Brew #12 - Saison Ete
On September 25th, 2008, I brewed a Saison. I bottled it March 1st, 2009. ‘Sokay, it’s 7% ABV, it can handle five months and some change in secondary. I took the recipe from Zymurgy. There was an article, “A Saison for Every Season”, a lovely article, written, I believe, by one of the members of the Maltose Falcons down in Southern California. I decided against using spices, though, and I ended up adding extra malt extract, out of fear of a low gravity, so it’s a modified recipe.
Saisons seem to usually come with spices. I decided against it because I was in a particularly knee-jerking mood. I think it had something to do with drinking too many overly spiced wits. Also, I wanted to see whether spices were necessary with a Saison-specific yeast.
Here’s the recipe:
9 lbs. Belgian Pilsener malt
3 lbs. white wheat
0.5 lbs. Vienna malt
0.25 lbs. acidulated malt
2 lbs. light dry malt
1.5 lbs. Belgian Candi Sugar (added 5 minutes from flameout)
2 oz. Sterling pellets - 6.0% AA for 60 minutes
2 oz. Vanguard pellets - 4.4% AA for 5 minutes
White Labs WLP568 (Belgian Style Saison Ale Yeast Blend)
13.4 quarts of mash water
17 quarts sparge water
Protein rest @ 120F for 20 minutes
Mashed at 150-155F for 1 hour
Ended up with 6.5 gallons of wort at 1.048
Boiled, adding additional extract and candi sugar.
Aerated with a stone for 30 minutes
Pitched a 20oz starter (made at 12:30am that day), wort was at 80F
SG: 1.076
October 12th, gravity was 1.024
January 29, 2009, gravity was 1.022
Added 1 packet of Red Star Pasteur Champagne Yeast that I’d mixed with about 2oz of unfiltered, warm tap water.
March 1, 2009, FG was at 1.022
Bottled into 1 3.5 gallon plastic bottle (tap-a-draft system), 9 12oz bottles, 3 16oz bottles, and 7 22oz bottles.
Tasting notes as of bottling:
Light amber in color
Some residual sweetness, though not too strong
Nice malt flavor like malted-milk kind of malt (as opposed to cereal or biscuity)
Somewhat citrusy
We’ll see if the bottles carbonate. I used the regular amount of sugar, so the tap-a-draft thing could get ugly.
[...] sad, my last brew day was September 25th of last year. I made a saison. I wrote about it. At the time, I’d just bottled, and I was worried that it wouldn’t carbonate. That [...]
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