if they had been sitting in your house for a year. Try your beer again in a week and maybe you will have to add more spices and let it sit in a third fermenter for another week.

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