Did you ever have one of those evenings where you were out on the town with a drinking buddy that your wife rather disapproved of, and after your third pint of barleywine you start talking about how awesome it would be if you were to do that one thing you’d always talked about but can’t quite recall now because things got kind of hazy and somebody just had to order you a boilermaker and you vaguely remember walking home — perhaps being chased somewhere along the way — and not much after that, then woke up with a splitting headache, an irate wife on the couch, two large pumpkins in your bed and a palpable sense of unease about what you’d committed yourself to the night before? Me neither. Let us never speak of it again.

Regardless of who had the original idea, how the pumpkins were acquired, or how dramatically our personal standards had fallen, my friend — hophead and brewer extraordinare Joe Yoder — and I decided to brew a batch of pumpkin ale. The catch, for reasons that we ourselves still don’t fully understand, was that we weren’t going to make a typical pumpkin pale ale. No, we were going to make a typical pale ale in pumpkin. I know the question on your mind, but no, we don’t know why. We just did it.

Brewing using pumpkins as vessels wasn’t all that different from brewing with plastic or glass, except for their non-reusability. We started by hollowing out the pumpkin mash tun, or “tunkin.” This was the larger of the two pumpkins we used, and it was a big-un. We laid the pumpkin down horizontally then cut a lid out of the side. After that, we scraped out all the guts and seeds and threw them on some newspaper to sort out the seeds later for roasting. We then drilled out a hole for the spigot and fit it and the copper manifold we’d taken from our normal mash tun into the pumpkin. We then heated up the liquor and mashed in more or less as normal. The tunkin did a better-than-expected job at retaining the mash heat and we sparged without much of a problem. The area around the spigot leaked just a little bit as we ran off the wort, but since the tunkin was right above the kettle, there was minimal loss of wort.

As the wort boiled, we carved out the pumpkin fermenter. A small hole was drilled in the lid to fit an airlock, but it probably wasn’t really necessary. After sanitizing, we hefted it down to the basement. We figured that, although hauling a huge pumpkin filled with raw wort down a flight of rickety stairs was only marginally dumber than what we’d already embarked upon, it was probably safer to haul the fermenter empty.

Once the boil was complete, we chilled the wort and ran it into a plastic fermenter. We then hauled that downstairs and split the batch; half in plastic, half in pumpkin. This was done to ascertain the effect of the pumpkin fermenter on the flavor of the completed beer, with the in-plastic beer as a “control” batch. Well, that and the fact that we wanted at least a few gallons of it to be drinkable.

We pitched the yeast, aerated the wort, sealed up the fermenters and waited. A couple days later, we checked the pumpkin. A healthy kräusen had formed at the top. Satisfied, we sealed it back up and let it sit.

Then, tragedy struck. We checked in on the beer a few days after we’d confirmed it was fermenting, and the pumpkin’s lid had fallen in. It was at that point that we decided (after examining the beer as best we could to make sure it wasn’t bacterially infected) to rack it over to a glass secondary fermenter. We racked the “control” beer, which had pretty much finished fermenting, at the same time. A week or so later we kegged both up and gave them a taste. The control beer was copper-colored, light-bodied with an assertive and lasting, earthy hop flavor. Not bad at all, really. We’ve made worse beers.

Speaking of which, as for the pumpkin-fermented beer, well . . . We took some to our local brew club meeting. One club member said it tasted like the color of lima beans. That person was me, and he was the most charitable of the lot. The beer was dominated by an intense vegetal/raw squash flavor followed by hops. No bacterial sourness was noted by anyone, but it was mentioned that such a flavor would be a vast improvement. Of course then it would be a pumpkin pseudo-lambic — or pp-lambic for short — and the less said about that, the better.

You may say we didn’t really go all the way, as the wort was not boiled in a pumpkin. You’re right, of course, and you’re welcome to give it a shot. Just find a disreputable buddy and hit a bar some night in October, and you’ll be well on your way. Here’s to hoping you have a king size bed and an understanding spouse.