Infuse Your Homebrew Beer With Pumpkin Flavors

With Halloween right around the corner, there’s no better time than now to brew a batch of pumpkin flavor infused beer. There are several different brands of ‘premium’ pumpkin-flavored beer on the market, but the truth is that you can brew your own. As long as you’re familiar with the homebrewing process, you can easily brew up a batch of pumpkin-flavored beer. For some tips and tricks on how to homebrew pumpkin beer, keep reading.

 Go Sweet and Not Bitter

To create a delicious, authentic pumpkin-flavored beer, you’ll need to increase your brew’s sweetness while decreasing its bitterness. As you may already know, the amount of hops used in a brew affects its overall bitterness. Brewing your beer with too much hops will create a hard-to-drink bitter flavor that most people dislike. On the other hand, however, not using enough will give your beer a flat, bland flavor that’s equally as bad. There’s a fine line you must balance to ensure your pumpkin-flavored beer is delicious yet not overly bitter.

Canned vs Fresh Pumpkin

When brewing pumpkin-flavored beer, you have two options available: you can use either fresh or canned pumpkin. There are both advantages and disadvantages associated with each option. Canned pumpkin is concentrated; therefore, you can use less to achieve the same results in your brew. Fresh pumpkin is a bit more flavorful but requires a greater amount to use in the brew. If this is your first time brewing pumpkin-flavored beer, I recommend using canned pumpkin for this reason alone.

Another problem with using fresh pumpkin in your brew is the possibility of adding seeds. No matter how hard you try to prevent it, some of the pumpkin seeds are bound to make their way into your homebrew beer. You can always filter them out at a later stage, but it’s generally easier to use canned pumpkin instead.

Other Spices To Add

Of course, you’ll need to add more than just pumpkin to create a delicious batch of homebrew pumpkin beer. Adding some canned the pumpkin to your beer will certainly give it a huge kick of flavor, but the secret to producing high-quality homebrew pumpkin beer is to infuse it with the right ingredients. Like all homebrew recipes, you can play around with different ingredients to come up with your own unique flavors, but some of the most popular ingredients used in homebrew pumpkin beer include cinammon, nutmeg and pumpkin spice.