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HISTORY BAmericans taught the colonists to plant pumpkins, squash, corn, and other crops needed to survive,ack in the days of colonial America, our forefathers didn’t have the abundance of barley that wehave today, so they often had to be a bit more creative when it came to brewing beer. Native so these foods often found their way into the brewing kettle along with apple parings, rye bran, and even birch twigs. Written history is a little sketchy about calling out the words ‘pumpkin beer,’ but there are quite a few references to another drink of the day, known as ‘Flip’. This was a combination of beer, dried pumpkin, spices, sugar, molasses, and rum that was tossed into a pot and then brought to a boil using a hot poker from the fire. It was almost like a hot cider with a smoky flavor imparted by the red-hot loggerhead. Little mention of pumpkin beer was made for the next hundred years or so until Buffalo Bill’s Brewing Company debuted its Pumpkin Ale back in the 1980’s. Since then, pumpkin beer has taken on a dozen different forms well beyond the ale and continues to diversify even today. THE INGREDIENTS: The great mystery of beer is actually a simple combination of four ingredients that when brewed at the right temperature and given time to mature becomes the alcoholic beverage of kings that can make you dance like Travolta or Karaoke like the Wedding Singer. Beer is often referred to as liquid bread because you literally have almost the same ingredients: water, barley, and yeast. The forth ingredient in beer, which bread does not have, is hops. Hops are a bittering agent used to counterbalance the sweetness in beer and have become a much desired attribute to a beer’s taste and smell. Pumpkin beers, as the name implies, include pumpkin as one of their ingredients along with other seasonal spices such as ginger, allspice, cinnamon, and nutmeg. The great thing about pumpkin beers is that there is virtually no limitation on additional ingredients the brewer can add to the boil—although this can be just as rewarding as disastrous. Beware the brewer’s vat turned witches cauldron that ends up with eye of newt, wing of bat, or the succulent testicle of frog. WATER: It might seem strikingly obvious, but over- BARLEY: The barley used in a pumpkin beer truly looked by the average consumer, beer’s most abundant depends on the underlying style from which the pumpkin beer. If your water is too hard or you want to reduce the pilsner or Vienna malt. To get a roasted or chocolate Yes pumpkin beer season is over. But we can’t get them before they are brewed.beer was erected. Pumpkin beers are typically anenhancement from a traditional style such as a pale ale,porter, stout, or smoked lager (rauch beer) that have beenenriched with pumpkin, molasses, vanilla, cinnamon, andother winter spices. Because the type of barley used tomake the beer influences the beer’s appearance, taste,and aroma, darker grains will naturally produce darkerbeers. A pumpkin stout is derived from roasted orchocolaty grains, while a pumpkin lager will use mostlysugars into the wort, which will in turn be consumed by ingredient is water. The characteristics of water, including its hardness, levels of metals, salts, sulfates, or even chlorides can all play a part in the beer’s consistency, mouthfeel, and even bitterness. Ales that originate in northern Europe have harder water, and lagers from central Europe have softer water, so this becomes part of the beer’s distinguishing flavor profile. Pumpkin beers come in both ale and lager varieties, so there isn’t one specific water type that produces the best pumpkin alkalinity, one way to do this is by boiling and decanting malt, the barley must be toasted in a kiln. This turns it. Otherwise, you can just buy distilled water or move to its skin from a light beige to a dark coffee bean brown. the mountains like a real man and take it from a stream. Barley is the ingredient that releases the fermentable YEAST: To a brewer, the yeast used to make a beer the yeast and turned into alcohol and CO2. is like your own secret ingredient that you’ll be likely to pass down to generations to come. The yeast is the living HOPS: Though not considered a dominant ingredient organism that consumes sugars and releases carbon in a pumpkin beer, hops are there to provide a balance dioxide and alcohol, thus turning a sugary liquid into beer to the beer’s sweetness. Hops are small green flowers with bubbles. Yeasts come in dozens of varieties but are that resemble pinecones. They grow on a vine and typically classified into two distinct groups: top fermenting contain a yellow resinous substance known a lupulin and bottom fermenting. Ales rely upon top fermenting within their core. This substance is leveraged by the beer yeasts, meaning they stay toward the top of a beer and to offset the sugars provided by the barley. Hops come do all their magic up there, whereas lagers are a product in hundreds of varieties grouped into several categories, of bottom fermenting yeasts. Each yeast has an optimal including: American, English, Noble, New Zealand, and temperature at which it performs or ferments a beer best European. Hops can vary by their bittering qualities, and can easily be disturbed by environmental changes. aroma, and finish, and new strains are being produced all The real art in brewing comes from finding the right yeast the time to continue to provide variety to beer. The newer that enhances your beer’s flavor profile, can survive varieties tend to get tough-sounding names like Magnum, at the alcohol level you are hoping to achieve, and Warrior, Tomahawk, Ultra, and Zeus. For pumpkin beer, continues to ferment the sugars given the environment the hops used depend on the underlying style the you have provided. umpkin beer was morphed from. :29


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