Skip to main content

In the Fermentor: Experimental Saison

I think what I'm doing here may be a first, at least according to an admittedly brief Google search. I'm making a non-alcoholic Saison. For those of you who didn't stop reading at "non-alcoholic", I think you'll find what I'm attempting to be pretty novel.

Saison is a yeast driven style that I also feel benefits from some hop character. When you boil off alcohol to make a non-alcoholic beer, the live yeast in your beer dies off with it. Any hop aroma and flavor that was present takes a hike too (the bitterness remains, thankfully). That's a definite double whammy of flavor and aroma loss with a beer like this. To bring those losses back, I'm doing some experimentation.

Here's the order of business before getting to the actual recipe.

First off, the term non-alcoholic is a bit of a misnomer. Commercial N/A beers actually do have around 0.5% of the stuff. That means I can bottle condition my beer and let fresh yeast do a little bit of work.

Initially, I'm going to brew the beer as normal. After Primary Fermentation is complete, it's time to drive off the alcohol and add in hop flavor and aroma. The alcohol is driven off in the manner of all my other N/A beers. Priming sugar is also added at this time out of convenience.

In this beer's case, I'm driving off the alcohol by bringing the beer to a full boil for 30 minutes. The hops are added at the times prescribed below. I used hop bags to minimize the chance of hop particles finding their way into the bottles.

Once the beer cooled, I added fresh yeast and bottled it.

For bottle conditioning, I went with a dry Saison yeast for a simple reason. It's easier. I've had inconsistent results using starters made with liquid yeast strains. Sometimes I get very flat beer. Other times, it's geysers. There's no rhyme or reason to it. With the dry yeast, it's a simple matter of rehydrating it per the instructions on the packet, and then mixing it with the beer and priming sugar in the bottling bucket.

Now that the beer is bottled, I'm giving it a solid month to condition. That extra time should hopefully allow the yeast to do its job with the small amount of sugar in the bottles.

In keeping with the Saison revival in this country, I've gone with as many local ingredients as possible, and employed quite a few nonstandard grains. The grist itself was put together on the fly with the help of Adam at Boulder Fermentation Supply. A big thank you to him for that. All but one of my grains are from a malting company four hours south of my house, while the hops are from a farm up the road from my office. Only the Yeast and Spelt aren't local.

Now, do I know if any of my experiment is actually going to result in a good Saison? Nope. Will it be worth it even if it doesn't? Absolutely. All that's left now is the wait.

Here's the recipe for five gallons:

Grains:
5 lbs Colorado Malting Pilsner
2 lbs Colorado Malting Rye
2 lbs Colorado Malting Soft White Wheat
1 lb Colorado Malting Buckwheat
1 lb Best Malz Organic Spelt

Hops (Initial Boil):
0.5 oz Niwot Hops Organic Chinook (14.7% a.a.): 60 min

Hops (Secondary Boil):
1 oz Niwot Hops Organic Crystal (4.0% a.a.): 20 min
1 oz Niwot Hops Organic Crystal (4.0% a.a.): 5 min

Initial Boil Time:
60 min

Secondary Boil Time:
30 min

Yeast:
Danstar Belle Saison

Mash Schedule:
Protein Rest: 120F for 30 min
Saccharification Rest: 149F for 60 min
Mashout: 168F for 15 minutes

Original Gravity:
1.055
Estimated Final Gravity:
1.008

IBU: 39
SRM Color: 6

Fermentation Schedule:
3 Weeks Primary
1 Month Bottle Conditioning

Cost: $20 per case
Commercial Equivalent (in a sense): Great Divide Colette: $36 per case
Savings: $16

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Out of the Bottle: Insert clever use of the word Wit here

My latest Wit was a hit at my friend's birthday party. He especially liked the beer's citrus components. Others found it to be light and refreshing. I heard no Blue Moon comparisons, which actually made me quite happy. Compared to My Wit's End , this beer is much closer to style. Unmalted Wheat is part of the reason, as there's much less grainy sweetness at work. Instead, the beer is crisp and dry. The bitter orange peel really does its thing. The peel's sharp flavor melds nicely with the sweet orange peel I also used. Coriander pushes the beer's spicy character along. If I were to change anything, it would be to dial it back a notch or two. Some light sourdough aromas round out the flavor and aroma. Despite the relatively low ABV of right around 5.0%, the beer sports a fairly hefty body. Overall, I'm quite happy with this Wit. Next time, I'll hold back on the coriander. Maybe I will even take a shot at a Turbid Mash, which sounds like a great sub...

In the Fermentor: Kitchen Sink Barleywine

The Leftovers It's time for a cleanup of leftover grains and partially used packets of hops from 2012. With the exception of the 2-Row base malt, everything in the recipe below has been sitting on the shelf, or in the fridge waiting to be used. I had several open hop packages, some leftover toasted malts and a half-full bottle of malt extract too. I also had yeast cultured from my White House Honey Porter . My decision was to use almost all of my leftovers and make a partial-mash Barleywine. The finished beer will be quite strong and quite bitter. A toasted malt backbone should nicely complement pine, spice and citrus hop flavors. Because of the beer's strength, it will not be ready for at least three months and should improve with age. The recipe has been scaled up to five gallons from the 2.5 gallons I actually brewed: Grains: 9 lbs Rahr 2-Row 8.5 oz Victory 7.5 oz Brown Hops: Bittering: 0.75 oz Chinook (11.1% a.a.): 60 min 0.5 oz Colum...

In the Fermentor: Flaming Pumpkin

I'll admit that I'm not a huge Pumpkin Beer fan. I didn't have one on my brewing calendar for this year and didn't have my sights set on one for next Fall either. Then my niece came along and threw down the gauntlet. She asked me to brew her a pumpkin beer and I accepted the challenge. I did a lot of reading to see how to best go about using pumpkin in beer. Some people mash it with the grains. Others add it to the brew kettle during the boil. Some add it to the primary or secondary fermentor. The consensus from professional brewers appears to be adding it to the mash, so I took the same approach. The pumpkin was cooked ahead of time by my girlfriend to soften it, convert some of the starch and help release some of its sugars. It then joined the grains in the mash. I really want the pumpkin pie effect here, so I've thrown in all of the requisite spices toward the end of the boil. I've also gone with just enough bitterness to balance the sweetness of the ...