Pumking Racking

Monday night we racked our Pumking clone and got our first taste of how it's going. This is our first beer where the recipe calls for adding ingredients to the secondary. One of the ingredients was a spice extract we made ourselves with vodka and a mix of spices. Apparently we should have used more vodka, because there was very little liquid sitting atop a bunch of spice sludge. Measuring the right amounts was already a little hard because we had to divide all the ingredients between the two carboys. The spice sludge just made measuring the amounts that much harder.

After we got the ingredients added to the carboys, the rest of racking went very well. We ended up with two cups of liquid left over after filling the carboys, so the 2.4 gallon batch volume seems to be just about right. I feel like we're gradually getting the beersmith settings dialed in.

The gravity after primary fermentation is down to 1.015, which puts us at about 6.2% ABV. It's less than our original target of over 8%, but I think that's mostly because of the boil volumes and all the sugars that ended up all over our stove. :-) Considering this was our first attempt at mashing, just the fact that we produced enough fermentable sugars in the mash to get from 1.062 down to 1.015 is a success.

The taste at this stage had a mild pumpkin and spice flavor to it. With all the great-smelling things we added to the secondary, it seems like it could really come out well.

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