This one may be weird but I got to thinking what other things can be fermented and thought there are a lot of pumpkins every year. I looked online and sure enough you can ferment pumpkin. All of the online recipes said to use chunks of pumpkin but I don't have any of that so I decided to go with canned pumpkin puree.
Ingredients:
- 3 cans (6lb) of pumpkin
- 5 cups (2lb) of sugar
- 2lb honey
- clove
- allspice
- nutmeg
- cinnamon
- ginger root
- raisins (recipes say they add body and mouth feel)
The basic idea is to make the pumpkin taste like pie, then add sugars and let it go. The pumpkin has very little sugar, 15g per can hence the large amounts of sugar and honey. I think this one will get bottled until the fall.
I took a gallon and a half of water and added the pumpkin in a large pot and heated it. Add the spices and let it boil for a few minutes. This is to kill off anything weird. Most of the recipes that I saw had a step where you let the mixture sit for 8 hours. I assume this is to leech the flavors out of the pumpkin. I had to work so I let it sit for 24 hours on the stove with a lid to keep anything weird out of it.
I didn't want to water the mixture down further so I scooped out a couple quarts of the liquid and put it in a saucepan on the stove and heated but didn't boil. I added more spices since I thought the first batch of spices was a little on the weak side. Once the mix got up to 180ยบ I added the sugar and kept stirring until the sugar was no longer granular.
My estimation was that I have around 1.5 gallons of liquid. Maybe a little more. That's 12 pounds. Honey is about 80% sugar so with the 2 pounds of sugar and the wee bit in the pumpkin I have a total of 4 pounds of sugar. That's 33%. I'm sure in reality it's less though.
I added the pumpkin, sugar mixture, raisins, and honey to a 3 gallon carboy. I hydrated my yeast and threw it in and mixed really well. Overnight, by the morning, the airlock was bubbling away. I removed the airlock and covered with a towel to let some air get in if it needs to in order to keep the yeast happier. I plan on stirring it daily during the rapid ferment just to keep things mixed.
My only concern is the thickness of the concoction. This might be why recipes don't use puree. After the first ferment I plan on straining through fine mesh if it doesn't settle out on its own. It may though. In the picture below you can see that some settling had already happened. This morning though the settling had mixed up again, probably because of the fermenting.
2/10/2017 - I've mixed the concoction daily after work. It was a very nice pumpkin yeast smell. It's still pretty thick so it's hard to tell how much fermentation is happening. So I've been putting the airlock on after mixing and can see that it's still fermenting pretty rapidly. I've been covering it with a cloth and will go to the airlock full time when fermentation slows down. This morning I noticed that it is clearly separating. This is a change possibly brought on by the fermentation process. Time will tell.
2/19/2017 - Around 2/12/2017 I got tired of waiting to see if it was going to separate so I siphoned what I could into a gallon and pint+ jugs. I tried squeezing the pulp through cheesecloth but it was too thick so I put it in a gallon jug and have been watching it. It's still fermenting which I think is due to the sugar getting into the pulp. This weekend (the 19th) I siphoned off the wine and checked its gravity. It's at 1.000 and hasn't moved for a week. I racked this wine to see if it will settle out any more. I don't think it will and am fairly convinced that it's completely done fermenting. It's delicious! Mary B says I need to make another batch because it's so good. There's probably a good glass full of wine that came off of the extra pulp. I'll use that to top off the wine when I bottle it or I may just drink it.
2/26/2017 - It didn't seem to be settling any so I bottled it. I ended up with a gallon and a quart. I kept the quart set aside so I can taste it to see how the character is changing. I put the rest in some nice wine bottles with corks. We plan on not touching these until the fall. Let's see if we can wait that long.
11/23/2017 Thanksgiving - We had this and the V2 batch at Thanksgiving and it was a hit. Everyone liked it a lot. Theresa says that it needed maybe more cinnamon. When she mixed it with a little ginger ale she said the flavors came out. So, next time I make it I will add some fresh ginger.
We drank it at Thanksgiving 2017. Very tasty!
