Hows my little brewmaster?

Ladies and Gentlemen! I have succeeded in making my first beer from scratch! Yay! Several months ago a friend said hey, we should try making a pumpkin beer that actually tastes like pumpkin. We thought that this would be a great idea since we hadn't tried a good pumpkin brew ever let alone one that tasted like pumpkin. So naturally since this was a challenge that seemed out of my reach I accepted and promptly began my research into pumpkin beers.
The three of us agreed that we all are really enjoying wheat beers currently and we thought we should attempt a pumpkin wheat beer. Since a pumpkin wheat beer recipe, is hard to come by my work was cut out for me. I was successful in finding one but the recipe seemed complex and out of my league, I homebrew for pleasure, I'm not into the science of brewing. So I did some more research geared towards the noob I am and found about a billion pumpkin ale recipes and another thousand wheat recipes. I decided I would combine the best ideas that I thought I could pull off and get brewing from my own pumpkin wheat recipe.

I've decided to post the approximate recipe (and pictures!) for fellow pumpkin wheat lovers so that they can attempt their own version. Most of my steps here are estimated becasue for whatever reason I got rid of my notes before I got this entry together.

Here are my ingredeants for the brew:


As you can see:
Wheat Malt Extract
Pale Malt Extract
3 Baking Pumpkins
(I guess there are pumpkins grown for cooking & carving, they are not to be interchanged.)
Vangard Hops (alpha acid 4.4)
Fuggle Hops (alpha acid 4.8)
(Wheat beers are lightly hopped for less bitterness)
Allspice
Cloves
Bottling: Priming sugar and caps

and of course, some expired hefeweizen live yeast.

Why expired yeast? Because I didn't check the date of course!
Apparently I'm lucky the yeast even did anything, whew.

So the first step was to hack the pumpkin up into a bunch of chunks and bake at 325 degrees, this apparently makes the starches in the pumpkin turn to sugar, or gets that process started. Do that for an hour. If for some reason you haven't started drinking beer while making it remedy that error while this is baking ideally another pumpkin beer to either shoot for or to beat.

Baked punkin chunks.

After this step you make a giant batch of pumpkin tea by steeping it for about a half hour to an hour. We ended up combining that statement and steeped for like an hour and a half because we didn't think we were getting enough color in the water. Don't let your shit boil though, or the sugars will go away and your beer will taste funky. Ours came to a boil for a few minutes on accident.

This picture is to show that it took a longass time for the water to even look like the pumpkin chunks were doing anything. Very apparent, right?

After you're all done soaking the pumpkins we kind of pressed the water out of the chunks and got the malts into the brew and began our hour long boiling process. More beers were drank here. Stir every now and then and enjoy.

We hopped the beer for the last 15 minutes. The second variety hops was added with only five minutes left.

After rapidly cooling the beer to close to 70ish degrees F we added in our spices, 1 teaspoon of each, remembering we wanted a stronger pumpkin flavor over spice flavor. Next time I think I would use even fewer cloves. A few of those go a long way. After that we added the yeast and sealed it up!

And thats it! we didn't clear it all the way in order to leave the sediment for a creamier texture, and what a success!

Check it out: