Chestnut Brew

I did a quick search for recipes or conversations about creating a chestnut beer, I came across one but the post died after four posts so I wanted to resurrect the topic and see if we could come up with something.

I have a friend who owns a chestnut farm here in Michigan and I will be picking chestnuts with her next Saturday. Since chestnuts are an amazing good food, I wanted to see if I could brew with them. I am relatively new to home brewing and am still an extract brewer so I haven't done a whole lot of experimenting.

What if, you took Yuri's Thunderstruck Pumpkin Ale recipe and substituted roasted chestnuts for the pumpkin so the recipe would look like this (I also added some honey for a little sweetness):

6.25 lbs light DME
2 lbs Honey
1 lbs Caramel/Crystal Malt - 60L
8.0 oz Biscuit Malt
4.0 oz Wheat, Flaked
60.00 oz Chestnuts, (Boil 60.0 min)
.75 oz Goldings (5.0% AA) 13 IBU
0.25 tsp Irish Moss (Boil 10.0 min)
1 Pkgs English Ale (White Labs #WLP002) or Fermentis S-04

Roast the chestnuts in the oven just as you would the pumpkin before putting it in the boil. Would that work?

Any thoughts on this recipe? How can it be made better? I defer to all of you who have way more experience at this than I do. Thanks so much!

I like this idea I'm going to have to find my self some chestnuts. Can you let us know how this turns out.

So I modified the recipe I originally posted for my chestnut beer. Here is what I actually did:

.5 lb. Cara-Pils
4 lbs. Extra Light DME
1 oz. Argentinian Cascade Bittering Hops (2.8%)
3 lbs. roasted and shelled chestnuts, crushed
2 oz. dried chestnut slices
Safale Dry Ale Yeast

I steeped the grains in 2.5 gallons of water from 130 degrees until it reached 170 degrees (about 15 mins.).
Boiled the DME, chestnuts, and hops for 60 mins.

Racked to primary for 2 weeks, racked to secondary for 1.5 weeks, primed with 5 oz. dextrose and it's been in the bottle now for 1.5 weeks.

The beer has pretty good flavor. It's hard to pick up the chestnut flavor in it (not that they have much flavor to being with), but there definitely is a nuttyness to it. It's a nice light beer. The clarity isn't what I wanted it to be. Probably because the chestnuts almost dissolved in the beer and made it look kinda grainy (just the look, can't tell in the taste). It's got great head retention upon pouring too.

Any thoughts out there on chestnut beer, or how to make it better? Anyway to pick up more of the chestnut flavor in it? Thanks.