It's been a while since my last post, but I've been busy with vacation and brewing. My latest creation is a saison. I've always loved the saison style. It's a light, crisp, high volume beer, with a dry taste resembling champagne. The best part about homebrewing it is that it ferments at very high temperatures. When I say high, I'm talking between 80-90 degrees Fahrenheit. So it's perfect for a homebrewer with no way to regulate temperature in the sweltering heat of the summer. I found an award-winning recipe online and decided to try it out, with some minor modifications made due to ingredients I had lying around. The most important ingredient, though, is the yeast. I used a French Saison yeast, the 3711, and I have to say-this yeast is a beast. I read a lot about it online before brewing this batch, but even I was impressed. This is a beer with an OG of around 1.070-1.072 (mine came in just below that, at 1.067) and a finishing gravity right around 1.000, so you know the yeast strain has to be good. The recipe recommended just one smack pack of this stuff and I have to say, I was skeptical. I read online that this yeast strain brought the FG down to its expected level in about two weeks. Well in my case, it only took 7 days. My OG was 1.067 and 7 days later it was all the way down to 1.002. The recipe also calls for sugar to be added when the fermentation slows down. I decided to go with Belgian Candi Sugar and the fermentation started up again and lasted about another day or two before dying out again. The FG wasn't affected much, but the alcohol content will be a bit higher since Belgian Candi sugar is 100% fermentable. I carbonated it with 1 oz of corn sugar per gallon to give it a nice, crisp, sparkling character and dry it out real good. It's finished after about 3 weeks in the bottle. More on this below.
To celebrate my saison homebrew. I have been looking for The Bruery's Saison Rue for a while now, but it's always been sold out. It's been billed as one of the best saisons in the country by a lot of publications, and I've wanted to try it so I could compare it to mine. Well, I settled for another one of The Bruery's saisons, Saison de Lente. It's a bit lower gravity that the Saison Rue, but it was fantastic. It has the carbonation of a champagne but was incredibly light at 6.5%. It starts sharp but finishes smooth, leaving spicy notes in the back of your mouth. Today, I went back on my search and found some Saison Rue. It's Saison de Lente's big brother at 9%. I have to say that I was a little disappointed. For as much as it is hyped, I came away with just an okay opinion of it. It's certainly more earthy than any saison I've tasted, and almost had a grassy taste, with not much carbonation, but it finished incredibly dry. I would drink it again, but it certainly wasn't my favorite.
Along with that, I picked up a bottle of Saison DuPont, another saison billed as one of the best in the country. It's a little bit lighter than the Rue, but I liked it much better. When I think of a saison, I think of the DuPont. It's light and crisp, sparkling and finishes dry with a nice heady middle. Also, I bought a new flavor from Victory called V-Twelve. It's billed as a Belgian Ale, but tastes kind of like a saison. It's definitely the heaviest of the ones I picked up at 12%. It's another win for victory (pun intended) as it was a great-tasting beer, but deceptive at such high alcohol content. Last but not least, I finally found some of Dogfish Head's Chateau Jiahu. It's a seasonal beer that comes out around July or August every year and it's possibly my favorite beer that Dogfish brews. At 9,000 years old, it is the oldest known beer recipe. It's brewed with Hawthorn fruit and fermented with grape juice, and it comes in at 10%. It's a bit sweeter than their year-round Midas Touch, but similar in flavor. I also was able to get one on tap at the brewpub before they were all out. Also on the Dogfish front, I was able to grab a couple bottles of their Sierra Nevada collaboration, Life and Limb 2. It's brewed with birch and maple syrup, and it's supposed to symbolize the union of the two breweries or something, and contains live yeast in every bottle (news flash, most good beers do) to encourage aging. Anyway, it's a solid beer, not fantastic, but definitely worth a try. You don't get much of the sweetness of the syrups in the final taste, which is disappointing, but it's still a solid effort from two of my favorite breweries. We'll see how much the taste changes after aging a bottle for a year or two.
As for comparing the different saisons that I tried, I have to say that the DuPont was probably my favorite, with the DeLente coming second and the Rue as my third place finisher. Now, on to my saison. What I was going for with this beer was a sharp, crisp, heady taste, with a dry finish that leaves spicy notes on the back of your mouth. I may be biased, but I think this was the best of the saisons that I tried. It has a medium body, darker than many of the others that I tried, but it has more character as well. The spice from the 3711 yeast hits your taste buds right away and stays with you, but it finishes very dry, begging you to take another sip. I think this could be the best beer that I ever brewed. I also did an experiment with cloves, adding a couple to the final quarter gallon or so before bottling and the spice stands out even more in the final product. Delicious. I did complete one more beer since, my first attempt at a pumpkin beer. I just bottled it Sunday night. More on this later!
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