Welcome to our new beer blog! We may as well get right down to business: my first post will be about the last beer we made, a pumpkin ale that we brewed in the middle of October and started drinking at the beginning of December. Read on to hear about the beer, and scroll down for the recipe.
If you walk into a liquor store in mid-October, you will probably see a fair number of pumpkin ales on the shelves. Most people probably don’t find this odd — it is pumpkin season, after all. But here in New England the pumpkins are only just starting to be ripe in October, and these beers should take at least a month to ferment. What it means, of course, is that most of these beers are made with pumpkin extract rather than fresh pumpkins. Now, I don’t have anything against the use of flavor extracts in beer. Actually, they probably give much more predictable flavors and mess with the chemistry a lot less than using fresh fruits and vegetables. But sometimes you need to live dangerously, and using fresh local pumpkins in our pumpkin beer gives us such a delicious sense of moral superiority.
