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

Saving Money: Simple Yeast Culturing

A few members of the family I just finished racking my English IPA to a secondary fermentor. As part of the process, I saved some of the yeast in the primary for future use. Here then, is the start of a series of articles on yeast culturing. Back in the "good old days," homebrewers didn't have a ton of yeast choices. In some cases, brewers would even use bread yeast from the baking section of the grocery store. In practice, you hydrated the packet of dry yeast you got at the homebrew or grocery store and pitched it. The packets were cheap and worked, but there wasn't much variety to be had. Nowadays, there are several dozen strains available. While a few strains are still dry , most are liquids that come in pitchable tubes , or smack-packs . The liquid yeasts give consistent results and provide tremendous variety to finished beers, but are pricey. If you only use each pack, or tube once, you will quickly discover that yeast makes up 15%, or more of the cost ...

Kit Review: Northern Brewer La Petite Orange

Every once in awhile, a good deal on a beer kit hits my inbox. This time around, I received a nice offer from the folks at Northern Brewer for their La Petite Orange . It's described by them as a lighter take on the traditional Trappist Dubbel . What's the finished brew like? Let's find out. The kit is Malt Extract based, but also has a nice compliment of pre-crushed specialty grains in the box. In addition, there's a bag of Belgian Candi Sugar. Replacing part of the extract with Belgian Pils malt allowed me to perform a Mini-Mash with the kit's grains, rather than simply steep them. Other than that, I followed the instructions as written. Of the two recommended yeasts, I went with Wyeast's Trappist High Gravity (a.k.a Westmalle ) strain. Fist off, the beer has nice clarity and a copper hue that's paler than I expect from a Dubbel. The dense eggshell cap has decent staying power and leaves quite a bit of lace behind. Whether I approve of the colo...

Kitchen Brewing Part 3: Sparge and Boil

The mash emerges from the oven. Now that we're finished with Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, it's time to Sparge. As you can see from the photo, the grains have absorbed a lot of liquid. In a traditional all-grain setup, your Mash Tun has a valve at the bottom to release the first running of Wort. The grains are then rinsed with the sparge water to extract any remaining sugars. My stove-top method doesn't afford such luxury, so a different method is called for. The grains have gained a little weight. There are a couple of choices at this point. One choice is to lift the grain bag out of Pot A and place it into the sparge water in Pot B to steep for 10-15 minutes or more. The other is to lift the grain bag up, put a colander under it and slowly pour the sparge water through the grains into the original pot. I prefer the former, because I get a better extraction rate from my grains. All that absorption means that the grains weigh a lot more than they did going i...