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.