Brewcraft Rogue Dead Guy kit

Yesterday I picked up a brewcraft Rogue Dead Guy kit and a smack pack of pacman yeast from my LHBS.

Kit includes: hops,specialty grains,DME, and candi sugar.

However the instructions were a bit lacking. I've brewed three times before with extract and partial grains.

The recipe calls for adding half the malt extract at the beginning and then it follows the normal hops schedule. At the end after turning the heat down it then tells you to add the candi sugar and the other half of the malt extract. I always thought it was better to boil all the DME from the beginning?

What they are suggesting is called the "Late Extract addition," the purpose is to keep the final brew from being dark due to the over boiling of the malt extract...It's a great tip for making any extract brews. You put enough extract in the beginning to get hops utilization, then add the rest late in the boil to pasturize the rest of the dme...This way the extract doesn't get overly carmellized...it also helps avoid "extract twang."

Since you have got the rare pacman yeast, you should consider harvesting or culturing some before you pitch it all in the wort...Or at least harvest and wash it after you rack to secondary....It's a hard yeast to get. Especially since they are only releasing it with the kit this year....SO you want to keep it (A bunch of us are harvesting it from bottles of Rogue Beers....) But getting the fresh culture is better. Look at the wiiki's or do a forum search on how to harvest or wash the yeast...you'll be glad in the future you did!

So what's the instructions/recipe? I've got a clone bottle conditioning now (Yooper's recipe) but it doesn't call for candi sugar...how much is in the recipe?

I just brewed this last Wednesday and I agree that the instructions were a bit vague. They were written as if someone was talking you through it.

As for the candi sugar its a pound of mixed light, med and dark. Funny thing is they don't tell you what kind of grains or hops are included.

BTW,make a starter. And like Revvy said start reading the yeast washing thread. Your gonna have fun with this one. I know I did.

With a bit of googling I was able to find out what the ingredients are:
Dead Guy Homebrew kits include whole Perle and Czech Saaz Hops, Amber, Munich and Crystal Malts, Candi Sugar and English Pale Ale malt extract.

The bittering hops and flavoring hops are separate vaccum sealed bags of pelleted hops. The specialty grains all come in one big bag so it's not possible to know how much of each grain is used. I have a scale if you'd like measurements on any of the ingredients.

The instructions are really wordy and sort of confusing so I don't want to type them out verbatim. But here is a condensed version:

1. Put 3 gallons of water on the stove and turn on heat. Add grains to grain steeping bag and place into water.
2. Allow water to heat slowly to 150 degrees and hold at this temperature for 30 minutes
3. Remove grains and squeeze out water of bag.
4. Bring water to boil and add half of DME.
5. Add half of bittering hops to pot.
6. After 40 minutes of boiling take other half of bittering hops and add to pot.
7. After another 15 minutes take aroma hops and put them in. Boil for 10 more minutes
8. Turn down heat. Add other half of DME and add Amber Candi Sugar.Stir until dissolved
9. Pour enough cold water into wort until it's cool enough it won't damage fermenter.
10. Pour wort into fermenter and top off to 5 gallons with cold water.
11. Pitch yeast at 60-64 degrees.

....

So it's been a couple months since I talked about brewing this kit. The brew went fine although I think I ended up with closer to 4.5 gallons rather than 5 and did not add water.The gravity ended up pretty high at 1.072 and finished at 1.014.

The taste is similar to the original but has a little bit more alcohol and less hop taste. If I were to brew this kit again I'd use less of the candi sugar and more hops than the kit includes.

Overall a good beer that is very close to Dead Guy but lacking in hops. Here is a picture of it.

Instead of the Kit, brew Yooper's clone recipe...I'd like to know what you think....

Revvy said:

OOOHHHHH....Big mistake in line 3 NEVER SQUEEZE THE STEEPING BRAIN BAG!!!!

Click to expand...

Brain Bag? And I thought Dead Guy was just a name.

Revvy said:

Instead of the Kit, brew Yooper's clone recipe...I'd like to know what you think....

Click to expand...

It's on my list of beers to brew.



I have a question that's been bugging me about Dead Guy. Rogue claims it's a Maibock beer but I thought Maibocks were lagers? It's brewed with Pacman an ale yeast but the instructions with the kit said to ferment at around 60 F for a cleaner finish.

Is it a hybrid beer or ???

mysteryberto said:

It's on my list of beers to brew.



I have a question that's been bugging me about Dead Guy. Rogue claims it's a Maibock beer but I thought Maibocks were lagers? It's brewed with Pacman an ale yeast but the instructions with the kit said to ferment at around 60 F for a cleaner finish.

Is it a hybrid beer or ???

Click to expand...

It's a "maibock styled ale."

One thing though, the brewmaster from Rogue likes to brew it @ around 60 degrees, so he's using the ale yeast at it's lowest temp range...so it's almost on the border with lagers.

Sorry to bring back a dead thread but after about 4 months it's time for an update.

I bottled some of this today to make room in my kegerator. It's now smoother tasting with less of an alcohol bite. However it has become even sweeter with almost no hop taste left. It's almost too sweet to drink.

I still think a brewery releasing homebrew kits is awesome. But I found this kit majorly lacking in hops. Also I think the candi sugar could have played a part in making the beer sweet.

If I were to try and clone dead guy again I'd probably just use Yooper's clone recipe.

mysteryberto said:

Sorry to bring back a dead thread but after about 4 months it's time for an update.

I bottled some of this today to make room in my kegerator. It's now smoother tasting with less of an alcohol bite. However it has become even sweeter with almost no hop taste left. It's almost too sweet to drink.

I still think a brewery releasing homebrew kits is awesome. But I found this kit majorly lacking in hops. Also I think the candi sugar could have played a part in making the beer sweet.

If I were to try and clone dead guy again I'd probably just use Yooper's clone recipe.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I found it odd that they add candi sugar, going by Yooper's clone it really dosen't need it.

Revvy, if you've got any of your Yooper Dead Guy left, maybe you and Mysteryberto could do a small swap to compare the kit beer to your version. I'd be interested to hear how each of you assesses the other clone brew.

My take on Yooper's recipe is on the schedule for later this month or possibly early October, depending on when I can free up space in the fridge. Mine actually will be a lager, pitched onto the yeast cake of a Vienna lager that is burbling away now.

Chad

Sorry to drag up an old thread but I just finished brewing this kit myself. When the kit arrived a few weeks ago one of the DME bags had a hole in it which left the entire inside of the box a sticky mess.

Like previously mentioned the instructions were lacking in identification of the brewed items which kinda stinks if I want to repeat the recipe. Another problem w/ the instructions was that they too were coated in DME so I through them away w/o really paying attention. I have to laugh at myself after reading the previous threads b/c I assumed that all the bittering hops were to go in at 60 min and the aroma hops were to go in at 58 min. Maybe that will help out w/ the lack of hop flavor and too much sweetness mentioned since I should be getting more IBU's from the full 60 min boil?

Another thing I did differently was adding the DME and candi sugar pre-boil. I do full boils so I don't think this will hurt me too badly.

Lastly, I weighed each bag of DME and added 0.5lbs of extra light DME to make up for what I thought I had lost in the box. This is concerning since my OG is 1.084 even after topping up to just over 5gallons. The projected OG on the box was 1.067.

I would love to hear peoples' thoughts.

Although there is precious little information regarding the ingredients I ran what I had through beer smith and it doesn't make any sense.

5.5# extra light DME
8.5 oz Candi Sugar
1.5# of specialty grains; I ran this as crystal 60

With these fermentables I got a projected OG of 1.059. I suppose it's possible that the wort wasn't mixed completely although I doubt it. Between dumping it into the fermentation bucket then mixing it w/ my wine thief I was pretty sure is was mixed adequately. I even took several readings after more mixing.

I'm stumped.

for those with itunes, check out the brewing network presents-the jamil show. they did a show about cloning rogue dead guy dated 6-22-09. they interviewed the head brewer there at rogue and although he wasn't quite forth coming with information about it because it's one of their proprietary beers, you can still get an idea of what malts are used. they actually use a lot of crystal malt ranging from about 60 up to 120. check it out, it's a good listen.

I have a certain place in my heart for this kit...

When I first started brewing I brew a couple batches a brown ale and a red ale... they weren't great but certainly drinkable.

The third batch was a cream ale I brewed it in august-sept in VT huge temperature shifts. It ruined the beer and me from homebrewing.

About 6 months after the cream ale I decided I'd get this kit and give it one more go.

It came out great. That was more than 2 yrs ago and I've been brewing at least one batch a month since then. I don't think that it completely clones a dead guy but its a damn good beer.:rockin:

This is from the kit I just brewed. Interesting how the ingredients have changed for 2012:

3lbs Pilsen Light DME (Brewcraft) @60
2lbs Amber DME (Brewcraft) @15
1lb "Brewers Crystals" (Brewcraft) @15
1lb Munich - slowly warmed to 160F, rested for 10 before boil
0.5lbs Crystal 40L - slowly warmed to 160F, rested for 10 before boil

1oz Perle 7.0% "raw" (whole,dried - HopUnion) @60 "bittering"
0.5oz Mt. Hood 6.1% "raw" (whole, dried - HopUnion) @15 "flavor"
0.5oz 0.5oz Mt. Hood 6.1% "raw" (whole, dried - HopUnion) @flameout (+10 min rest before cooling) "aroma"

Recommended Yeast: Wyeast PACMAN
Alternate: US-05/WY1056/WLP001

Hope this helps someone!

I saw this kit recently in LHBS and was curious about it. If it was similar to the bottles you'd buy in the store. I've seen yooper's recipe and I've listened to Jamil's podcast version. Just curious about the taste of the kit compared to all grain, etc. Let me know.

Just my $0.02, but not sure I'd do this kit again.

It was very expensive at my LHBS after I added the PacMan. DGA is my go-to commercial brew and the kit just... didn't do it for me. I think the "Brewers Crystals" really kinda threw things off. I fermented it at the lower end of the fermentation temperature listed on the instructions to try to keep it as clean as possible and I ended up with good attenuation. It seemed too sweet in the end, even though I finished on the lower end of the prescribed FG. I would say that mysteryberto's notes at the top of this page are a good summery of what I found as well.

Maybe it was something in my process or environment? I've been doing all grain for a while now so I figured this would be a quick and easy way to make 5 gallons and fill tap space with something I love. It is a decent beer, it just wasn't DGA for me. I'd try Yoopers or Jamils before I would pony up for this again.

Alright. Thanks. Just thinking something simple for a Christmas present really. People asking, and I'm the only one that homebrews. (Well, mom makes wine.) People are asking what to buy me. I'm giving them everything I can think of: beer brewing stuff. I mentioned the DGA kit. it'd be straight forward to people.

No worries! It does make beer, its just very sweet. If I wanted a Brewcraft/Rogue kit, I'd look at the Shakespeare Stout.