Le Pumpkin et Le Blackberry Wheat

Hail peasants!

Today I want to go over a couple of things, namely the tapping of the Keith's Pumpkin Ale as well as a quick ditty of brewing the Blackberry Wheat.

The KPA was a partial extract recipe from deFalco's, they call it the Great Pumkin [sic] Ale. I tried this recipe as an all-grain last time and added WAAAAAY too much pumpkin. To call it chewy and mealy would be a compliment. This time however I scaled back on the pumpkin quite a bit, and poured the first pint below.


I'm pretty pleased with the results. The base beer is an amber that finishes with pumpkin pie spice. I'd like to have tasted more body in the beer, but will give this guy a little bit more time to settle and condition. Ok, on to the Blackberry Wheat!

This is a recipe that I've kind of modded along the way. Technically its an American-style hefeweizen (at least with the grain bill), but I like to use the Wyeast 1056 American Ale yeast. Here's the recipe:

• 6# 2-Row Pale Malt


• 3# Domestic White Wheat


• 8oz Cara-Vienne Malt


• 4oz Rice Hulls


• 1.0oz Czech Saaz 3.1AA @ 60m


• 0.5oz Czech Saaz 3.1AA @ 5m


• 2oz blackberry extract @ keg


• Wyeast 1056 American Ale

Mash in with 1.5L of water per pound of grain (about 3.5g) at 152*F. Hold for an hour, mash out slowly (I did a 40min slow draw). Sparge with 4.5g of water at 170*F.


It was a cold mother that day (well, at least for Houston) so we brewed in the garage. You can see the dead soldiers starting to pile up on the table. Somewhere there's a Wicked Hops Rule of Thumb that says not to drink until the boil, but we typically ignore the hell out of that. As Captain Barbosa likes to say, "They're more like guidelines than actual rules." :)

Here we are racking to carboy. Aerated (violently shook) the carboy before adding the Wyeast, and was good to go. Hydrometer reading came in at 1.053. I's pleased with that.

Against, temps in Houston were to be relatively low this week, so I wrapped the guy in a towel and set in the garage. Good thing I did because...


LOOK AT THIS! This is about 24 hours after racking and I've got krausen coming out of my ears! To be fair my carboy is a 6-gallon model and not a 6.5-gallon like Brandon has. Mayhaps I need to invest in one.


All for now, will update you guys when I get em!