Belgian Saison – 5/23/2010
Recipe based off Saison Du Mont from the AHA’s Big Brew 2009. Modified a bit to make use of things I had laying around: http://hopville.com/recipe/205017/belgian-specialty-ale-recipes/belgian-saison Process notes:
- Heated 1 gallon of strike water to 165 to hit the 150 degree mashing mark
- Lost about 10 degrees over the course of the hour, should probably try keeping the burner on lowest setting next time
- 3.2 brix after adding into kettle (pre-DME being added)
- Calculating the partial mash efficiency I came up with 2*37 (vienna) + 0.5 * 2.2 (flaked oats) + 0.5 * 2 (flaked wheat) = 76.1 / 6 gallons = 13.12 PPG. Something must be odd about this though because 3.2 brix is 1.013. Does that mean I had 100% efficiency? Can’t be right…will have to ask around.
- After adding DME and bringing things to a boil the new refractometer reading was 14.6 brix (1.060).
- 1.064 per a hydrometer reading after adding honey and topping off to 5 gallons
Note: After checking with the experts on the internets I was informed I had the wrong point values for the flaked oats and wheat. As it turns out I now see that you can tell the proper point value in Hopville if you look under the PPG column in your recipe. After correcting the numbers I was able to calculate my efficiency to be around 72%. Back into the realm of reality…
Gravity check – 5/31 Fermentation activity looked to slow to a halt based on visual inspection around middle of the week so I went ahead and made up a starter with the washed WLP001 california ale yeast and pitched on Saturday to help dry things out further. As of today the gravity is about 1.021 which is pretty much where Hopville said things would end up. I gave the carboy a good shaking to try and reintroduce some oxygen to restart fermentation. I’ll check back next week to see if it’s actually doing anything.
are you souring any of this? Most saisons are a combo of 1/2 batches, one half batch fermented as normal and one half batch intentionally infected and fermented over 90 degrees to sour it, then combined, rested, and bottled. I’ve never been brave enough to try. Sour beers scare me. I love em, but I’ve never attempted them.
Sort of? I read/heard from multiple places on HBT, etc that with Saisons you actually want to just ferment the entire batch at high temps because apparently that’s what the yeast performs best at. Like in the range you refer to…85-90 degrees. I don’t have a heating belt or anything to keep the temps but I did make zero effort to cool the beer and started it a little high. I’d say on average the carboy stayed between 75-85 through the duration of the fermentation and aging process. Just bottled them on Monday and drank a tester on Friday. Was pretty good but unfortunately not nearly as dry as a Saison should be. Everything I’ve read says you should get the FG down to insanely low numbers like 1.008 or something. Mine stopped at 1.020 in the end and even after dumping some WLP001 in there and doing lots of swirling to re-suspend the yeast I couldn’t get it to drop any further. I gave up after 3 weeks and just bottled it.