Pumpkin Chlorophenol Spice Ale

The Pumpkin Spice Ale seemed to be doomed from the very beginning. You can read all about it in an earlier post.

I'm pretty sure that this recipe may be thrown out, but it depends on who you ask. Sonya, Ryan, and I decided to give it a taste test last Friday to see if, by some miracle, the beer turned out. After the first taste, Ryan and I just looked disappointingly into our mason jars of "Pumpkin Ale" and decided, nearly simultaneously, that it had the odd taste of Band-Aids. For anyone who has ever brewed, you'll understand exactly what I mean by that.

It's not like we had an unfortunate "lunch lady band-aid in the goulash" kind of problem. It's just something known as off-flavoring. Surprisingly, I blame it on what seems like the smallest mistake that we made.

The tap water.
Although we only used a little bit, Pittsburgh's water sucks. You get Chlorophenols in unfiltered tap water if your city adds any chlorine to the water. Chlorophenols smell and taste like vinyl.

In case you were wondering.

Sonya, however, said that she didn't mind the slight medicinal taste and thought it wasn't too bad. I'm glad to hear that because we have two cases of it that I would hate to see go to waste. Anyone interested in helping us drink these two cases of beer is more than welcome. Or if you happen to have a cut on your tongue or in your throat and can't figure out how to put a band-aid on it, come on over.

It's honestly not that bad.

Darn tap water.

Pumpkin Spice Ale

It took me about a week of researching, but I finally came up with my own beer recipe. I had originally hoped to have this brew ready for Halloween, but it wasn't ready yet, so it ended up getting pushed back a little. Actually a lot.

I made a recipe for a Pumpkin Spice Ale for our December batch. I know. I could have made a more fitting recipe for the month, but Sonya really likes Pumpkin beer and it seemed very challenging. Since I love a good challenge, once again, I figured "why not?"

Every time we brew, Ryan and I seem to get better at it. It goes much smoother, it's less hectic, and we figure out a solution to some problem we had before.

We had been a little nervous about this one since it was my own recipe, but we were confident and figured it couldn't be too bad as long as we didn't stray from that recipe. Except we did. Several times.

Eh, I'm still confident.

We didn't have the muslin bags we needed, so we just mashed the grains and pumpkin right in the water, then strained it all out. We'll catch the rest when it settles in either the primary or secondary fermenting.

Then we, and by we I mean I, accidentally swapped the bittering hops with the flavoring hops. It really won't matter, but I was pretty disappointed when Ryan pointed that out to me. Oh well.

The final thing that I was a little disappointed with was the fact that I accidentally used some tap water in the batch. Since it's so little, it shouldn't cause a problem, but I really like to use only spring water in the beer.

Even though we now have a wort chiller, we decided to use a natural chiller this time. Snow. It's cheaper than city water and it adds an element of ridiculousness.


I'll have to report back in about a month on the turn out.