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.

Basic Spelt Saison Recipe

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you might have noticed that I stopped posting recipes at some point.  This was a conscious decision rather than laziness, but it didn't come from any desire to be secretive about my home-brew.  The real reason is that I just don't think that precise recipes are all that important, especially for the kinds of beer I make, and I think posting them can be a bit of a distraction. (If I were making a lot of stouts or amber ales, I might feel differently.) For me the real interest is in the thought process behind the recipe, rather than the numbers on the page.

However, when the team behind the wiki at Milk the Funk asked for some home-brew recipes from regular posters, I decided to provide one that I brew quite regularly.  And having taken the time to write out the details of my process, I figured I might as well turn that material into a post that could serve as a sort of complement to the "A Typical Brew Day" post at the top of the blog (which needs to be updated), using it to describe some of the thinking behind the recipe.  Hopefully people won't find the 'sloppiness' of my approach too horrifying!  As you'll see, there are ways in which I am a very imprecise brewer...

The recipe I provided is for a Basic Spelt Saison, i.e. a dry, bitter, hoppy beer with a reasonably low ABV.  If you want some pedigree, a version of this beer scored 43.5 at MCAB this year, and took bronze in its category.  I have made this recipe, or variations on it, at least ten times, and it probably has as good a claim as any to be my 'standard' saison recipe.  That already shows you something that I think is important in the way I think about home-brew (and that is important background to the details of my brew day): repetition.  For any recipe I'm serious about, I'll rebrew it time after time after time.

I learnt how important this is from making bread.  I'm by no means an expert baker, though I can usually throw together a decentish loaf from any recipe, and know a reasonable amount about the techniques and processes involved in baking.  But I have been making the same sourdough loaf, or variations on it, 1-3 times a week for at least the past five years.  They don't always come out great, but when I put my mind to it, I can make a good loaf, and when they don't come out well I usually know what's gone wrong.  Some of that came from reading a lot about bread-making, but most of it is from making the same loaf over and over again.

So, with that in mind, on to the recipe:

Malt

24.2% Unmalted Spelt
75.8% Pilsner

Hops

60 min - EKG - 20 IBUs
20 min - EKG - 8 IBUs
2 min - EKG 2 IBUs

Yeast

Saison blend

O.G. 1.046
F.G. 1.002-4

Yes, that's it!  In a way, you don't need to know anything more, if you know your way around your own equipment.  But I'll include some commentary and suggestions , as well as some details of my process on brew-day.

Malt: 

First, why 24.2% of spelt and 75.8% of pilsner?  Well, after several test batches, in which I varied the proportions deliberately and precisely, I decided this was the perfect ratio...  

Just kidding.  I originally brewed a recipe with 70% pilsner and 30% spelt, the proportions provided for Blaugies Saison d'Epeautre in Farmhouse Ales, with an O.G. in the mid-1.040s, because that would give me a moderately strong (by my standards) but drinkable beer.  As I started to repeat it, I began to make some small changes.  First, a single bag of unmalted spelt from Bob's Red Mill weighs about 800 grams.  Opening two bags to get a different amount is a bit of a nuisance, especially if I'm not baking with spelt at the moment, so I decided to stick with one.  Add 2.5 kg of pilsner malt to that (an easy number to remember), and---on my equipment---you get a predicted O.G. in the range I was looking for.  That means the recipe is less than 70/30, but its close enough to not make a big difference.  My O.G. is reliably between 1.044 and 1.046.

I often vary the grist slightly, depending on what I'm going for and what grains I have on hand.  Here are some suggestions (I've listed them as percentages, but I usually round off to a convenient weight, typically 300g, 500g, 1kg, etc.):

• Sub in 5-15% Munich or Vienna malt.  I add Vienna fairly frequently, and Munich if I'm adding other adjuncts to this base to make a darker, maltier beer.
• Sub in 10-40% of a characterful base malt.  I've used Golden Promise, 6-row, and US 2-row, either from necessity or because I thought the flavours would work well.  
• Add adjuncts.  The spelt gives this beer a nice full mouthfeel, which means the recipe can stand up well to relatively large amounts of sugar.  I've taken this base recipe and added a container's worth of either Candi Syrup or honey.  The latter worked particularly well. 
• Add post-fermentation flavourings.  I've added a hibiscus tea at bottling, along with some fruity brett strains, and I thought it came out great.

Hops:

The hops listed above are just a suggestion.  EKG work well, and its pretty hard to get too much bitterness from them, so I often go as high as 40 or even 45 IBUs, especially if I'm planning on letting the beer sit for a while post-fermentation.  The fuller, fluffy mouthfeel from the spelt helps the beer stand up to this bitterness, even though it finishes fairly dry.

I tend to stick to European hops, or American varieties that have some of the same characteristics, since I'm looking to both complement and accentuate the slightly savoury characteristic of the spelt with earthy, spicy, citrusy flavours. But I don't see why this recipe couldn't work with some of the North American or Southern Hemisphere hops as well.

I occasionally add a light dry-hop (1-1.5g/l), especially if I've let the beer sit for a few months during a secondary fermentation.  I'm usually going for something quite subtle here, trying to slightly accentuate existing flavours and aromas, rather than adding a new layer that screams 'HOPS!'.

Fermentation:

I've used various blends of saison yeast for this recipe, and they all work well: just pick something that will get it fairly dry.  If I had to name one, I'd say Wyeast 3726. Recently I've been using two blends with this strain, one that is a combination of 3726 and 3724, and one that is a combination of 3726 and The Yeast Bay's Saison Blend II.

I also think this beer works well with brettanomyces.  My preference is for a more subtle brett character that emerges gradually as the beer ages, so with that in mind I prefer to pitch a small amount of brettanomyces in secondary or at bottling.  I've been using Wyeast's Brettanomyces Clausenii a lot recently (in the form of dregs from previous batches), as well as The Yeast Bay's Beersel Blend.  Based on what I've heard from a local homebrewer who works at Omega Yeast Labs, I think the brettanomyces strain in their C2C American Farmhouse blend would also work well, so you could just pitch that.

The fuller mouthfeel also means that the beer stands up well to a bit of acidity.  My preferred method for achieving this is by blending in some aged sour beer.  You may want to dial back the bitterness a bit if you're planning to do such blending.  I typically don't bother, because the hops I use rarely give a harsh bitterness, and I enjoy the changing balance between bitterness and tartness as the beer ages.

Process:

Because of the relatively large proportion of spelt in this recipe, I typically do a cereal mash. The process is quite straight-forward for Brew in a Bag, but may require some modification for other mashing regimes.  I'm still a little ambivalent about the best time to add the spelt porridge to the main mash.  Some of my recent beers made with the process below have had lower head-retention than I'm used to, and I'm still trying to work out if that is from using a more modified pilsner malt, or from including the spelt porridge in the first protein rest.

1. Crush spelt separately to consistency of grits.  For me, that means running it through my Corona mill twice on a fairly tight setting (too tight and the mill sticks).  
2. Bring the spelt grits to a boil in a large saucepan with a few litres of water (subtract this from the volume of your main batch, or take it directly from the liquor in the main kettle). Keep at a boil, stirring to prevent scorching, until it forms a thick porridge: usually 15-20 minutes. This stage can be done prior to brew day, with the cooled spelt porridge stored in the fridge till required.  [NB: I often throw in a handful of crushed pilsner malt as well (yes, a handful, I don't measure it).  I think the enzymes convert some of the sugars as mix passes through the conversion temperatures on its way to a boil.  Sometimes I'll let it rest for ten minutes at around 150°F first.]
3. Heat main mash liquor and dough in with grist and spelt porridge, aiming for an initial temperature of 131F. You may need to break up the spelt porridge with your hands if you stored it before use. Keep at this temperature for around 15-20 minutes. [Optional step: you can also include an earlier rest at around 113F. This may aid with lautering and possibly increase phenolics from any brettanomyces strains.]
4. Raise mash to around 145F. Keep at this temperature for 40-50 minutes.
5. Raise mash to around 154F. Keep at this temperature for 20 minutes.
6. Raise to 168F. Mash out and lauter. Top-up with water to reach your desired pre-boil volume. Proceed with boil.

Here's what I typically do post-boil:

Cool beer to around 65F. Oxygenate, pitch yeast, and allow to free-rise. (In the summer, I would keep it in my fermentation chamber set at 70F for 24-26 hours.) At the moment I prefer to add a small amount of brettanomyces after primary fermentation is underway, or in secondary.  This is because I'm looking for a slower development of the brett-related flavours.

Hopefully that was helpful, or at least interesting, to someone out there.

Bière de Coupage: Boxed Lambic

In the previous two posts in this series I described my experiences making bières de coupage with both kettle-soured and mixed fermentation home-brew.  The inspiration behind all of this was the ongoing tradition of using aged beer from lambic breweries for blending, and when I conceived of this series of posts I knew that I wanted to look into making such a blend myself.

First, I needed to get my hands on some lambic.  As these advertisements from old volumes of Le Petit Journal du Brasseur show, lambic brewers have a history of selling aged lambic for blending, which continues in the present day sale of `bag-in-a-box' lambic from certain breweries.  These boxes are occasionally available from Belgian webshops that ship to the US, but the price of shipping makes them prohibitively expensive, to the point where for a while I felt that I couldn't justify the cost (they would be much more affordable if I still lived in England!).  I had all but given up on the idea, when a fellow brewer from my homebrew club offered to split the shipping on an order with me: it only saved a little bit of money, but combine that with an upcoming birthday and I had all the excuse I needed to ask for a box of lambic, along with a few examples of bière de coupage not available in the U.S.

My original plan was to purchase a single box of Oud Beersel lambic, which I would then split between two 11.4 litre (3 gallon) batches of beer.  Each box contains five litres of lambic, so subtracting about ~400ml for tasting and other analytics, that would leave 4.6 litres to divide between the two batches, or 2.3 litres each.   Although I was tempted by the idea of just adding the lambic to each batch at bottling, and relying on the fermentation of residual sugars for carbonation, this felt like too much of a risk for such an expensive batch of beer, so I instead decided that I would simply remove 2.3 litres of beer from each carboy, and replace it with lambic, giving me a blend of approximately 20% lambic to 80% home-brew.  I could then leave the beers to undergo a secondary fermentation for a few months before packaging.

The Home-Brew

The first thing to do was to make the home-brewed beers.  I settled on two recipes, one for a 'basic' saison made with 100% pilsner malt, and the other a variation on a spelt saison that I've been making a lot recently.

Spelt Saison

Grist: Pilsner (60.6%%), Unmalted Spelt (24.2%), Vienna (15.2%)

Hops: EKG

Yeast: Saison Blend (Yeast Bay Saison Blend II, Wyeast 3726)

O.G.: 1.044

IBUs: 28.3

I have a separate post scheduled about the spelt saison recipe, so I won't write much about it here.  It typically includes between 20-25% spelt, often with something like Vienna or Munich malt to give it some additional character.  In this case I went with Vienna, and backed down slightly on the IBUs.  It was fermented with a blend of The Yeast Bay's Saison Blend II, and Wyeast 3726.

Basic Saison

Grist: Pilsner (100%)

Hops: EKG

Yeast: Saison Blend (Wyeast 3724, 3726)

O.G.: 1.060 (Predicted: 1.055)

IBUs: 36.6

I've been mostly using cheap North American pilsner recently, but I decided to splash out on some Weyerman Bohemian pilsner for the basic saison.  This is supposed to be slightly under-modified compared to many other modern pilsners, and I've enjoyed its more pronounced flavour when I've used it in the past.  I put the grist through the mash-steps I use for adjunct-rich beers, with rests at 131F, 145F, and 154F.

Since I knew the beer was going to be blended with lambic, I also decided to do a longer boil, hoping to match the richer colour and perhaps some of flavours of the lambic.  In the end I settled on a three hour boil, which was shorter than the one I used for this bière de garde, but still long enough for a noticeably darker colour (relative to both the start of the boil, as shown in the picture below, but also to the same volume of wort of comparable strength made with a shorter boil).

The rest was all quite straight-forward: EKG early and mid-boil to around 36 IBUs, and a blend of Wyeast 3724 and 3726 for primary fermentation.  The original proportions were approximately 70% 3724 to 30% 3726, but this was the second or third generation, so I have no idea how that balance had changed.  I was aiming for a O.G. of around 1.055, but between the longer boil and the step-mash with an unfamiliar malt I ended up overshooting by 5 points.

The Lambic

While I was doing all of this, my friend placed his order at Belgium in a Box, and it arrived about a month after I brewed these beers.  As I said above, I only ordered a single box of Oud Beersel lambic, and had planned to split it between the two beers.  However, when my friend dropped off my order, he had added an extra box of Timmermans from his own stash!  Incredibly generous, and very exciting for me.  (Thanks Tarsicio!)  That made me re-think my plans slightly.  I knew I wouldn't have time to brew many more beers before leaving for the summer, so I decided to make an additional blend with beers I had in my brew-closet.  But first, the lambic...




I've copied out my tasting notes for each box below.

Timmermans

Gravity: 1.009
Tasting Notes: Nutty aroma, almost like marzipan.  Assertive, lemony sourness.  Nice but one-dimensional.  Will add a pleasant acidity.

Oud Beersel

Gravity: 1.006
Tasting Notes: More complex than the Timmermans, with a mix of bright fruitiness and light funk.  Sulphurous note that is a bit overwhelming at first.  Bit of plastic with the fruitiness.  Only lightly tart, compared to the pronounced lemony acidity of the Timmermans.  Preferred blending component.

The Blends

Since I had more lambic than I had anticipated, I let myself take larger samples from each box for tasting, gravity readings, and blending experiments.  Luckily I had just made some pulls from two of my soleras (ECY20, Roeselare), so I had some aged pale sour on hand in carboys and jugs.  The ECY20 pull has a pronounced lemony sourness, along with a bit of hay and light funk.  I decided to keep this for blending with other home-brew, as I like the acidity it adds, but that wasn't needed here.  The Roeselare pull (which has had a lot of dregs added over the year) was more funky, with a softer acidity.  I felt like this worked better with the boxed lambics. I also had five gallons of an adjunct sour that I made a few years ago.  For a long time this suffered from a strange minty/herbal taste that I attribute to 'aged' hops that added more bitterness than I expected, but that flavour was finally beginning to fade, and I found that the beer added a nice complexity in blends.  So that gave me the following components to play with:

1. Basic Saison
2. Spelt Saison
3. Roeselare Solera
4. Adjunct Sour
5. Oud Beersel Lambic
6. Timmermans Lambic

Blending these together was fun, but only moderately informative.  As with my previous blending session, I found that I got palate-fatigue pretty quickly, and that it was hard to make well-founded decisions between different possible blends, beyond ruling out the ones that I felt had obvious flaws.  In the end things went the same way as last time: I was testing out pre-conceived blends to see if they would work, rather than coming up with a blend on the spot.

I decided to stick with a variation of my original plans for the saisons.  Instead of splitting the Oud Beersel between both batches, I used it in the basic saison, and used the Timmermans for the spelt saison.  I racked out approximately 2 litres from each saison, and replaced it with an equivalent amount of lambic, for a blend of ~18% lambic to ~82% saison.

This left me with approximately 2.5 litres of each lambic (subtracting the 0.5 litres I took for sampling and testing blends).  I combined this in a five gallon carboy with 11.4 litres of pale sour racked from my Roeselare solera, along with the 2 litres of basic saison described above and approximately 2.5 litres of two year old adjunct sour that went unused in my Autumn blending.

All three blends have been sitting in carboys since blending, and each has shown some signs of fermentation. The Oud Beersel box was clearly alive and fermenting on arrival, as the bag was swollen to the point where I was worried it might burst, and continued to swell after I had let out some of the gas.   I didn't see any comparable activity from the Timmermans, but a pellicle has formed on the blend, so I think it also contained active yeast and LAB.  I haven't taken new gravity readings, but I know that I won't be able to package these beers for a while because I'm running low on heavy bottles.  I'm hoping I can bottle them before I leave for England in July, but it may have to wait until the end of the summer. 

Bière de Coupage: Aged Sours

For this next post in the series on bière de coupage, I'm going to try to summarize my experience to date of making such beers with aged sours, and talk about some recent batches made with this process.

For a while I thought that coupage was something brewers did after primary fermentation.  That's certainly true of most contemporary versions, but Dave Janssen directed me towards some material that suggests that  this wasn't the only process used by earlier brewers.  Some of the details are still unclear, but at least some of the material that Dave has passed on to me suggests that in some cases a small portion of aged beer was added at the beginning of fermentation, rather than after primary fermentation was complete.  This practice is often mentioned in connection with seasonal brewing, and its a running theme that coupage is a necessity if brewing in the summer.  This fits with the idea that the aged beer was used to steer fermentation in the right direction, by inoculating with bacteria and yeast that had proven themselves to make a positive flavour contribution, and also perhaps by lowering the pH of the wort to a point that would inhibit spoilage organisms in the early stages of fermentation.  (I do not mean to suggest that the brewers understood it in exactly these terms.)  This process is closer to using aged beer to inoculate a solera than it is to using it to contribute particular flavours to a blend.

The way I typically use aged sours is somewhere between these two practices.  My primary purpose is to modify the flavour of the young beer, adding some aromatic complexity and a degree of tartness.  But I also want the blend to slowly evolve over time, as the bacteria and yeast from the aged sour gradually take over the flavour profile.  For me, noticing how a batch gradually changes is one of the pleasures of home brewing, and I've started to think a lot about how to brew beers that will go through a positive evolution as they get older.  I'll say a bit more about that below.

When it comes to choosing base beers for this kind of blending, I generally follow this advice from Garrett Crowell at Jester King: "Beyond both components of the blend being dry/done with fermentation, there aren't any special requirements for making biere de coupage [except perhaps] a nice level of acidity in the aged beer".  Although this can be hard to predict, I think the most important thing is to have some picture of where you want the final blend to end up.  I like this general advice from Ron Jeffries, found in Brew Like a Monk, even if its a little harder to apply to blended beers:

Key in writing a great recipe [or making a great blend!] is to begin with the end.  You must begin with the finished beer.  You need a very clear vision of the beer you wish to brew.  How does it look, what color is it?  Does it glow; does it sparkle, or throw a yeasty haze?  How does the head look, its color, texture, and lacing.  Breathe in deeply through your nose.  How does it smell?  What does the aroma tell you about the beer?  [Etc.]

Sometimes I want to accentuate and the fruitier flavours of a base beer with some tartness, and compliment them with some of the sharper citrus, hay, and overripe fruit you can find in aged sours, so I look for beer that I think will pair well to this effect.  Other time I want to add a soft layer of barnyard funk and a lighter tartness to complement a more phenolic or earthy-hop-driven saison, so I'll use a blending component that I know has some of these aromas and flavours. Over time I've found myself preferring base saisons with a fairly clean fermentation profile, since I now want any brettanomyces-related funk to emerge slowly after blending.  I also don't mind a bit of bitterness, even when blending with a tart beer, since what I want is for the balance between this bitterness and the tartness of the sour to gradually shift as the beer ages.  My guide here is Yvan de Baets' description of Rodenbach-era XX Bitter: "When young, the bitterness predominated, balanced by a light tartness.  As it aged, the bitterness diminished, giving way to a more pronounced and lightly vinous tartness."

Using dry/fully-fermented beers is certainly the easiest way to make these blends, and I take the usual steps to ensure that the base beer finishes as low as possible (step mash, plenty of oxygen, healthy yeast).  My saisons can end up anywhere between 1.006 and 1.000, depending on the blend of yeast I'm using, and the aged sours are typically in a similar range.  If I want to blend straight-away without worrying about over-carbonation I try to get the saison as dry as possible.  One way to do that is to use a highly attenuative strain like Wyeast 3711, which can take a beer down to 1.000 or lower.  I'm not a big fan of the flavours from that yeast, but one technique I've used with some success is pitching a small proportion of an attenuative strain along with my primary yeast.  A dried yeast like Danstar's Belle Saison is a good candidate here, because you can weigh out a tiny pitch and seal up the packet with a vacuum-sealer.  Another option, if you're planning to let the beers age a bit before blending, is to pitch some brettanomyces along with the saison yeast.  I still do this if I know the beers are going to sit for a while, but in general I want the base beer to have a relatively clean flavour profile at blending, so that the brettanomyces can gradually make its presence felt as the beer ages, rather than dominating from the start.

Most of the bières de coupage I've made at home have used a pale sour from one of my various soleras for the sour component of the beer.  Whenever I take a draw from a solera, I put some of it in gallon and half-gallon glass jugs to save it for this kind of blending.  In the past this has meant that I've varied the final proportions of a blend based more on convenience than tasting considerations.  If I'm planning to blend in a five gallon carboy, I'll make four gallons of saison and blend it with a one gallon jug of pale sour in the carboy.  That gives me a blend of 20% sour to 80% saison.  If I'm making a smaller batch, I'll usually make three gallons of saison, move it to a carboy, and then rack out and replace some proportion with the sour.  In some cases, this means racking out to fill a 1/2 gallon jug, and replacing with the same volume, i.e. roughly 15% sour to 85% saison.  In other cases, I've split a single half-gallon jug between two three gallon carboys, i.e. roughly 8% to 92%.

I can't always predict the final profile of the beer based on the way it tastes at blending.  One reason is that, if there is enough residual gravity left in either beer, there may be further fermentation afterwards.  Depending on the age of (and relative health of the yeast and bacteria in) each beer, the sourness will either increase rather quickly after blending, or increase more slowly in the bottle.  As with the blends made with my kettle sour, I've found that a small amount of acidic beer makes a quite noticeable difference to the perception of the final blend.  I would hesitate to go over 20-25% sour beer, unless I wanted to make something with a very pronounced acidity.  5-8% seems to be a good proportion for a background tartness, and 8-15% if you want something a little more pronounced without making the beer 'sour'.  Of course, all of this will be relative to the sourness of your acid beer, as well as your own palate.

So far I've usually let the beer sit in the carboy for at least a month before packaging, which gives it a chance to stabilize.  I have occasionally made blends at bottling, and its something I'd like to do more frequently.   The trick, of course, is getting a predictable level of carbonation after packaging, which means either ensuring that both components are as dry as possible before blending, or factoring in any further fermentation into how you calculate the amount of priming sugar.  (Jeffrey Crane's calculator is an excellent tool for this, but only if you can predict the terminal gravity of both components of the blend.)  The most interesting option---one that's inline with what many Belgian producers do---would be to rely solely on residual sugars in the blend for carbonation.  I haven't been brave enough to try this yet, but its something I'd like to do in future.  It certainly requires more patience, as the beer will need a longer period in the bottle to reach condition.  There is also the fear that the beer will over-carbonate, or fail to carbonate at all.

Old Batches

While writing this post, I took the opportunity to revist some previous batches of bière de coupage.  One recipe for which I've used this technique consistently is my buckwheat saison.  This is one of those beers where I'm looking for a more pronounced tartness to complement the fruit-forward flavours of the base, so five of the six batches I've made have had a ratio of 20% sour beer to 80% saison.  Some of the saisons underwent mixed primary fermentations, whereas other were fermented clean.

The batch I tried while writing this post was the third I made, and is almost a year old at this point.  It is very fruit-forward in its aroma and flavour, with lots of lemon up front (both in the flavour and acidity), and some more generic citrus and stone-fruit in the background.   The buckwheat still gives this one a fairly full body, along with great head retention, but the beer still finishes dry.  Its been pretty well received by most people I've given it to, and is one of my favourite batches.

The second was one of the spelt saisons I brewed a few months ago.  This one was aged with a small pitch of the Dupont Lochristi blend, and had approximately 1/4 gallon of ages sour blended in, to make up 8% of the final blend.  Both beers were fairly attenuated at blending, and I let the blend sit for a while before packaging, at which point it had reached 1.002.  I had hoped it might drop a little further in the bottle, but there's no sign of that yet.

At this point the beer has a noticeable tartness, but not one that dominates the rest of the beer.  There's is also still a slight tannic bitterness at the back end, which I rather enjoy, since it adds a bit of complexity to the finish.  The Lochristi strains are recognisable in the aroma and flavour of the beer, giving a soft fruitiness that is accentuated by the tartness.  My biggest criticism of the beer is that it is only moderately carbonated, where higher carbonation (modified by the softer mouthfeel of the spelt) would really help some of the flavours to pop out.  If I were to make this batch again, I would add the Lochristi strains along with the aged sour (or use a sour that had some of those strains), and package the beer at blending.  My hope would be that the flavour profile would gradually shift over time, and that the carbonation would steadily increase without becoming dangerous.

New Batch

While working on this series of posts, I also decided to make a bière de coupage that was a little different from the ones I've made before.  For the most part, I've tended to stick to fairly classic saison profile for the blended components, particularly in their hop profile.  This time I decided to go in a different direction, taking my basic spelt saison recipe, but using American hops for the flavour additions instead of something like EKG.  In the end, I went with Ahtanum, Amarillo, and Citra for the kettle hops (keeping additions fairly small), as well as a light dry-hop with Amarillo.

I blended in a small portion of aged sour from a pale solera as I racked the beer to secondary (probably around 5%, though I did it by eye), and let it sit for a few weeks before adding the dry-hops.  Once these had settled, I tasted the beer in preparation for bottling.  The dry-hop had given it a very perfumed aroma, with lots of citrus and tropical fruit, and a touch of funk underneath it.  This seemed promising, but I decided that the beer needed more tartness to make all of this jump out in the flavour.  With that in mind, I added an extra 1/2 gallon of aged sour to the batch at bottling (in the photo below, you can see the parts of the dislodged pellicle spiralling down through the glass jug).  I will give the beer at least three weeks before opening a bottle, and won't drink most of the batch until after I return from England at the end of the summer.  It will be interesting to see how much of the hop aroma survives at that time.

Grist: Pilsner (65.7%), Unmalted Spelt (23.9%), Vienna (10.4%)

Hops: EKG, Amarillo, Ahtanum, Citra

Yeast: Saison Blend (Yeast Bay Saison Blend II, Wyeast 3726)

O.G.: 1.046

IBUs: 28.1

ABV: 5.8%

That's it for this post.  In the next part of this series, I'll be writing about some rather special bières de coupage, made from home-brew blended with genuine lambic.

Bière de Garde with Extended Boil

My first brew of 2016 was also my first attempt at making something like a classic
bière de garde.  I have a few malty saisons cut with red sours that could probably pass for interpretations of the style, but here I wanted to make something closer to the stronger, malt-forward beers described in Phil Markowski's Farmhouse Ales.
Initially my plan was to make something along the lines of the 'Bière de Garde - Artisanal Brewery Version' on p.89 of that book, which relies on an array of specialty malts 'to yield a greater complexity and depth of malt flavour'.  However, as I was flicking through the rest of the book, my attention rested on the following short note on simpler single-malt grain bills:

This approach to malt grist formulation might be more appropriate if a longer keeping time (six months or more) is desired for a bière de garde.  As the beer ages and slowly reacts with oxygen (ingress through the bottle closure) the malt character will intensify and come into its own over a period of six to twelve months.  A formulation containing a larger degree of specialty malts (Munich, Aromatic, Biscuit, etc.) may become 'too malty' over an equivalent aging period.

Since I'm planning on ageing this beer for quite a while, I decided to change my original plans and go for a much simpler grist.

Something else also caught my eye in the simpler recipe for a 'Bière de Garde - Large Brewery Version' on p.88.  In the notes below the recipe, Markowski says:

An extended boil (two or three hours) will add complexity and character.  This grist formulation will yield a bière de garde suitable for longer-term storage (greater than six months).

I'd been meaning to experiment with longer boils for a while, prompted in part by conversations with Andrew Addkison from The Farmhouse Obsession.  Boil-length and intensity was one of the ways in which traditional brewers could control the flavour profile of their beer without relying on the array of specialty malts we have access to today.  As Yvan de Baets mentions in his essay in Farmhouse Ales, longer brews were also characteristic of at least some historical farmhouse ales:

The boil lasted five to eight hours and sometimes up to fifteen hours "due to the generally accepted opinion that beer kept better the longer it boiled". This resulted in a deeper coloured wort, intensified by the fact that the copper boiling kettles were generally heated by open fire. (p.107)

Longer boils are also associated with traditional lambic brewing, and I think they might add some interesting complexity to my pale sour soleras.

With all this in mind, I decided to try making a bière de garde with a simple grist of 80% pilsner and 20% Golden Promise, hopefully getting some colour and complexity from an extended four and a half hour boil.  The planned O.G. was 1.075, with bitterness and hop character coming from some French Aramis hops.

The extended boil took some extra planning, since with my full-volume BIAB mash I couldn't fit all the liquor I'd need in the kettle.  The solution was simple, holding back some water until after the mash, then adding it back before the start of the boil.

I do my brewing on the stove-top, placing the kettle across two burners, which together provide enough heat for a moderately vigorous boil, as you can see in the following video:

I removed a small sample of wort at the start of the boil, and then roughly every 40-50 minutes afterwards.  As you can see from this picture, the change in colour over the course of the whole boil was quite striking.  The turbidity of the final sample (hops and protein) doesn't do full justice to its dark colour:



I fermented the beer using a kolsch strain (Wyeast 2565).  I'm also planning to add a small pitch of brettanomyces for a slow secondary fermentation, probably the Wyeast Clausenii strain.  Contemporary wisdom has it that brettanomyces doesn't really have a place in bière de garde.  Here's Gordon Strong on the topic in his new book:

[Bière de garde] is a widely misunderstood outside of France because of the condition of their exported beers. The style doesn't have a musty, cellar-like quality; that is something that comes from dried-out corks used in old bottles.  Some imported examples were fruity due to oxidation.

This is almost certainly right when it comes to contemporary versions of the style, but if it really does have its roots in French farmhouse brewing, a secondary fermentation by brettanomyces doesn't seem completely out of place in a beer intended for a long-term storage.  If nothing else, it will help to dry things out, and perhaps add some interesting complexity.  Since I'm not planning to enter this in any competitions, I don't care if its considered 'to style'.  I might even add a light dry-hop, or just use the whole batch for blending...

Spelt Saisons

Since the end of the summer, I've made a series of spelt saisons, each with a different combination of saccharomyces strains, and each intended for a different treatment post-fermentation.  I've written here before about the fact that I like to keep unmalted grains around for both baking and brewing.  Pictured below is the lunch I ate while writing this post mid-brewday: the bread was based on a recipe from Chad Robertson's Tartine Book No. 3 for a loaf that included spelt flour and sprouted spelt grains (see here for the process).  The beer was an earlier attempt at a bitter spelt saison.

Speaking of the Tartine book, I made one change to my process this time round, based on some of the techniques used in baking.  Robertson includes a number of recipes for breads that include a sort of adjunct porridge, much like the kind we make when we do a cereal mash, and he mentions in passing that this can be made in advance and kept in the fridge until needed.  Copying this, I've started doing my cereal mashes a day or two before brew day.  As well as saving me some time on the day itself, this means that the porridge is already made by the time I start my step-mashes, which means that the spelt is in the mash for the protein rest at 131°F, whereas before I added the porridge after this step to bring the mash up to saccharification temperatures.  I'm hoping that including the spelt at this earlier stage will lead to an improvement in head retention.

Each recipe was basically the same: a 70/30 split of base malt and unmalted spelt, with the majority of the base malt being pilsner, in some cases supplemented by 5-10% of either Golden Promise or Vienna to see if I noticed and liked the differences these made.  Each beer came in with an O.G. somewhere between 1.042 and 1.044, and each was hopped quite aggressively to around 38 IBUs, although since I used EKG in all cases but one the bitterness should be a bit softer than the numbers might suggest.

This is actually one of the things I'm looking to test here.  My original idea was to dial-in a recipe for a bitter, hoppy saison, with the spelt providing some of the additional mouthfeel needed to balance and round out the bite from the hops.  But some of these beers will be sitting for quite a while before I can package them (simply because I'm running out of heavy bottles, and have a quite a few batches I'd like to condition to 3+ volumes), so I expect that bitterness to soften a bit with age.  I'm inclined to think, without any real evidence I suppose, that the the tannins provided by large doses of low AA hops help beers age gracefully.  I certainly think it provides a different quality of bitterness to small doses of high AA hops.

I'm planning to blend two of these beers with a small amount of pale sour left over from this Autumn's blending session, and I also backed down a little bit, but not by much, on the bitterness of these beers.  Brewing lore has it that sourness and bitterness shouldn't mix, but I have to say I'm not convinced of that: some lambics seem to me to be characterized by a sort of earthy bitterness, as are some well-regarded saisons like BFM √225.  I suspect its more a matter of the character of the bitterness, and the way it balances with any acidity.  

I've included descriptions of the various beers, along with their post-fermentation treatments, in a list below.  Some will be dry-hopped, some are under-going a secondary fermentation by various brettanomyces blends, and it will be some of these beers that I go on to blend with a pale sour for a bit of acidity.  One batch, which was fermented by a blend of Wyeast 3726 and a saccharomyces strain that a fellow brewer isolated from a bottle of Hill Farmstead, has been turned into a sort of small solera, which I may keep going for a few pulls if I like the results.

Spelt Saison 1: Clean

Yeast Strain(s):  Yeast Bay Saison Blend II
Grist: Pilsner, Vienna, Unmalted Spelt.
Hops: EKG
Post-fermentation treatment: This beer will be kept 'clean', besides anything it picks up from my saison equipment.  When I transferred it to secondary I noticed that the gravity was still relatively high, at 1.010, even though most of the yeast had dropped out of suspension.  In an effort to bring it down a few more points, I added some of the still-fermenting wort from Spelt Saison 4, hoping that the saccharomyces strains from that fermentation would attenuate it further.

Spelt Saison 2: Brettanomyces and Dry-Hops

Yeast Strain(s): Wyeast 3726
Grist: Pilsner, Unmalted Spelt
Hops: EKG
Post-fermentation treatment: Wyeast Brett C added to secondary.  Once secondary fermentation is complete, this will probably get a light dry-hop with Styrian Goldings before packaging.

Spelt Saison 3: Brettanomyces and Coupage

Yeast Strain(s): Wyeast 3726
Grist: Pilsner, Golden Promise, Unmalted Spelt
Hops: EKG
Post-fermentation treatment: Yeast Bay Lochristi Blend added to secondary. Once secondary fermentation is complete, this beer will be blended with a small amount of sour beer leftover from the blending session from my pale soleras.  Compare with Spelt Saison 4 below.

Spelt Saison 4: Brettanomyces and Coupage

Yeast Strain(s): Wyeast 3724, Wyeast 3726
Grist: Pilsner, Vienna, Unmalted Spelt
Hops: Crystal
Post-fermentation treatment: Yeast Bay Beersel Blend added to secondary.  Once secondary fermentation is complete, this beer will be blended with a small amount of sour beer leftover from the blending session from my pale soleras.  Compare with Spelt Saison 3 above.

Spelt Saison 5: Solera and Dry-Hop

Yeast Strain(s): Wyeast 3726, HF isolate
Grist: Pilsner, Vienna, Unmalted Spelt
Hops: EKG
Post-fermentation treatment: Blended with two gallons of aged-hop saison.  This was a beer I brewed about twelve months ago.  The original was four gallons of saison cut with one gallon of mixed-fermentation pale sour.  I racked three gallons of the old beer onto about 15g of Crystal dry-hops, and then racked this batch onto the remaining two gallons of aged beer.  In a few months I'll either take off another three gallons for dry-hopping, and add a further three gallons back, or simply dry-hop and package the whole five gallons.

Autumn 2015 Blending: Bière de coupage and Leftovers

As I mentioned in my post about the pale sour blends, I deliberately set aside some of those beers in one and half gallon jugs to use for cutting saisons over the next few months.  I did the same with the sour red ale as well, only this time I had already brewed two beers to be cut with beer from the red solera.  This post is about the final blends I made during the sour red blending session.

Dark Saisons cut with Sour Red

I thought about calling these bieres de garde, but dark saison will do.  I brewed two separate beers with the yeast cake from the Autumnal Saison I made with my pack of Wyeast 3725.  The idea was to make some darker, maltier beers that might blend nicely with the leather and fruit character of the sour red.

The first was a basic spelt saison, supplemented with some Munich malt and a pouch of D-90 candi sugar.  Due to some issues with the cereal mash (I didn't crush the spelt finely enough), my efficiency took a dip, which meant that the beer didn't come out as strong as I'd predicted, starting at around 1.054.  The candi sugar gave the desired colour (both these beers looked quite beautiful, a deep rich brown), and after primary fermentation it tasted like a pleasant though one dimensional belgian beer.  It was still relatively young, but I didn't get much in the way of distinctive saison character from the yeast, although it did bring out the flavours from the malt-bill as I'd hoped.

The second beer was all malt, based roughly on one of the recipes for biere de garde in Phil Markowski's Farmhouse Ales.  The base was a blend of pilsner, Golden Promise, and Munich, rounded out with small amounts of Dark Crystal and Amber malt, and a touch of Midnight Wheat for colour.  This time I hit my planned gravity right on: 1.074.  After primary fermentation this beer also had a very nice malt character, so much so that I could have been quite happy to package it as it was.

Because I was getting tired by this point in the blending session, I neglected to take gravity readings for either base.  I had previously checked on the Candi Sugar beer, which was already around 1.006.  Wyeast 3725 seems to be pretty attenuative, so I hope that they were both already quite dry.  For blending, I simply siphoned around three litres out of each carboy, and replaced it with three litres from the Sour Red solera.  Easy.

Both beers fermented on Hungarian Oak cubes, and I transferred a few of these across into the secondary fermenters with them.  I'm going to let each blend sit for at least 3-4 months so that some secondary fermentation can take place.  If they seem sufficiently dry after that time, I'll package them and allow them to continue to develop in the bottle.

Odds and Sods blend

Since these beers started off as three gallon batches, after blending them I ended up with about six litres of dark saison.  Originally I was thinking of just dumping this, but on blending day I noticed that I had a little extra top-up beer for the solera: enough that I could perhaps pull a little more than I'd originally planned.  I also had about a litre of the ECY20 pale sour that I'd used to add acidity to the sour blends.  So at the last moment, I combined all of these in a three gallon carboy, topping it up with some more beer from the sour red solera.  I added a few Hungarian Oak cubes, and set it at the back of my closet.  I'm basically thinking of this beer as a freebie: if it turns out well, great, and if not, I'll dump it.

So that's the end of my Autumn 2015 blending.  I'll be brewing some pale saisons to blend with the leftover pale and red sour ale in the coming month.  Each solera was topped up with three gallons of fresh beer, and I'm hoping that they will start to mature more quickly as time goes by.  I'll check on them again in the Spring, and may even try another blending session then.  If they don't seem ready, I might still pull off three gallons from each into separate carboys, and top up the base again so that I'll have more beer available next Autumn.

Brew Day: Autumn Saison w/ Wyeast 3725

Making slants of Wyeast 3725

After taking the summer off, I'm finally back to brewing on a regular basis, which should mean a return to regular posts here.  Most of my batches for the next few weeks will be top-ups for my various soleras in preparation for a blending project next month.  But I also picked up a few saison strains via RiteBrew's preorder program, and on Friday I made a batch with a strain I've never used before: Wyeast's Biere de Garde (3725).

Despite the name, the online consensus seemed to be that this wasn't really a typical biere de garde yeast (in his book on the style, Phil Markowski focuses more on lager and hybrid ale strains).  But the official blurb from Wyeast---"Malty and full on the palate with initial sweetness. Finishes dry and slightly tart"---made me think it would work well for some non-typical saisons I had planned.

The first of these was a rebrew of the Saison de Pipaix recipe from Farmhouse Ales.  I made a version of this beer last year with The Yeast Bay's Wallonian Farmhouse strain, and found the result intriguingly different from my usual pilsner-and-adjunct saisons.  The combination of Vienna malt with a small amount of Amber gave the beer a distinctively bready, toasty flavour, which to me at least brought up various Autumnal and harvest-related associations.  I have no idea how well the recipe matched up to the original beer (twice now the bottles I've bought have been completely flat), but I found the results interesting enough to make a mental note to come back to the recipe next Autumn.

The flavour profile of the yeasts sounds like exactly what's called for here: something to emphasise the malt and suggest at slight sweetness, while also drying the beer right out.  And if nothing else, it will give me a healthy pitch for some of the other projects I have planned, which include some higher gravity beers, along with a few more yeast blends.

Due to some technology-related issues I don't currently have access to my old BeerSmith files, so I couldn't check the exact details of the old recipe.  I followed the percentages mentioned in Farmhouse Ales for the grist (58% pilsner, 38% vienna, 2% amber), and used some Triskel and Fuggle hops I had lying around for bittering and aroma additions.  This was all decided at the last minute, but my hope is that they will complement the maltier character of this beer.  A bit of online research suggested I was more likely to get the flavour profile I was looking for by keeping the yeast on the cooler side, so I pitched in the mid 60 °Fs and set it in the fermentation chamber at 70 °F.  It will have to come out after about 36 hours to make way for another batch, so at that point I'll let it free-rise to wherever it wants to go.  I also added 10g of oak cubes, as part of my ongoing effort to see whether the addition of some amount of oak to the primary fermentation will subtly affect the structure and flavour profile of the beer.  At the moment it is fermenting away vigorously in the fridge.

I'll end by mentioning a few things I have planned for the next couple of months: the blending project should yield some pale and red sours, some of which will end up on fruit purchased earlier this summer; I'll use some of the leftover sour beer from the soleras to cut some fresh beer (including some darker, maltier saisons made with this strain that I'll cut with beer from my Flanders Red solera); I want to work on perfecting my base recipe for a bitter spelt saison; and since I recently purchased a small kegging system, I'll also be working on ordinary bitter recipes, and seeing how well I can emulate cask conditioning in a keg.

Bread and Beer: Buckwheat

As I've mentioned before on this blog, one reason I like using unmalted grains in my beer is that I can find other uses for them around the kitchen, particularly when it comes to baking bread.  I've been using buckwheat a lot recently, both in baking and brewing, so I thought I'd follow up on my earlier post on spelt and combine some tasting notes for a couple of buckwheat saisons with pictures of how I use buckwheat groats in baking.

Buckwheat seems to have at least some history in brewing.  G. Lacambre mentions it in his 1851 book on brewing in Europe. (Yvan de Baets cites this book in his essay on the history of saison, but its contains very little about historical farmhouse beers, as Lacambre was more interested in the 'fancy' beers brewed by commercial brewers.  There are some interesting sections on Lambic though.)  Anyway Lacambre doesn't seem to think much of buckwheat as a source of fermentables.  He says its used rarely (occasionally in some parts of Germany, less commonly in Belgium), though it does contain a decent amount of starchy matter and is often fairly cheap.  He even describes his own experience with it: a small amount gave the beer a distinctive and disagreeable bitter flavour, prevented the beer from clarifying, converted poorly and caused problems because it became gummy in the mash.  Hardly a glowing recommendation!

Some contemporary brewers might be interested in using buckwheat because it doesn't contain gluten, but I was first drawn to it because I was curious about whether brettanomyces would convert its relatively high levels of caprylic acid into the ester ethyl caprylate.  Caprylic acid is not something you want much of in beer (it apparently tastes 'goaty'), but ethy caprylate is described in Wild Brews as "Waxy, Wine, Floral, Fruity, Pineapple, Apricot, Banana, Pear, Brandy".   Perhaps using larger amounts of buckwheat in a mixed fermentation might encourage the formation of these esters?

I've described how I use buckwheat in brewing in earlier posts: I crush the groats in my mill, boil them into a thick and goopy porridge, then add them into the main mash for the saccharification rest.  One thing I haven't stressed enough in earlier posts is that buckwheat is an absolute nightmare to lauter (as Lacambre warned us!).  I'm doing Brew in a Bag, which usually means I can get away with very gummy mashes using rye or wheat without too much difficulty, but buckwheat is a complete nuisance.  It forms a sort of gummy layer on the bottom of the bag, which means it just won't drain when you lift it out (or at any rate, drains very slowly).  This makes the bag difficult to maneuver (since it extra heavy with all the hot wort) and means it takes a long time to get enough wort from the grain.

In baking, buckwheat is much easier to use.  There are a number of ways you can incorporate unmalted grains into bread (including by making a porridge in a process that is basically identical to a cereal mash), but the method I use most frequently involves sprouting the grains and then folding them into the dough.  Buckwheat groats are particularly easy to use in this way: they only require a brief soak (about twenty minutes, where something like spelt needs four to six hours), after which I drain them, put them in a mason jar with a breathable seal (a coffee filter and a rubber band usually), give them a good shake so that there is plenty of oxygen in the mix, and then leave them till they start to sprout.  You can help them along by shaking once a day and maybe soaking and rinsing them again, but buckwheat groats sprout so quickly its usually not necessary.

Once they're just beginning to sprout, they're ready for use in bread.  I fold them into a wholewheat version of the Tartine loaf about an hour into the first rise (you need to do a few folds to develop the gluten first, as the sprouted groats will cut through it if added too early).  You can also grind up a small handful of the groats and use them to coat the top of the loaf.  They add a nice sweetness, along with a bit of texture, to the final bread.

Back to beer again, I've only ever used buckwheat in saisons.  I've brewed four versions of essentially the same beer now: a pale saison using up to 30% buckwheat.  In every case I've cut the fermented beer with some proportion of aged sour beer.  The very first version used a few litres from a lambic-style beer, but the three subsequent ones all used pulls from my Roeselare solera.   All of them have had flavours reminiscent of the description of ethyl caprylate above, though of course its difficult to say for certain whether this is because of the buckwheat and brettanomyces, or because of the saison yeasts and fruity hops (all versions have had late additions of Amarillo).  I've included tasting notes for two of these beers below.  I packaged the third version just before I left for England, and combined the fourth version (fermented with a different blend of yeasts) with the pale sour so that it can undergo a secondary fermentation while I'm away. The most recent batch was fermented with oak cubes in the primary, and I'm curious to see how these add to the overall flavour profile.

Buckwheat Saison I

This is the first version of the beer: I blended about 10 litres of saison with 2 litres of lambic-style sour, and added some Trimbach Pinot Gris as well.  Its about nine months old at this point, and has been in the bottle since the end of January.  You can read some earlier tasting notes here.

Appearance:  Pale and slightly hazy yellow colour.  Soft, foamy, meringue-like head with great retention.

Smell: Lemons and limes, followed by a hint of tropical fruit. Slightly floral edge as well, but more like dried flowers (almost reminds me of my Grandma's potpourri).

Taste:  Lemony acidity up front, but only moderate.  White wine comes across in the finish.  The strange waxy flavour is gone, or at least blended seamlessly with the rest so that its no longer offensive.

Mouthfeel: Crisp, with good carbonation, but the wine in the finish gives it a slight vinous character.  Nice balance of dryness with mouthfeel that I'm aiming for in using these unmalted adjuncts.

Drinkability & Notes: I'm very happy with how this one is tasting right now, and I'll probably start drinking the majority of the batch as soon as I get back from England, setting aside a few bottles to see how it continues developing.  This has all the elements I'm looking for in my saisons: its tart, fruity, refreshing, but with some complexity and structure as well.

Buckwheat Saison II

This is the second version of the beer, and the first that was blended with a pull from my Roeselare solera.  The idea with this and subsequent versions was to increase my overall yield by brewing four gallons of clean saison (about the most my system can handle) and then blending them with one gallon of aged sour.  This works well, and I plan to continue using this system as I keep brewing these beers.

Appearance:  Same as the first version.  Head retention on these beers is pretty solid.

Smell:  Lemons, yellow stone fruit, and hay.  Reminiscent of a younger version of the first version, but without the strange 'soapy' edge that I think came from the white wine.  Slight funk underneath it.

Taste:  Tart and lemony at the start, then again a more generic fruitiness with some floral honeyish elements.

Mouthfeel: Crisp and dry.

Drinkability & Notes: This one is still a bit sharp and angular, but hopefully with a bit more time in the bottle the edges will soften and become more rounded.  Still a very promising beer, and one of my favourite saisons.  Luckily I have more of this batch so I can check in on it more regularly.

Tasting Notes: Second Extraction Beers

Last summer I bought a lot of fruit at my local Farmer's Market.  Some of it went into pickles and preserves, but most ended up in sour beers.  The results were excellent, with some of the beers going on to take first place their categories in local competitions, so I've been looking forward to picking up more this year to use when I make blends from my soleras in the Autumn.  However, as a penny-pinching graduate student I was also very aware of how expensive all that fruit was, and I couldn't help wonder if I might be able to extend its use beyond single beers.  After all, Cantillon use their cherries twice, and Jester King have also tried a similar process for some of their beers.  What's more, by transferring clean beers onto the spent fruit, dregs, and secondary yeast cake of a sour beer I would be essentially repeating my process of cutting young beers with aged sours.

My basic idea, then, was to take clean beers that were already quite dry (mainly saisons) and transfer them onto the spent fruit and dregs from a sour beer.  I was hoping that the mixed culture might add some tartness and complexity to the finished beer, and that at least some of the fruit would come through as well.  Overall this has been pretty successful, especially with fruits that make a quite assertive contribution like Raspberries or Tart Cherries.  I'll certainly be repeating the process with more saisons this year.

Tart Brown Ale w/ Cherries from a Sour Brown

The base was a blend of American 2-Row and Pearl malt. along with some Medium and Dark Crystal for character, Pale Chocolate and Midnight Wheat for colour, and Golden Naked Oats to fill out the body.  I was going for a light tartness with this one, so I first let it ferment with a pitch of Wyeast Ardennes, and then transferred it on top of the spent fruit and yeast cake from a beer I'd brewed with Wyeast Oud Bruin.  I felt like the first beer I made with that blend was fairly one-dimensional and boring, and that's true to some extent of this one as well.  The fruit does come across nicely in the aroma though.

Appearance:  Dark brown with red highlights when I hold it to the light.  Thin but persistent head.

Smell:  Bright cherries prominent on the nose, along with darker fruit like blackberries or currants.  A sort of bready smell behind it, so that the whole makes me think of good quality preserves on toasted wholewheat bread.  Slightly metallic edge as it warms up.

Taste:  Light tartness first, kind of lacking in the mid-palate, and then a lingering taste that reminds me more of red currants than cherries. A bit disappointing after the aroma: a bit flat, I'd like more prominent fruit and more of that toasted bread in the background.

Mouthfeel:  The oats definitely give it a slightly fuller mouthfeel.  In fact, because of the low carbonation, it coats the back of throat in a way I'd describe a 'cloying' if it was sweet.

Drinkability & Notes:  The fruit comes across nicely on the nose, but the beer itself is a bit lacking.  I haven't managed to come up with a low ABV sour brown recipe that I'm happy with yet.  The oats certainly help with the mouthfeel, but there just isn't enough going on with the flavour.  With slightly higher carbonation it would be quite drinkable and refreshing: the tartness is just right.


Tart Saison w/ Cherries and Raspberries from a Flanders Red

The base was blend of Golden Promise and Pearl malts, aiming for a bit more character than plain pilsner.  I added some Golden Naked Oats again for mouthfeel, and around 1.5% Midnight Wheat for colour.  Once the beer had fermented out with Wyeast 3726, I transferred it onto spent fruit and and a small amount of beer left from a Flanders Red, and let it sit for about a month.  The O.G. was 1.044. and I'm sure it dried right out, giving an ABV of about 5.8%.

Appearance:  Reddish-brown colour.  I was going for a more brilliant red.  First pour is crystal clear. Head dissipates entirely after a few seconds.

Smell:  Raspberries and cherries dominant in nose, with some earthiness as well.  Smell of clean lactic sourness.

Taste:  Tart, jammy fruit up front.  Mid-palate is again a bit lacking, but it finishes nicely with a lingering taste of raspberries (fruit and seeds).  Hint of bready malt behind it.  Also fairly sour, to the point where I might struggle to drink more than one or two (my tolerance is low though).

Mouthfeel:  The high carbonation makes it crisp and refeshing.  Perhaps a touch thin, but it doesn't detract from the beer.

Drinkability & Notes:  Tart and refreshing, with the fruit coming through quite clearly.  Its actually a bit more sour than I'd like, but otherwise I'm quite happy with how this one came out.  I'll probably do the same thing again this year, perhaps adding some spelt for body and maybe some Munich and dark candi syrup for a bit more character and depth.


Tart Saison w/ Apricots and White and Yellow Peaches from a Golden Sour

I planned this beer as a pale saison that I would age on spent yellow peaches and apricots from a Golden Sour/pLambic.  The grist was  again a combination of Pearl and Golden Promise, rounded out with a bit of torrified wheat.  I added some El Dorado and Mandarina Bavaria hops to the whirlpool, hoping they'd accentuate the fruit.  Once it had fermented out with Wyeast 3726, I transferred it onto the spent fruit and dregs, but this time I added three pounds of frozen white peaches as well.

Appearance:  Pale yellow colour.  Crystal clear.  Billowing head that dissipates very quickly.

Smell:  Interesting aroma.  Lots of grass and hay.  Strongly evocative of cut grass that's dried out in the sun.  Reminds me of summers when I was a kid.  Peaches are very subtle in the background behind it, emerging a bit as it warms up, but I don't know that I'd pick that description if I didn't know they were there.  Aroma is probably more reminiscent of apples at this point.

Taste:  Tart, and a little juicy.  Peaches come across a bit more here.  Same warm and bready malt emerges in the background.  I quite like the dimension this adds.  Lingering tartness with a slight taste of peaches

Mouthfeel:  Crisp, with fairly high carbonation.  A touch thin though, which makes the sourness a little sharp, although is already softened a little compared to earlier bottles.

Drinkability & Notes: The 'dried cut grass' aroma is very striking, and wasn't there in the earlier bottles.  Peaches are subtle but there if you look for them.  All in all a tart and refreshing beer with a bit of added complexity.  I was hoping for a bit more from the peaches, but they seem to make quite a subtle contribution in all the beers I've made with them.  It'll be interesting to see how this one continues to develop over the next few months.