Pumpkin Oatmeal Stout:

My mom grew a lot of pumpkins this year and gave me a few, and I wanted to make some beer with them. I had a pumpkin stout that I really liked back in October, and started thinking I wanted to go darker with my pumpkin beer, since the first one I’d brewed was pretty close to a UK styled brown ale. I was drinking an oatmeal stout and it struck me that the smoothness of the flaked oats would probably go really, really well with the sweetness of the pumpkin. I just brewed this on the first of the year, so it’s not going to be ready for a bit, but here’s the recipe I used. That and I felt like I ought to make something on the first day of the year.

Pumpkin:

Get a few pumpkins

Grains:

1 Lb Chocolate Malt

.5 Lb Roast Barley

.5 Lb Black Patent Malt

1 Lb Flaked Oats

Extract:

6 LBs Dark dme

2 Lbs Light dme

(mostly since I work at a homebrewing store, I have a bunch of slightly leaky bags of dried malt extract that we couldn’t sell to customers that I’ve adopted lying around, so I decided to go big with this recipe. I’m expecting this to roll in at around 7-9% alcohol by volume.)

8 Oz malto dextrin

Hops:

1 Oz Magnum at the start of the boil, for bittering

1 Oz Fuggles five minutes before the end of the boil, for aroma

Yeast:

WLP004 Irish Ale yeast

Spices:

2 Oz organic cinnamon sticks

a pinch of ginger

two pinches of nutmeg

a squirt of vanilla extract

Process:

Cut up the pumpkins, clean out the insides, and roast them. Make sure you have a big enough cookie sheet to deal with the amount of pumpkin you’re cutting up. I missed this step and now have a freezer full of pumpkin as a result. Oil the sheet, and put it in your oven for 45 minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Supposedly the skin will just peel off, but it didn’t. Maybe I didn’t roast for long enough. Anyway, if the skin has not peeled off, cut it off. Put the chunks of pumpkin into your grain bag. Bring enough water to cover the grain bag to 150 degrees Fahrenheit. Steep for about a half hour. Pull the grains.

Bring the water to a boil. Add your dme and your bittering hops. Towards the end of the boil, add the spices, the aroma hops, and the malto dextrin. Malto dextrin is a nonfermentable sweetener that gives beer a bigger mouth feel. This recipe is low in hops because traditionally, stouts are low in hop flavor and bitterness. There are a few exceptions, and some of them work, but I think hoppy stouts are a little weird.

Pull the brewpot off the stove, and put it in a sink with running water. Fill the sink with ice cubes. Wait for the beer to drop to less than 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and then pitch your yeast. Seal in fermenter, leave for two weeks, bottle.