Or maybe that should be, “Doppel, Dupel, Porter, and Tripel.”
Happy Halloween!
My Halloween was spent indoors, keeping the cold at bay with spaghetti and meatballs, a bottle of Belgian abby ale, and some good friends (since they brought the beer). A snow storm on Saturday knocked out power throughout the state and while we are fortunate to have power now, it’ll be awhile before everyone gets the lights back on. Which is why I’m posting about Halloween on November 1st.
The town here even cancelled trick-or-treating, which seemed a shame, but was probably the right thing to do. Still, it’s hard to think of it as Halloween without trick-or-treaters asking for candy and with snow covering the ground.
Not counting this year, I love Halloween. I truly do. I have since I was a kid. I love the candy, the dressing up, the goofiness of it all. And I love the spooky stuff, ghost, graveyards, witches (no, not real witches, I know some real witches and some of them are really awesome people), and things going bump in the night. I got away from the kiddy aspects of Halloween as I got older, not dressing up for quite a few years, not trick-or-treating since high school (yeah, I said high school), but never let go of my overall love of all things Halloween.
And then, I became a dad, and I could go back to loving every single thing about Halloween. Did we go trick-or-treating with our daughter when she wasn’t even old enough for solid food? You know we did! Now, she’s older, choosing her own costume (rainbow, this year), and I have to be more careful about sniping a few of her candy bars, but I still get caught up in the excitement. The hardest part these days is in reconciling her love of the lighter parts of the holiday (see, rainbow costume) and my love of the spooky stuff. She’s too young for the Exorcist, or even The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. But the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown is just about right, I guess, since she has taken to calling me, “Blockhead.” As in, me asking, “What do you want for dinner?” followed by, “Dad, you’re a blockhead.”
Suddenly seemed like we were on the same wavelength.
But Mother Nature has a way of messing with things, and this year, she set her vengeful ire on our Halloween. Saturday night the snow blew in, the trees came down, the lights went out, and Halloween went away, or at least postponed for sometime later when it’s, you know, not actually Halloween. What’s a guy to do, in a situation like this? Brew a pumpkin beer, of course.
I tend to stay away from flavored brews, preferring my beer to taste like, well, beer. And I’ve had bad luck before brewing with fresh fruit. I’ve made blueberry ales and Belgian lambic-style peach ale, but have had to resort to concentrated flavorings and fruit-flavored liqueurs. These have given me much more control over how much flavor I’m adding. The problem with fresh fruit is in adding enough to create the desired flavor. To make the problem a little more complicated, pumpkin is a pretty bland flavor on its own. But the beer history nerd in me knows that pumpkins enjoy a special place in beer history, being full of delicious fermentable sugars. Early American colonists made pumpkin beer when malt was both rare and expensive. Pumpkin’s bland flavor made it a logical choice. Now, it was my turn to try it.
(Quick unrelated aside. I just discovered that my auto-correct turns lambic into limbic. I find this tremendously entertaining, especially when I consider the affect of lambic on the limbic system! Just me? Ok, nevermind.)
Anyway, the pumpkin beer (recipe below) was fun to make, if a little challenging. Pumpkin is pretty squishy when cooked, which made a little bit of a mess, and the jack-o’-lanterns kept staring at me as a cooked their friends like I was some kind of monster. In the end, the pumpkin side of it was a little weak, but the brown ale side was quite tasty. Next time around, I’ll increase the pumpkin and skip the second hop addition.
Either way, someday soon I hope to be able to sip one after a long-overdue night of trick-or-treating. I might even bring my daughter along.
And now, I have just the thing to serve with my Thanksgiving turkey.
Next up: Turkey beer!
Just kidding.
Or am I?
-----------------------------------------------------------Daddy Blockhead’s Great Pumpkin (Charlie) Brown Ale:
- 8 lbs of sugar pumpkin, scooped out, cut in quarters, and roasted.
- 3 lbs pale 2-row malt
- 3 lbs amber dry malt extract
- 1 lb crystal malt
- ½ lb roasted barley
- ¼ lb black patent malt
- 1 oz. cascade hops (5% alpha)
- ½ oz. fresh-grated nutmeg
- 1 cinnamon stick
- Ale yeast
Heat 2 gallons of water to 120 degrees, mash in the pale malt, crystal malt, black patent malt and the roasted pumpkin, and mash at 155 degrees for 1 hour. Sparge with a gallon of hot water, collect wort and bring to a boil. Add DME, and boil for 1 hour. Add ½ oz hops at 30 minutes, and ½ oz and 45 minutes. Cool wort, transfer to primary fermenter and pitch yeast. Let it sit in the primary for 3 days, rack to secondary and add cinnamon and nutmeg. Keep it in the secondary for 4-7 days, then bottle and allow it to condition for another week. Target O.G. 1.045, ABV 4%
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