Recipe: Hookarm's Dark Ale

This is my original 5 gallon recipe:

• 5 lb dark DME

• 60L Crystal Malt 1/3 pound
• Choclate Malt 2.5 oz
• Perle Hops 6% AA 3/4 oz 60 minutes
• Mt. Hood Hops 6% AA 3/4 oz 30 minutes
• Tettnanger Hops 5% AA 2/3 oz 10 minutes
• lager yeast

Steep grains in 1 gallon of water at 150F for 30 minutes. Strain. (Optional:You can bring a quart of water to 170F while the grains are steeping. After straining, slowly pour the water over the grains to sparge.) Add DME and bring to a boil. Add the hops as described above. At the end of the boil, cool to 80 degrees and pitch yeast. Ferment for one week. Bottle with 3/4 cup corn sugar.

OG: 1050 IBU: 25

Once I brewed this a couple of times, I changed yeast. I used a Belgian yeast, with lactobacillus in it, to sour the beer. What I had done was recreated a Kentucky Common, or Sour Mash beer. I really like this one.

BTW, Hookarm is the name of a fictional mass murderer around Fredericksburg. When I was in High School, Jamie Smallwood wrote a piece about how an abandonded house came to be that way. Hookarm was born in the school paper. Six years later, some current FHS students told me all about Hookarm, and swore he was real. They never beleived me when I told them it was all made up.