October Pumpkin Spice Ale

I bought this as a kit from Midwest Brewing Co.  It sounded tasty and I was more concerned with making a beer with a strong pumpkin presence than anything else.  I also wanted something seasonal that wasn't an Marzen Lager.

Again, I used a single infusion mash at 154 degrees and held that for 60 minutes.  I sparged for about 30 minutes and ended up with six and a half gallons of wart.  I started the boil and added one ounce of Mt. Hood.  While this was going on, I cored and baked three pie pumpkins for 40 minutes at 425 degrees.

 
At 45 minutes I added 1 tsp. of Irish Moss and five minutes later I added my 1 inch cubes of pumpkin meat.  At 2 minutes left in the boil, I added my Cluster hops, cinnamon, and nutmeg.  I immediately started cooling the wart and in about 15 minutes I pitched with Muntons dry yeast.

I left the pumpkin with the wart for fermenting.  I figured the beer could then continue to adsorb the flavor of the pumpkin.  My original gravity was 1.058.  Should have some nice warming alcohol for those cool autumn nights.

When I tasted my wort while siphoning it for secondary, it had a little pumpkin flavor with some subtle cinnamon notes.  It was still a little too sweet to really detect the flavors though.  I'm excited to keg this one.