Recipe: Holiday-Spiced Ale

I was going to make a pumpkin ale for Thanksgiving.  Somehow that didn’t happen.

A couple of weeks ago a bunch of us from the homebrew club got together and brewed this recipe on the 20 gallon club system.  The club brew system isn’t much to look at, but you can check out some pictures here if you’re curious.

The original plan was to brew a pumpkin ale, but nobody felt like preparing enough actual pumpkin for a 20 gallon batch.

So it turned into a pumpkin-spiced ale.

Then I figured I should do something different and not use all of the normal spices you’d expect in a pumpkin ale.

So really there’s nothing pumpkin ale about it anymore.  But it’s still pretty tasty.

Recipe Notes

For the spices I used ginger, vanilla, nutmeg, star anise and allspice.  If you want something more pumpkiny use cinnamon, nutmeg and allspice.

I used whole spices, grating them (everything but the vanilla bean) into a small dish in different amounts until it smelled balanced.  Some of them can be overpowering if you use too much.  Each spice was in the 1/4-1/2 tsp. range and half of a vanilla bean.

Rather than adding whole spices to the fermenter, I made a spice “tea”  by combining the spice mixture with 1 cup of water and boiled for a couple of minutes to get the oils working.  Then I let it drain through a coffee filter and added the resulting liquid directly to the keg, racking the beer onto it.

If you want more spice character add more tea.  Just remember it’s easy to add more – hard to take out.  If you do go overboard though, the spice will fade over time so just store the beer away for a couple of months.

When we did the big brew everyone used a different yeast.  I picked an English ale yeast but you could also use a regular American Ale (1056/WLP001) or even a Belgian strain.

The base beer would also make a decent pale or amber ale if you upped the hops and skipped the spices.

Cheers!

Holiday-Spiced Ale

Spice, Herb, or Vegetable Beer

Tagged as: ale, holiday, recipe, spice