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I really enjoyed the porter that I had brewed before, so I decided to use that recipe as a loose base for designing this beer.  Gainesville has a local coffee roaster, Sweetwater, who produces some very nice stuff and I wanted to add some of this to my beer.  Initially I wanted to make this into an "imperial" porter, so I added several pounds of base malt and honey.  In the end I believe that using grain bags isn't effective when dealing with the amounts of grain I used in the batch and I think this combined with not enough mash time resulted in underconversion.  This beer was a real learning experience and I want to try it again some time with better grain conversion procedures.  Nonetheless the resulting beer isn't bad- it's super dark and super thick.  The coffee flavor came out just fine (I'd actually use a little less coffee next time) and the honey and maple syrup are hardly noticeable in the flavor.

Ingredients:

• 7lb Briess Dark LME
• 3lb 6-row base malt
• lb chocolate malt
• 1/2lb German Carafa
• 1/2lb Crystal 60L
• 2 cups Tupelo honey (~1.5lb)
• 1/2 cup maple syrup
• 1/2 lb sweetwater "good morning gainesville" full-city roast coffee (after boil)
• 1/2oz chinook hop pellet @ 60min
• 1/2oz chinook hop pellet @ 30min
• 1/4ox Willamette hops @ 5min
• 1/6 cup gypsum @ 20min
• 1 tablet whirfloc @ 15min
• 1 vial whitelabs irish ale yeast in 1L starter
• dextrose and maple syrup for priming (see below)

I altered my mash times a little to account for the base malt conversion- though it still wasn't long enough.  ~130F for 15 min and ~150 for 50 min.

After the boil I added the ground up 1/2 lb of coffee in a grain bag to the cooling wort.  Steeping this way added plenty of flavor.

OG was 1.072

Fermentation slowed significantly after a few days and on day 4 I took a gravity reading: 1.029.  Two days later I took another reading and it was 1.028.  Since it didn't seem to be moving I decided to bottle.  I'm not sure why the FG was still so high.

The 3/4 cup (4 oz) dextrose I had ordered had leaked some in shipment I decided to add ~1oz maple syrup to my primer...  this turned out to be too much and this beer will gush when opened if it isn't chilled first.

So I made plenty of mistakes with this beer, but in the end it's not bad.  Several of my friends really enjoyed it so that's the joy of homebrewing!  Even a batch riddled with  mistakes can come out pretty good.

This one is based on the "Limp Richard's" schwarzbier recipe in The Complete Joy of Homebrewing and it's my first shot at a lager.

Ingredients:

• 7lb Briess dark LME
• 1/2lb german caraffe
• 1/2lb crystal 60L
• 1oz Sterling hops @ 60 min
• 1/2oz Sterling hops @ 45 min
• 1/2 Vanguard hops @ 30 min
• 1/2 Vanguard @ 15 min
• tablet of whirlfloc @ 15 min
• whitelabs wlp830 German Lager yeast - in 1 ltr starter
• 1/2 cup tupelo honey @ racking.
• 3/4 cup dextrose for priming

I started the yeast by creating a 1L starter w/ extra-light DME about 24 hr earlier and pitched at 72F.  I left the wort at 70F overnight in my 5gal betterbrew carboy with a hood/blow-off tube.  The next morning it was going nuts.  At that point I moved the carboy to my ice-cube lager box and brought the temp down to 50F.  I left the blow-off tube in place for 3 days (until blow-off had ceased) and then replace with a #10 stopper and fermentation lock.  For the first 3 weeks I kept the temperature between 48 - 55F.

After three weeks I racked to a secondary fermenter and added boiled then cooled mixture of 1/2cup of tupelo honey and 1cup water.  Then back in the lager box for 3 days @ 50-55F.  Then I dropped the temp down to 40-45F and will try to maintain it there until lagering is done (update: see-below).

My big complaint here is that this lager will take 6 weeks to complete, but that's how lagers work.  Ales are much easier and quicker, so I hope this beer is good enough to warrant all this work and attention.

The OG was 1.048 and gravity at racking was 1.022 (before adding the honey).

Update

After 6 weeks in the lager box at between 50-55F I bottled this.  The last 5 days or so my digital thermometer got out of whack and was reporting temps ~10F higher than they should have been.  This resulted in dropping the temp lower into the low 40s, upper 30sF- I think this caused much of the yeast to drop out before bottling.  Thanks to this it took several weeks for this beer to successfully carbonate.  However, it eventually became very nicely carbonated- now it pours a large brown head with good retention.

This beer isn't a very true representation of the schwarzbier style, but it's a very tasty beer.  It's like a clean drinking porter.

Update 2

This recipe won two awards at the '09 First Coast Cup competition- gold in category as a schwarzbier and bronze in category as a robust porter.