Feature: Brewing Pumpkin Beer at Capitol City Brewing Co

The upstairs brewing room contains a combination Mash and Lauter tun as well as a Kettle and a hot water tank. In the brew house we meet lead brewer Travis Tedrow who ends up tending to much of the process for the rest of the day. He’s a newer brewer with a couple years experience including an internship with the excellent Laurelwood Brewery in Portland, Oregon and a brewer’s education from Chicago’s Siebel Institute. Travis likes to get into the science and process behind brewing, putting even the most knowledgeable guys at the DC Homebrewers meetings to shame (or at least I’d like to see him go up against them in some sort of brewer Jeopardy).

Grains are pumped up through PVC piping from the basement where it is crushed before being added to the Mash tun and the strike water. Cap City uses a floating mash where large quantities of milled grain float on the water as the enzymes break down starches to add sugars to the future beer liquid called wort. The liquid is recirculated through the process using a smaller kettle-like container called a ‘grant’ which pulls wort from the bottom of the mash and sprays it back over the top to concentrate the liquid and filter out small bits of grain.

During the mash we toss in chunks of the pumpkins McCarthy chopped up and roasted in the early morning hours. The pumpkin chunks sink in with the grain, the meat becoming mushy with some of it liquefying over time. The brewers admit that adding the pumpkin contributes only very subtle flavors to the beer while the spice mix in the big steel measuring cup with provide much of what we perceive as the pumpkin beer flavor. Still you can’t blame them for sticking to tradition and authenticity, I always feel cheated when I hear that no pumpkins were harmed in the making of a pumpkin beer. Every time we walk by the spice mix we get a huge whiff of the future pumpkin pie aromas the brewers hope to attain in the beer. After the mashing and recirculating, the wort liquid is eventually pumped into the kettle leaving much of the grain behind. In the kettle it will boil for 90 minutes with Willamette hops additions when 70 minutes and 10 minutes are left in the boil. This beer’s focus will not be on the hops, of course.