So I tried this. I bought two ten pound bags of wunder grains. One bag had a considerable amount of dark and crystal malts, and oatmeal, probably a quarter of the bag. The other was mostly lighter malts and I think a little munich malt, from what I could tell.
I also picked up 9 packs of the "magic hop dust", because they were 69 cents and I figured "why not?".
I did one batch, yielding 9 gallons of wort, hopped with 3 oz at 60 minutes, 3 oz at 5 minutes and 3 oz at flameout. I then split between two fermenters and fermented one with windsor yeast and one with Nottingham yeast, just for kicks.
The wort smelled and tasted amazing. Ended up at 1.057.
The windsor batch got down to 1.016 and the Nottingham got to 1.019 after 3 weeks in the fermenter, held at 62-65 for the first week then let it rise up to about 70 for the rest of the time(swamp cooler).
At bottling time I took tasting notes. The batches were strikingly different. The windsor batch was very malt forward, lots of roast and coffee, thin and dry finish. The Nottingham was very fruity, slight banana pineapple tropical flavors and aromas, but the body was very full in comparison.
Now they have been bottled just over a month. I don't know what style these were, but I would guess a brown ale or oatmeal stout type. Possibly foreign stout...
All in all I am pleased with the results. The bags of grain were 7.99 each and the hops 69 cents per ounce, so this beer was inexpensive to make, and I really rather enjoyed the lack of structure involved in the process. Made for a very relaxing experience. If I had to do it all over again I would have added some 2 row just to help mellow out the darker malts, though this beer is not sweet at all, nice and dry with lots of roasty coffee type flavor, molasses, etc. but I brew less often these days and would have enjoyed a little more of a "middle of the road" type style, like Amber or what have you.
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