Are you planning on doing all grain soon, or is this just wishin' and hopin'?

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Neither.
The all grain has an extract version half way down the page. ;o)
Also, it's pretty easy to convert from all-grain to extract, and vice versa. I can get you the formulae if you want.

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Ah, missed that. When are you brewing? ^_^

It's actually been a while since I've used someone else's recipe as anything more than a template. I'll usually just reformulate the recipe rather than convert it. So long as I've got an idea of the OG and an idea of the character I'm looking for from the grain, it's pretty straightforward.

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Well Meg and I went to the Cambridge Brewing Company for dinner the other day, and stumbled onto a special event. The Brewers Dinner.
The head brewer (who we met, nice guy, but I forget his name) and the executive chef got together and paired up foods and beers. You ordered from a menu with 2-4 choices for each of 5 courses, and they gave you food and beer for each course. (8oz beers thankfully). It was awesome.

Anyway, one of the beers was a Heather Ale, and Meg loved it. So I'm scaring up (or trying to) some recipes for it so I have an idea of what I'm doing. Unfortunately it looks like it's a very rare brew.

Some Irish brewery makes one called Froach, but I can't find a recipe (or clone) for that out there, other than that it uses bog myrtle and Heather in the boil, and a bunch of heather as a 1hr infusion stage (dry heathering?) before fermentation. No clue on the malts. Also we haven't tried that one, so don't know if it tastes anything like the CBC heather ale.

So yeah, hunting down ideas, probably going to brew a 1-2 gallon batch so that I can see what we end up with before dumping a wad of cash on 5gals worth of ingredients.

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I actually had Froach at my place this weekend. It's right tasty.

Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot of guidance for "non-traditional" (or probably more accurate, "really traditional") beermaking. Even in the lj homebrewing community, while you'll find people who think it's an interesting idea, there's just not a whole lot of experience with non-hops herbing. I'm pretty much in the same boat. I've done a few (wormwood, mugwort, lemon-balm), and have had about a 50% success rate.

I've a book at home by Stephen Harrod Buhner called Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers that I know has a couple of heather ale variants as well as a number of other recipes that make use of evergreen tips. You're more than welcome to borrow it for the grand experiment.

Incidentally, I may try making a maple/spruce beer soon...

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How 'bout hemlock beer?! ;P

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I'm just not sure that would be "good."

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Come now! You could serve it with blowfish and call it "A Dinner Worth Dying For."

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*groan*

bad puns make baby buddah cry...

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very cool, I'd love to get my hands on it.
^_^

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