ive seen a few dunkle recipes with decotions... is there a way to avoid that for us lowly newbs or is it simple enough?
If you can get your hands on light munich malt, anywhere from 70-100% of that along with pils or even 2 row for the balance will come out close enough.
If you do try a decoction, I'll warn you right now that it will be frustrating the first time. When I tried it the first time, my normal brew day was 6 hours long; that more than doubled to 13. I was pissed off, discouraged, and tired but the beer turned out fantastic.
You don't have to do a full triple decoction to get the full decoction flavour. A single decoction will suffice, either from the protein rest to the sacch rest or sacch rest to mashout. For the protein -> sacch rest, pull about 1/3rd of the thickest part of the mash (volume-wise) and for the sacch -> mashout, pull 1/3rd of the thinnest. Dough in at about 1.3 - 1.5l/lb, which amounts to 2.9 - 3.3l/kg. If you use 15l of water to dough in, pull 5l for the decoction. Put the decoction on your stove/burner/whatever to boil. If the decoction is thick, stir like mad so that it doesn't scorch. Once it starts to really boil well, you don't have to stir as there is enough movement to avoid scorching. You don't have to stir a thin decoction nearly as much. Let the decoction boil for 5 minutes, then dump it back into the mash.
I've done a lot of decoctions (around 15-20 or so), but I stopped doing them quite a few years ago. Not because I don't like the results, but because my system has changed and decoctions are now difficult for me to do. From my experience, the 1/3rd rule is enough to hit the next target quite easily. The biggest thing to remember is to not get too worked up if you miss your temperature target. The beer will still come out fine.
