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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
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