What this is
A single-hop Citra pale ale over a two-malt base: Gladfield Ale and Vienna, nothing else. Nominally 18B, though at 7% it sits above the style and has done for a while.
The appeal is that there is nowhere to hide. Two malts, one hop, and a clean thiol-active yeast means every change you make is legible in the glass.
Where the name comes from
It started as a Zombie Dust clone — Karl’s recipe from Brewtopia in Petone, itself a take on the Three Floyds original. That first brew in February 2023 worked, and the parts worth keeping were obvious: the Gladfield Ale and Vienna base, and Citra as the single hop.
Rather than keep brewing someone else’s recipe, it got renamed. Dusty Zombies keeps the tie to the original without pretending to be a clone any more. The clone sits at the head of the lineage below because the grain bill is genuinely the same recipe — 4.74 kg Ale and 1.58 kg Vienna, against 4.7 and 1.9 today.
The detour, and the return
The two brews in October 2023 abandoned Citra entirely and went to a New Zealand trio: Nectaron and Superdelic, with Moutere on one and Sequoia on the other. Owen brewed his the same month.
They were a genuine fork in intent, but the recipe came back. From DZ II in May 2024 the hop reverted to Citra alone, at double the original charge — 300 g against 150 — and stayed there through DZ III, which is the canonical version above.
Since then the direction has been Citra with Krush alongside it: your fourth brew in December 2025, and Owen’s in March 2026, arrived at that pairing independently. It is very likely where this recipe goes next. It is not canonical yet because the two brews disagree on strength — DZ IV came in at 1.071 and 7.5%, Owen’s at 1.060 and 6.3% — and the single-hop version is the cleaner statement of what the beer is.
Watch the gravity
The lineage has drifted. The clone was 1.057 and 6.0%; DZ IV was 1.071 and 7.5%. Some of that is deliberate and some is efficiency running ahead of the plan. 1.063 is the number above, and anything past 1.065 is worth checking your pre-boil against rather than accepting.
Related
Alora (Va Bene) IPA is the same idea run with different parts: a two-malt base and a single hop, but Golden Promise in place of Gladfield Ale and 210 g of Alora in place of the Citra. It sits outside this lineage rather than in it — different base malt, different hop, no shared history — but the architecture is borrowed directly, and it is the obvious place to look if you want to know whether the structure travels.