Last year, I brewed a pumpkin scotch ale that ended in disaster as I lost almost the entire batch to bottle bombs.
A year later, and now I primarily keg my beers, partly due to this beer. In hindsight I think the culprit was a faulty kitchen scale (since replaced), but since I never really got to try this beer when it was finished, I set out to rectify some of last year's mistakes as well as re-brew it with better equipment, techniques, and - most importantly - not botching the priming sugar.
I used the same recipe as last year, with a couple of tweaks - British pale malt instead of Golden Promise, as the LHBS was out - and adding a pound of Munich for some added maltiness. The hop bill, yeast strain, and everything else remained the same. The biggest change this year was using canned pumpkin instead of buying and roasting my own pie pumpkin, but this was simply because fresh pumpkins aren't yet available at the grocery store.
Last night I transferred my Harvest Wee Heavy (Pumpkin Scotch Ale) to secondary for some simulated bourbon barrel aging. A little over two weeks ago, I charred some American oak staves in my oven and cut them down to 3" lengths (so that they would fit in a mason jar), and put them into a jar with some Buffalo Trace bourbon. Now that they've had plenty of time to soak up the flavor of the bourbon, I added the jar - whisky and all - to the secondary at racking.
Final gravity was 1.018, a few points under my estimated FG of 1.024, giving an approximate ABV of ~8.4%. It's a bit dryer than I had expected, but the hydrometer sample still tasted pretty close to last year's batch. I will need to add more spices at bottling, however, probably using a tincture with vodka.
