It’s that time of year when people are starting to think about brewing pumpkin beers, and for the past month six of the top 10 search results to this site are for variations of “pumpkin ale recipe” (for which I am still is the #1 result on Google for that search apparently). So it’s a good time to again point to my own recipes for pumpkin ale, both an extract version and an all-grain version—and both produce (in my opinion) really good pumpkin beers.

Both recipes use real pumpkin that you’ll have to roast and chop up yourself (which makes it even more special!).

Extract-based pumpkin ale recipe: I first published this back in 2004. It uses some specialty grains along with the malt extract.

All-grain pumpkin ale recipe: this is assuming a standard all-grain single-infusion mash setup, and I’ve included notes for batch sparging as well.

Both of these recipes should result in beers that are between 5.5 and 6% alcohol by volume.