It seems like a really long time since I made this one, and I guess it has been.  It fermented almost the full two weeks, followed by a little over a month of conditioning.  It would then need a full two weeks before I first tasted it.  I've been tasting it for a while, so I guess that the beer was actually made sometime in April or May.  I know that I show way too much love to the beers I make, but surprise surprise I really like this one too.  Its' probably only my third favorite though, behind the Celebration Ale and the IPA.

This batch was the first one I used the new wort chiller for, so I had high hopes for it.  For the uninitiated, this is a coil of copper tubing that you run water through to cool off the hot beer much faster than it would otherwise.  It helps separate various proteins that cause haziness in the finished product, so that they can be skimmed off the top.  It cooled off 3 gallons from around 190 degrees to 70 in about 15 minutes!

It also helps to make my setup look more like a meth lab, which is always good:

Ok enough rambling about geeky beer topics.  Lets get on to the finished product.  Dead Guy Ale is kind of hard for me to describe.  Rogue describes it as a Maibock, but it is brewed with ale yeast so that doesn't seem right.  I've always thought of it as an American ale with a serious dose of dark German malts.  Regardless of how its' classified, I like it a lot, so I decided to try to try my hand at making something similar.

I started out by reading this thread at homebrewtalk. This gave me a decent idea of the malts I needed.  I ended up using extra munich and cara-munich malts (about a pound of each) and half a pound of crystal.  I did my best to steep the grains at a low temperature, so that as much of what was extracted as possible could be fermented.  Managed to keep it around 160, if I remember correctly.  For base malt I used about 8.5-9 lbs of Golden dry malt.  For hops, I pretty much followed YooperBrew's schedule from the thread I linked to.  Yeast was a Northwestern Ale yeast that gave it a great fruity taste.  I also dry-hopped it with some more saaz.

This beer ended up a bit darker than Dead Guy, no doubt due to the extra munich and cara-munich.  I think I may have gone too heavy with the cara-munich, the beer has a very strong caramel flavor that seems to be screaming for a little more hops, and maybe some fruit (think Dogfish Head's Raison d'Etre without the raisins).  Next time I would probably dry hop it a bit more.  Anyways, here is the finished product:

Not the best picture, but you get the idea.  Not much head to speak of, but that could be partly due to the glass being a little wet when I poured, and the fact that it still has some time to age and carbonate.  I love the malty flavor, but somtimes its' a bit much - I think as it ages it will mellow a bit more though.

In a nutshell, I guess this beer was not all that true to the Dead Guy style (whatever that is) but I'm not worried.  It still tastes great.  The way the German malts seem to take over everything else has me wondering if I could figure out how to make an Oktoberfest using a California Common yeast (a lager yeast that works at warmer temperatures).  I'm planning to try it some time in August, so I hope to know this Oktober

LTD people, I'll do my best to save some for the end of the month.  Cheers!