Ugly Pumpkin Ale 2012

Back in August a couple of friends came over the house to help me brew a pumpkin ale for a Fallapalooza party they were having. We wanted a pumpkin ale with spices and on the malty side. What I did was basically take my brown ale recipe, added spices and pumpkin to it. We made 5 gallons of the stuff but there was a set back in the brewing process. I had never worked with pumpkin before so I was reading that generally people used a couple of pounds of this stuff. I went out and filled my cart up with Libby canned pumpkin. About 6 cans. all six cans went into the mash then at sparge time we noticed we couldn't even vourloff. The mash water was soooo thick. We were in trouble! What ended up happening is that we started all over again. I mean cleaning then crushing grains etc. During the second time mashing I separated some of the sweet pumpkin wort from our original brew to mix with the new mash. This seem to work very well but obviously took a whole day to brew because of the set back. Well, fast forward to Fallapalooza and I come to find the beer wasn't fully carbonated and the spices that were so prevalent from the sample I tasted on bottling day was gone. I'm actually going to open another bottle tonight and see where we are at with this thing. I also plan on saving a couple of bottles to open up during next year's pumpkin brew day.

Here is the recipe I used

Ingredients: 

13 lb (82.5%) 2-Row Brewers Malt; Briess 

10.0 oz (4.0%) 2-Row Caramel Malt 120L; Briess- 

10.0 oz (4.0%) Biscuit Malt ; Dingemans 

8.0 oz (3.2%) Chocolate (Mout Roost 1400); Dingemans 

1 lb Pumpkin (canned) - added during mash 

1.0 oz (50.0%) Northern Brewer (8.0%) - added during boil, boiled 60 m 

1.0 oz (50.0%) Sterling (7.5%) - added during boil, boiled 0.0 m 

1.0 tsp Pumpkin Pie Spice - added during boil, boiled 1.0 m 

1.0 lb (6.3%) Dark Brown Sugar 1.0 m 

1.0 ea White Labs WLP001 California Ale 

Original Gravity: 1.079 

Terminal Gravity: 1.017 

Color: 23.21 SRM 

Alcohol: 8.17% 

Bitterness: 28.4 

I mashed for an hour at 148 degrees. Boiled for an hour