Here are some photos from last years pumpkin ale and lager.  It's a lot of fun, but plan on a couple of hours prep time before brewing the beer.  In our recipes, we allow the enzymes from the base malt to break down the pumpkin sugars into fermentable sugars, and if you use a large Cushaw pumpkin (ie. 14 pounds!) a good portion of the fermented alcohol comes from the pumpkin itself.  Although our recipe calls for an 8-10 pound pumpkin, you can use more.  With a 14 pound pumpkin we got the gravity up around 1.075 last year for the lager, while the malt gravity alone would have been around 1.060.  So we are picking up about 15 gravity units with the pumpkin mash.  Cushaw pumpkins are the classic pumpkin used to make pumpkin pie.  It is also the type of pumpkin in canned pumpkin.  Yes, you can make pumpkin beer even when pumpkins are no longer in season.  You can use the standard Jack-o-lantern pumpkin but the taste will be a bit more green, and less of the sweet pumpkin flavor you get with a Cushaw.  The small cooking pumpkins also work well.  We recommend traveling to Stuarts Draft for your Cushaw pumpkin, or to Carter Mountain for cooking pumpkins.  These are both Cushaws from Stuarts Draft.  Directions are on our Stuarts Draft Pumpkin Lager product page.  On the way there, make sure you stop by Blue Mountain Brewery for some good eats and killer beer.  Good Luck and most import, have fun!

Take out the guts.

Skin it, and cut it up into 1-2 inch chunks.

After baking. Stretch one of the muslin bags over a bowl, and load it up with pumpkin.

Pumpkin bag ready to go into the partial mash along with the other bag of malt grain.

Our deer friends eating the spent grains from the mash.  This is Crazy Legs and her twin bucks.