Zombie Dust clone recipe (LME 2016 thread)

I'm going to reply to your questions above in bold. My answers may be contrary to your instructions from the recipe, but instructions are sometimes not best practices. Good luck with your beer.

 

I would highly recommend extra light DRY malt extract(DME) and distilled water for all of your water. Also be super, super extra careful to keep oxygen out when bottling/kegging.

 

What yeast are you using and do you have temp control for fermentation? More than likely, you'll want to ferment cooler 65-68 (assuming you can hold that temp when fermentation starts getting active). If you don't have temp control, then you may want to start cooler (62-65) and let it free rise up to 70. Other than that, you should be good.

 

I've brewed the Zombie Dust clone recipe, and it came out very close to tasting like the real Zombie Dust.

Another hint: I think this beer had an aggressive fermentation, so you probably want to start out with a blow-off tube on your fermenter.

 

I would recccomend the basement for the first 72 hours of fermentation then bring it up stairs to get warm and finish out. This is my preferred ale method in the winter when my fermentation chamber is in use. Swamp cooler with ice in the summer.

Good luck. Report back with your results.

 

I believe the 90 min bittering charge assumes you will be conducting a partial boil as you originally described to account for lower hop utitilization and subsequent dilution from adding water straight to your fermentor. If you are doing a full boil, you are correct that this can be moved to 60 minutes (and possibly even reduced to between .3-.5 oz), as you will want to target between 50 and 60 IBUs total (closer to 50 if you are looking to clone actual zd). Regarding your question about final volume, depending on whether you will adding any water directly to your fermentor, it may have a slight but mostly negligible impact on abv and IBU due to the dilution, but impact to body shouldn't be noticeable. Assuming you are planning to pitch 1 pack of rehydrated S-04, you should be fine, regardless of whether final volume is 4.75 gallons - 5.25 gallons. Good luck! I currently have batch #6 of my ZD clone on the dry hops and will be kegging it in a couple days. My last clone was dead on and I couldn't differentiate between mine and actual zd in a blind triangle test. I will say that using WLP002 (instead of S-04) made the biggest difference for me in cloning this beer. Cheers!

 

Your comment may be a red flag depending on your stove. I hope this is a gas stove. Whether it is gas or electric, you might want to do a practice run with that large kettle to see if the stove will bring that much water to a boil. I'll predict that a domestic electric stove will have difficulty, and you don't want to wait an hour or more just to attain a boil before you can get started brewing. It's better to discover this potential limitation now instead of on brew day. If the stove can't do it, test the kettle at lesser amounts of water to find out what is a reasonable level of liquid to start with.

Also, I agree with @jmich24 that you should start your fermentation in the basement, but the temps that you mentioned above could be pinpointed a little better. If you say it's 60 down there, that may cause a very sluggish start for your yeast. If you have a spot a little closer to the furnace or water heater, the temp in that spot will be a little better (around 65-67). Also, putting you fermentor onto a table instead of on the floor can make a 3-4 degree difference in the temp in the same spot of your basement. I suggest that you play with a thermometer a little bit and take readings in different locations so that you know more exactly what the temp will be where you place the fermentor.

As for planning the amount of liquid in the kettle after the boil that will then go into the fermentor, that will depend on whether you use the hop bag or not because you will remove most of the hop matter when you remove the bag. When I brew a 5 gallon recipe I plan for 4.75 gallons of liquid (after allowing for the hop trub since I don't use hop bags) so that the last quart of missing liquid will be the water that I use for boiling my priming sugar. (If you are going to keg your beer, then this last comment does not apply.)

I don't know why your store clerk gave you three hop bags. (I presume these are not the muslin socks that are used for steeping grain.) He must think the bags are disposable (I think I've read in this forum that people do clean and re-use them) and that you'll use one in the boil and one for dry-hopping. It could also be that since the hops are in a confined space when in the bag, that using multiple bags will allow for better liquid circulation around the hops in the boil, thus better hop utilization. I suppose this make sense for this recipe since you are putting a boatload of hops into this beer. It's up to you whether you use the bags or not.

 

Good catch regarding conducting the boil on stovetop @Mothergoose03. I missed that comment but I agree that a stovetop burner will likely have trouble bringing that large of a volume of liquid to a boil (I know mine won't), and even if it can reach a boil, it will likely take several hours to get there. A turkey frier or other propane burner is your best bet if you can find one in time. Regarding the hop bags, also not sure why they gave you 3 bags. Possibly one for bittering charge, one for late additions, and one for dry hop (or possibly 2 for dry hop if you are fermenting in a carboy - due to the expansion that will happen when the hops are soaked in the beer. Personally, instead of hop sacks, I generally use one grain bag (just the cheap disposable muslin/cheese cloth bags) for the boil (tying the end around the handle of the kettle) and use a spoon to stir the hops in the bag with each addition. On rare occasions when using a rediculous amount of hops (DIPA or 10 gallon batch of very hoppy beer), I will use 2 grain bags, but that probably isn't necessary. When dry hopping, I never use hop sacks. Instead, I gently nudge the carboys about once per day to knock some of the hops floating on top into suspension and by the end of 3-4 days, most of not all of the dryhops have dropped to the bottom of the carboy. If there are still dry hops in suspension or floating on top when you are ready to bottle or keg, you can either 1.) cold crash the beer by putting it in a fridge (or garage or even outside for a while -make sure it is covered if outside so sunlight doesn't skunk your beer) or 2.) you can slide a muslin/cheese cloth grain bag over your autosiphon (the intake end) when racking to bottling bucket or keg, and that will filter out a large majority of the hop matter.

 

Also regarding the comment about how much to use for bittering, i would reduce the bittering charge to an amount that results in 50% or less of your total IBUs being contributed by the 60 minute addition. Looking at my recipes, I would guess that you will want to use between .35 - .6oz citra (depending on what AA% it is) for a 60 minute IBU contribution of between 17 and 25 IBUs. Then whatever citra you have left over, I would divide evenly and add to your 5 and 1-minute additions.

 

It is the volume of liquid that keeps the kettle from reaching a boil, or doing so after a long time. That's why I suggested a practice run with just water to determine if this will be an issue with you. Some people report that they can get their electric stove to work 'adequately' by placing their kettle across two burners. Of course, they have a large diameter kettle that makes that approach possible. Hopefully your friend's kettle has a lid, which is of immense help for retaining heat in the liquid to speed up the boil. You may have read that it is not good practice to keep the lid on the kettle during the wort boil, but I always keep my kettle about 75% covered. That allows me to see the wort so I can monitor the rate of the boil, as well as see when the boil-over is about to take place.

If you can't get 6 gallons to boil, try 5 gallons or 4.5 gallons or smaller amounts until you are able to maintain a fairly rapid boil. If your stove defeats you, then the suggestion above by @DVoors about getting a turkey fryer set-up is where I started my homebrewing career. (I still use it.) You'll also have to spend the additional money for the LP tank rental and deposit (or buy a cylinder and have it filled). Turkey fryers may still be around in stores since T-Day wasn't that long ago, and you'll probably get it on sale.

Lastly, if all else fails, you'll have to go back to your original plan to do a partial boil. Or you can do a partial boil following the hop schedule along with 25% of the extract in your bigger kettle, and boil the rest of the extract for 10 minutes in your smaller kettle and then combine the kettles to get to your final 5-gallons of wort.

 

I always rehydrate yeast to optimize yeast cell count.

Below is a video on how to rehydrate yeast.

Cheers!

 

Looks like my rehydration process...but I start at 90*F not 105...I noticed the yeast was not stirred into wort...my process, too. Lagers: n-10*F x 2 sachets