We had a pumpkin left over from the fall and I kept meaning to make a Coconut Lime Pumpkin Soup. (Hmmm not to rush through summer but doesn't that sound good right now?) With some convincing I allowed Joe to use it for some beer. The process for brewing the beer was pretty much the same but instead of starting the beer out with plain water you use pumpkin water. This was made by boiling pumpkin chunks til they are tender then blending them. This bear also had some new additions for us ... spices. A pumpkin pie like combination of Allspice, cinnamon and nutmeg.
The wort was a thick mess. Thicker than we were used to and it separated quickly.
We think we forgot some Malt extract. The beginning gravity reading was off from what the recipe said it should be. The theories we have are that it was not mixed enough when we took the reading or the pound of malt we missed effected the reading negatively.
We brewed the beer on 02/05/10 and the OG reading was 1.040 (should have been 1.078). We bottled it on 02/15/10 with an ending gravity of 1.013.
We paid 51.99 for the ingredients for this beer. It is higher than normal because we also bought some bottling caps, extra priming sugar, and a new hydrometer. The cost at the store would have been around 55. Leaving us with savings which is a plus but not really reducing our investment numbers as much. We are still 95.05 in the hole. This will all change when the barley wine is complete. (it is brewed and bottled- but it needs to bottle age for 3 months) We will have payed off the equipment by the time it's done. We'll keep chipping away with other beers in the mean time.
So if the numbers are accurate the alcohol content is - 3.5 %. If the reading was off because it just wasn't mixed up it would be 8.6%. A huge difference! I guess in the name of science I will have to drink a few in a row and see how it makes me feel. A sacrifice I know.
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