Before the holidays, I brewed two beers — the pumpkin ale that I wrote about in a couple installments of my blog and my porter that I brew a couple times every year. 

The pumpkin beer was interesting. The spicing turned out very well — you could taste the pumpkin pie spice blend, but it wasn't so prominent as to make to ale undrinkable. Spices can be tricky, so I was happy this turned out well.

The beer was cloudy, though, and at first I thought that maybe the pumpkin in the mash did not get fully converted. Then, of course, I realized that any starch haze was most likely due to the fact that I fermented inside of a pumpkin. However, given that the base beer was a dark, old ale, the cloudiness isn't that distracting. 

One interesting thing about that beer is how the flavor has evolved. The beer itself has mellowed a bit, as any beer would, but one thing hasn't diminished — the aroma of raw pumpkin. When I first smelled and tasted the beer, I could easily pick up a raw squash character. (Pumpkins are a variety of squash.) This isn't a bad odor, but it's not one that usually shows up in beer. As the rest of the beer mellows, the raw squash character has started to dominate the aroma of the beer. So I need to make a mental note — drink pumpkin fermented ales quickly. 

My porter turned out well (as it should, I've brewed this recipe about 30 times in the last 19 years). I like my porter with a few  "sharp edges" — aggressive hopping and a "bite" from the black malt — to it and I have tweaked the recipe over the years to deliver that. After a few weeks at peak flavor, the beer mellows a bit. It's still a decent beer (in fact, many people would probably prefer the slightly aged version to the young version), but it's just not the same. This last batch was 10 gallons, so turned a little bit of it into a coffee beer. This can help bring back a bit of the "punch" to the beer . 

With this weekend approaching and nothing on my schedule, I'm thinking Sunday is going to be a brewday. The long range forecast is 79 °F and sunny. I figure I'll check my brewing fridge for yeast and make a starter on Wednesday or Thursday, then get some grains from Austin Homebrew on Sunday. (I still have pounds of hops in my freezer, so no worries there.) I think a nice, low-to-moderate gravity pale ale or golden ale might be a wise choice with summer approaching and lots of gardening to do. On the other hand, I haven't brewed my "house" pale ale in awhile, either. 

I also have three small experimental IPA batches to brew, to follow up on James and I's recent experiment. I hope to do that early next week.