Over the Bridge

It's brew day!

I wasn't exactly certain when I'd get around to it, but for the past couple months, I'd had the ingredients around to make a beer, but hadn't gotten around to making it.

Enter today; when I thought I'd be going for a picnic with my parents (while maintaining social distance of course), at Park Île-de-la-Visitation, but instead, due to weather, I found I had nothing to do. (Tuesdays are generally my weekday off from work.). And so, after futzing around on the computer for a while, I decided, why the hell not; may as well do the beer.

And so, I started in on making my Pumpkin (Not Exactly) Pie Ale.

Ingredients as follows:

• 3.5 kg Light Malt Extract
• 4 Butternut Squash (instead of pumpkin, because it's not exactly pumpkin season)
• 200g Crystal Malt
• 14g Hallertau Magnum (Boil)
• 28g Saaz (Finish)
• 2 tbsp Cinammon (Finish)
• 1 tsp Nutmeg (Finish)
• 500g Lactose (Finish)
• Wyeast British Ale Yeast

This is an itereation of an earlier recpie, where I pretty much did the same thing, except used:

• 1 Butternut Squash instead of 4.
• No Lactose
• 28g of Hallertau Magnum instead of 14g.

So, I varied it up, because last time, it was good, but:

• It felt a little thin.
• Some sweetness would do it good.
• It was too bitter.

So, those changes are really designed to address all three of those problems. Too much boiling hops will make the beer too bitter, so I cut that in half; the thinness is caused by a lack of femrmentable stuff in there, so I upped the amount of squash, and I added some sweetness through adding lactose; a type of sugar that the British Ale Yeast can't ferment, so it'll come through in the final product.

Not sure how it'll taste, but it certainly smells delicious (that's mostly the cinnamon and and the malt at this point), but it's looking good! It's on the sink, cooling now, but soon I'll toss it into its fermentation vessel (i.e. a plastic bucket), and away it'll go! 23L of deliciousness, ready in about 3 weeks.

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