Holiday Season coming up – are you brewing and seasonal beers.

[chasjs]

I got my brew room functioning again and am thinking about brewing beers for the holidays. Looking at maybe a small batch of pumpkin ale (no usually a fan of flavored beers but pumpkin can be good). Definitely going to try a Christmas ale. I did a Great Lakes Christmas ale clone a couple of years ago but I was just getting back into home brewing and was not impressed with my result (although it was drinkable beer).

Anyone have any recipes they would share on successful seasonal brews?

[RyanP]

Hey Chuck, do you have any of the Gordon Strong books? He has a couple really good holiday recipes in there. If you don’t, I can paste a couple of the ones I’ve done on here.

Otherwise, you can take a base style that you enjoy and add a little spice to it.

Taking something like a belgian dark strong or quadruple or dubbel and adding something like an ounce of ginger and a few fresh cinnamon sticks would be a great way to “Christmas” the beer up.

Also the AHA has some good recipes on their website, especially if you separate by commercial clones and award winners. The samiclaus recipe on the website looks fun, I love that beer. And the many, many excellent homebrew books are good recipe resources.

I’d avoid places like brewtoad, and even homebrewtalk. They’re good for inspiration, but there is way too much inaccurate/poorly vetted material in there.

[chasjs]

Ryan:

Thanks. I do have Strong’s book Modern Homebrew Recipes and I have looked at some of his for both a Winter Ale and Pumpkin beer. I do have access to a lot of resources – AHA and Beer and Brewing plus many books. Almost paralysis by analysis.

Strong recommends using pumpkin flesh and baking it. I am wondering about the feasibility of just using a pumpkin puree. Some of the references I have seen mention Pumpkin flavor is pretty muted while the spices we associate with Pumpkin pie are what gives the brew its allusion of pumpkin.

Definitely don’t use Halloween Pumpkins which are grown for size and are mostly hollow.

[Author]

Posts