Brew Day: Old World Saisons w/ Whole-Leaf Hops

Once I'd made the De Ranke-inspired beers and the C19th-inspired IPA, I found myself left with a lot of whole-leaf hops.  What to do with them?  Make some saisons, of course!  (Some bitters too, but that's another post.)

I've blogged before about Yvan de Baets' description of old saisons as "either sour or very bitter ... with bitterness obtained by the use of a massive amount of hops low in alpha acid".  The hops I had left over fit the bill nicely: some East Kent Goldings (3.6% AA), some Bramling Cross (3.3% AA), and some Hallertau Mittelfruh (2.9% AA).

Bière de garde

For the first beer, I wanted to make a sort of bière de garde, in the literal sense of a beer intended for ageing.  To this end, I planned a recipe with a slightly higher gravity than I'd usually aim for in a saison, 1.054.  (I bet there was a time when that O.G. would have been lower than 90% of the saisons brewed in the U.S!)  I went with a simple grist of 90% pilsner malt and 10% wheat, since the main focus was going to be the hops and the fermentation character, though I also did an extended three-hour boil to add a bit of colour and complexity.

In his essay, Yvan mentions hopping rates of between 5 and 8 grams per litre, with a third of this added at the end of the boil.  Assuming this was based on the volume of wort in the kettle after the boil, that gave me a range of 110g to 176g on my system, and I decided to go for the upper end of that scale with 180g.  That meant I needed a bittering addition of 120g and a late boil addition of 60g.  I decided to split the bittering into roughly 2/3 Bramling Cross and 1/3 Hallertau Mittelfruh, with reverse proportions for the late addition.  That gave me 57.8 predicted IBUs, or just about a 1:1 BU:GU ratio.  Higher than a lot of saisons, but not all that different from beers I've brewed before!

Primary fermentation was carried out by a blend of saison yeasts: Wyeast 3726 and The Yeast Bay's Saison Blend II.  After this was completed, I transferred the beer to a three-gallon carboy and added some random brett strains I had been storing in the fridge (the C1 and C3 strains isolated from a bottle of Cantillon Iris by Dmitri at BKYeast) , along with the dregs of a beer brewed by someone at Omega Yeast Labs, which was dosed with the brettanomyces strain from their C2C blend.  I'll let it sit for at least a few months before bottling at the end of the summer: its likely that packaging this and other beers will be contingent on finding enough heavy bottles, as I am starting to run short again.

Spelt Saisons

For the rest, I planned to make three variations on my basic spelt saison recipe, one for each hop variety.  As I mentioned in that earlier post, I think the fuller mouthfeel from the spelt helps prevent the bitterness from overwhelming the beer.  Although I was making an extra gallon to accommodate for wort lost to the whole hops, I did not vary the amount of spelt in the recipe, which meant that with a predicted O.G. of 1.046 the base was 82.6% pilsner and 17.4% unmalted spelt.  I varied the base malt slightly for some of the batches.  Details on that below.

Once again, I wanted to really push the bitterness while also getting a good hop character and mouthfeel, so I went with three roughly equal additions at 60, 30, and 2 minutes left in the boil, aiming for a BU:GU ratio of about 1:1.  Even by the standards of the beers I've been brewing lately with these whole hops, that was a lot of vegetable matter relative to the O.G. of the wort!

Here is a sketch of each beer.  For more details, I suggest you look at the post on the basic recipe linked above.


Mittelfruh Saison: This was the simplest of the three, with no modifications to the grist.  It was fermented with a blend of Wyeast 3724 and Wyeast 3726.  This one has been a little disappointing so far.  It has a slightly odd soapy taste that I can't get over.  Unless I forgot to rinse out a fermentor or bottling bucket, it must have something to do with using such a large volume of Hallertau Mittelftuh in the beer.  I've used those same hops in other beers too, but usually as an aroma hop later in the boil, and I haven't seen this same soapiness.  I'm hoping it will age out as the hops fade a bit.

EKG Saison: For this I substituted approximately 30% Golden Promise for some of the pilsner.  It was fermented with a mix of The Yeast Bay's Saison Blend II and Wyeast 3726.  This has turned out to be one of my favourite homebrews to date.  It has a striking bitterness, without being at all harsh or astringent, and an earthy and citrusy hop-character that I find very appealing.  J said it reminded her of Taras Boulba, and I can see what she means.  Its not that they taste the same, but the overall character is very similar: dry, bitter, hoppy, and very drinkable.

Bramling Cross Saison:   I didn't get round to brewing this before I left for England.  Blame the summer heat, and a sense of fatigue from brewing over the past few months.  I'll probably do this batch when I get back, substituting about 15% Vienna for some of the pilsner.  Fermentation will go one of two ways: I'll either keep it clean and keg it (only because I want to use whatever heavy bottles I can amass for other batches), or add brettanomyces and let it sit for a while.

Brew Day: Nineteenth Century IPA v.2

The recipes inspired by De Ranke XX Bitter described in the last post weren't the only reason I had my eye out for some fresh whole-leaf hops this year.  The IPA in the photo opposite, based on a nineteenth century, is one of my favourite home-brews from the last few years, and I've been thinking about a re-brew since I opened my first bottle at the end of the summer.  Of course, in keeping with the tradition, I had to wait for the new season's hops, which seem to arrive in the US almost six months after they were picked!

I decided to use whole leaf hops this time, both because I presume that was what the Burton brewers used, and because I hoped they might have a freshness that would have been lost in the pelletizing process.  This is certainly what the brewers at De Ranke think: in the article I linked to in my last post, Nino says "By using only hop flowers, we ensure the hop oils are never oxidised so we never get any harsh bitterness in our beers".  I used pellets in the first version of the beer, which had a distinctive mouthfeel that I associate with large volumes of kettle hops, so I'm hoping I'll only improve things by switching to leaf rather than pellet hops.

Of course, using whole hops in the brewery presents a number of challenges, which are conveniently listed on the De Ranke website:

• When the quality of this expensive material drops, it can lead to off-flavours in the beer, which is why we work closely with a local hop farmer to ensure we always get hops that meet our high standards.
• The annual price fluctuates and depends on the harvest.
• The hops must be refrigerated to maintain quality all year long (which makes them even more expensive)
• Hops can only be bought once a year, just after harvest. It requires good planning for the entire brewing season to avoid hop shortage or surplus.
• Whole-leaf hops require lots of cleaning at the brewery. Hop cones tend to stick to everything during the boiling of the wort, which results in more work for the brewers because the hops must be manually removed, as opposed to breweries that use hop pellets or extracts, which requires far less work to remove.

This fits my experience: whole hops are messy, they take up a lot of space in the freezer, soak up a lot of beer, and make siphoning an absolute nightmare if you don't have some kind of filter or false bottom in place.  And as you can see below, these old IPA recipes use a lot of hops...

I brewed a series of beers with these hops (including the De Ranke-inspired beers from the last post, and some others that post about later), and I gradually learnt how to adjust my brew day to accommodate them.  The biggest problem is the sheer volume of hop matter in the kettle, especially when (as with these recipes) you're using an exorbitant amount of hops to begin with.  I deliberately brewed a whole gallon of extra beer, in anticipation of leaving a lot behind with the hops in the kettle.  (Even when I used pellet hops last year, I lost some volume in the IPA batch because I didn't make adjustments.)

The other problem is racking from the kettle.  If you have a fancy kettle, with a ball-valve, screen, or even false-bottom, it might not be an issue.  I rack with an auto-siphon, which quickly gets clogged by the whole hops, even if I cover the end with some kind of filter.  This meant that I had to pour the wort manually from the kettle, which is neither safe nor particularly sanitary (since I inevitably end up making a mess).  Frankly, its the kind of dumb s#@t I used to do when I first started brewing, and which I swore off entirely after having surgery to fix an inguinal hernia a few years ago.  Still, here I was again, precariously balanced with a heavy kettle as wort splashed off the whole hops over the kitchen floor.  No fun at all.

Since I get a lot of trub from my BIAB process, I generally like to whirlpool and leave a good amount of wort in the kettle.  Obviously, pouring the whole thing makes this impossible, so instead of doing a whirlpool I poured the wort into a keg as soon as it had cooled, then let this sit for a while until the trub and hop matter had dropped out of suspension.  At this point, I racked the much cleaner wort into the final fermentation vessel, oxygenated, and pitched the yeast.

Anyway, back to the beer itself.  Besides changing to whole hops, I didn't make any real modifications from the recipe I linked to above: 100% pilsner malt, elevated levels of sulphate (though not quite to the levels reported for historic Burton waters).  This time I pitched Wyeast 1318 for the primary fermentation, and the dregs from a beer fermented with Wyeast Brettanomyces Clausenii for the secondary. 

Last time the beer was all but undrinkable for the better part of eight months, so I'm not expecting to be drinking it any time soon.  I'm hoping the whole hops will soften the bitterness slightly, which might mean I'm drinking this one earlier than the previous version.  For now, its sitting in a carboy in my brew closet.