Thursday, December 12, 2013

Pumpkin Homebrew Review

Well, its been a long while since I’ve done a beer review, but I had someone ask me to review their Pumpkin Ale Homebrew, so what the hell. One of L Bird’s co-workers’ husband has gotten pretty deep into homebrewing and presented me with two bottles of gold to review and well, who am I to turn down free beer.So here we go ….

adambeer

Appearance: From the minute I popped the crown on the bottle until the bottle was empty it foamed over. I actually had to quickly get it into my pint glass before I lost the whole bottle to foaming. So it is plenty carbonated. It was a light tan/brown in color and produced a ton of rocky head. It is pretty cloudy with visible sediment floating throughout, which is not necessarily a bad thing. When brewing with pumpkin it can produce a lot of sediment that stays suspended and is harder to remove. In the future if you wanted to clean it up, you could rack to a secondary carboy for 1-2 weeks for more settling before bottling but it is perfectly drinkable the way it is.

Aroma: It has a bit of hop aroma right up front, it is slightly citrusy which could be from the choice of hops. There is also hints of cinnamon and pumpkin, but overall it is clean and bright.

Taste: The hops continue to shine through at the start, it has that bitter hoppiness up front that gives way to a nice pumpkin flavor before the traditional ale flavors come through. I am not sure if he added any spices during the brewing but I can detect a faint spiciness maybe allspice or clove. There is a very slight lingering aftertaste that is reminiscent of bitter citrus peel/oil.

Overall: This is a good foray into pumpkin beers. It has enough pumpkin to be tasty but not so much as to be over the top. I also like the fact that it wasn’t over-spiced, a lot of commercial pumpkin beers try to be liquid pumpkin pie and they tend to go over the top on spice and I find that makes it cloying and makes for bad beer. It could be cleaned up a little by giving it a longer racking time and the after taste may be from leaving the bittering hops in the boil a little too long, but these are very minor faults. Overall, this is a good beer and I would drink a couple of them if I had the chance.

Good job, keep brewing and keep ‘em tippin’!

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...