Pumpkin Ale

We brewed our Pumpkin Ale! I'm really excited about it and I can't wait to taste it. We didn't use a kit this time. The homebrew store we go to has TONS of recipes, so we just used one of those. They are super helpful there. We obviously didn't know where anything was so one of the employees helped us gather everything. They have an entire room just for grains. I think that was my favorite part of the trip. The smell reminded me of horse feeding time with my dad :-) The ingredients for this beer were a bit more expensive than when we used the kit. That's OK though, hopefully it will be worth it!

The pumpkin and grain.

The bottom bag is the pumpkin, the top bag is the grain. These had to steep for 55 minutes.

Boiling with the hops, we had to do this for 55 more minutes.

I quit taking pictures at this point. Haha. 

Next we had to add some pumpkin pie spice and let that steep for a few more minutes. Then we had to let it cool, add it to the carboy and add the yeast. We let it ferment for a while then we had to test it to see if it was finished fermenting. This is when we find out when we can bottle and what the alcohol content is. We checked it last Sunday and it wasn't quite finished fermenting. At this point, we tasted it as well. We decided it wasn't pumpkin-y enough, so we got some more pumpkin and pumpkin pie spice to add. It is ready to bottle now. We are planning to get around to doing that today :-) We'll be able to drink it about 2 weeks after that. 

We have also been able to taste our first beer now. It turned out really well!