Boulevard's Lunar Ale - All Grain Recipe?

Does anyone have an all-grain recipe for Boulevard's Lunar Ale? This is a very tasty beer that has a little belgian yeast flavor to it.

Here is some information from Boulevard's website:

STYLE: Unfiltered Brown Ale
INGREDIENTS: Pale & Amber malts, malted & unmalted Wheat, Dehusked Chocolate malt. Magnum & Simcoe hops.
STARTING GRAVITY: 12.0 degrees Plato
ALCOHOL: 4.0% by weight, 5.1% by volume
BITTERNESS UNITS: 15 IBUs
AVERAGE EBC COLOR: 34

Sounds like you have all the info you need.

Go mostly pale, with a pound or two of amber for the toasty flavor. A pound or less of malted and unmalted wheat for body and head retention. ~.5 lbs of carafa special (which is probably the dehusked chocolate malt they are talking about). Figure out how much malt you need on your system to hit 1.048.

It has pretty good attenuation so I would mash around 150.

I would get you IBUs from magnum (or any neutral hop) at 60 minutes. Use simcoe to finish, probably .5 oz or so in the final 5 minutes of the boil.

Use the yeast of yeast of your choice, or maybe a combination of a Belgian and an American if you just want a bit of Belgian spice.

Hope that points you in the right direction.

I think they use T-58 yeast.

I was thinking of using a mixture of an American Ale and a Belgian Ale yeast.

Any idea of percentages of the different grains?

What is an unmalted wheat?

What do you guys think of this recipe?

5.5 lbs American 2-row pale malt
1.5 lbs Amber Malt
1 lb wheat malt
1 lb flaked wheat
.25 lbs Dehusked Chocolate (Carafa II) Malt

.25 oz Magnum for 60 min
.25 oz Simcoe for 10 min

Mix of Wyeast 1056 and White Labs WLP550 (This is what I have right now)

Trying to get:
OG 1.048
IBU 15
SRM 17

Sounds like a solid attempt to me. Once you brew it you can alter the recipe if need be to get closer to the original.

I bought the ingredients yesterday and plan to brew it this weekend. We'll see how it goes.

I brewed this up yesterday. Mashed at 150 degrees and hit my starting gravity of 1.048. It looked a little bit darker than it should have, but we'll see what it looks like after it ferments.

Joshua618 said:

I brewed this up yesterday. Mashed at 150 degrees and hit my starting gravity of 1.048. It looked a little bit darker than it should have, but we'll see what it looks like after it ferments.

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I think they use Dehusked malt only. That should make it a little lighter on color.

Monsterc said:

I think they use Dehusked malt only. That should make it a little lighter on color.

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I used the Carafa dehusked malt. From what I understand, dehusked malt will add whatever color it is, but cut down on the roastiness compared to a husked malt of the same color.

Joshua618 said:

I used the Carafa dehusked malt. From what I understand, dehusked malt will add whatever color it is, but cut down on the roastiness compared to a husked malt of the same color.

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Yes. If it still looks a little dark or tastes too roasted, I'd cut back on the amber malt a little.

Be sure to let us know how it turns out!

Cheers!

I opened the primary fermenter after 6 days and there was still a large kraeusen. Gravity was down close to where I wanted (1.010) and it is still fermenting.

Any updates on how this turned out?

Sorry for not posting an update on this, but it didn't come out very good. I would probably split up the yeast and add the belgian yeast at bottling or secondary. The batch I made did not taste like Boulevard's Lunar Ale. It was kind of "mucky" and wasn't very tasty.

I've got a number of beers planned that I want to brew first, but after I've done that, I'd like to take a shot at cloning this great beer. I think I'm going to cut the amber back to 1 lb, and up the 2-row to 6 lbs. I'll skip the 1056 altogether, and use a Belgian yeast for the whole thing. Boulevard's head brewer is from Belgium, after all. Other than that, I think the recipe looks pretty good.

Great! Glad to see that someone else is going to give this a try. Please share your results. Which yeast are you going to use?

I'm tentatively planning on trying out Wyeast 1388 Belgian Strong Ale yeast (Duvel's yeast, same strain as WLP570). This is subject to change if I get better information and/or inspiration between now and this fall, when I plan on brewing it. I've never used this yeast strain before, so I'm not too familiar with its characteristics. We'll see how it goes.

Looks like Boulevard updated its website, and look what I found under the entry for Lunar Ale:

Malts and Adjuncts

Amber 50
Cara 300
Cara 50
Dehusked Carafa II
Pale malt
Wheat
Wheat malt

Hops

Bravo
Columbus
Magnum

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Sorry to bump this incredibly old thread, but ran across it while trying to Google what specific style Lunar was. This recipe is from the mouth of Jeremy Danner, brand ambassador for Boulevard. I don't really remember exactly what Lunar specifically tasted like, but I have brewed this recipe (or at least very close to it) twice now and can confirm it is quite delicious.


Lunar Ale


Malt

Pale malt – 61.5%

Dehusked Carafe II - .9%

Wheat – 11.9

Malted Wheat – 11.9%

Cara 300 – 6.5%

Cara 50 – 1.9%

Amber 50 – 5.6%


Mash Schedule

Mash in at 52 C and rest for 7 minutes

53 C – 10 minutes

63 C – 25 minutes

73 C – 15 minutes

Mash off at 76 C


Hops

Bravo – 3.8 IBU 10 minutes after beginning of boil

CTZ – 8.- IBU “ “

Tradition – 1.5 IBU “ “


We target a beginning of boil gravity of 11.1 and achieve 11.6 Plato by the end of the boil.


The wort is cooled to 19 C and pitched with our house Belgian yeast strain (high gravity Trappist). We ferment at 19 C until we reach 3.4 Plato. At that point, we temp up to 23C for the remainder of fermentation. Final gravity is 2.6.