Pumpkin ale
The Ever-Changing Recipe
As you may already know (especially likely if you have pumpkin ale recipes from previous years), I make a pumpkin beer every year for the squash potluck, a gathering of friends who enjoy squash. The rules for the potluck are simple: everything presented must have squash as an ingredient. The first such potluck was, as near as I can figure, in 1977 (there is a great deal of debate about this).
When I began brewing my own beer, someone mentioned to me that Thomas Jefferson had made a pumpkin ale at Monticello. I knew right away that this would be the ideal contribution to the squash potluck, and with nothing to go on but the slim knowledge that it had been done before, I concocted a recipe which used pumpkin along with the standard beer ingredients (malt, hops, water & yeast). I continue to tweak the recipe every year.
While I do not have Thom Jefferson's recipe, I do have an 18th century recipe. Unlike the recipes I have developed, this uses no malt at all. It may be similar to what Thom made. I did not have this when I started, so adapted familiar beer recipes to the problem. From the descriptions, I suspect that pumpkin flavored malt beers are probably more drinkable by modern standards.
Extract Partial Mash All Grain: Historic: