I gotta say, waking up in the morning to some great weather, and beautiful view made doing this brew even more enjoyable. As I write this, both are draining into their respective boiling pots. So I have some time to post some images.
1st thing I did was prepare the pumpkin. I picked up two pie pumpkins from a nearby produce stand. Both registered a little over 4lbs. I rubbed in the pumpkin spice like I do with any meats I have been smoking lately. I really wanted to penetrate the pumpkin.
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| The before pic 1 |
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| Before pic 2 |
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After 1 |
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| After 2 |
My setup looks like this:
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| This was what it looked like as I weighed and milled the malt. |
I decided to add MORE POWER(Tim Taylor) to the mill. It worked beautifully. I had grain all milled in no time...
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| Mashing. |
More pics and updates to come as I finish the day out. Almost done draining....just added second set of sparge water to pumpkin...going to go bring the temp up on the oatmeal sparge. Hopefully I'll be boiling in 30 min or so!
Boils went okay. There was a boil over in the pumpkin and I lost some wort. BUT the O.G. was right on. Bad thing is, getting the wort into the carboy was a pain, and I lost some more wort. It is hard to get all of that in there(pumpkin, etc.) into a small hole. I have about 4 gallons of Pumpkin Ale.
The Oatmeal stout....it was high on the O.G. with a 1.070. I added water to bring it down and to raise the amount of wort from 8 gal to 9.5gal. I had so little wort due to the fact that as I was taking it off the burners, it tripped, and lost some wort. I brought the O.G. down to 1.057, which is only .003 off from what I wanted. Can't complain there. We'll see how it turns out.
The day started out so great, but ended on some bad notes. I just hope the beer taste good.
I am exhausted, and tired. Going to shower, and eat some dinner(Smoked meatballs added to some chili in the crockpot).
-Matuz
