A favourite beer style of mine is "saison." This is a pretty broad syle, more of a category - like "bitter", saison can ultimately end up being a very different experience depending on the brewer, Its also quite hard to work out what you are getting. I've spent quite a bit of time in Brussels, which is close enough to the spiritual home of saison in the French/Belgian borders to find a reasonable good selection of styles to try.
In the tourist shops and supermarkets choice is pretty
limited to the big names (Saison du pont normally) and a few others amongst the
usual array of Trappist and abbey offerings. But in the trendier beer bars
(think craft ale UK style, except it feels like Belgium has been doing
"craft" for a long time) and in the bottle shops you can find all
types of exciting bottles jostling for your attention. In particular the
Belgians go in for wrapping some in tissue paper, and whilst some come in
familiar 330ml capped bottles, Others are packaged in the sturdier champagne
style, which goes some way to indicating how unpredictable these beers are when fermenting.
About saison
Saisons are typically dry, the yeast tends to attenuate
pretty well, chewing up most of the sugars. This makes the beers very
refreshing, and tasty even at low alcohol. This is not always the case, as well as
some excellent ones (Saison IV is just superb) I've had a more than a few duds as well.
Traditionally these were drinks made for farmworkers,
apparently in the absence of cider or wine a beer would made instead.
And because of this when making a saison one is at absolute liberty to
basically chuck in any cereals you like, malted or not without worrying too much about
authenticity. It also makes this an expedient beer to make if your stocks are
running low. Only got a kg of pale malt? Don't worry! chuck in half a kilo of oats,
use the rest of that wheat, chuck in the rye. I would normally add spelt to this but of
course I've pretty much used all of my stock up already making IPA. However, what I did
have is some chestnut.
Chestnuts
Chestnuts are a fairly common sight in the UK, and Ive always been a fan. I
love chestnut stuffing, and roast chestnuts sold in packets from burning coals
in the depth of winter. But mainly chestnuts are underused in general, and as their full
name (horse chestnut) suggests they traditionally mostly got left for animal fodder. But you can
make flour from chestnuts, and I figured you must be able to make a beer. And
so you can - there are some Italian and French varieties from Corsica and
Sardinia. But I've struggled to find anything closer to home. The obvious thing
was to make one. I found some tins of pre-roasted chestnut, you would normally make
some stuffing or ravioli filling from these.
decided that the simplest thing to do would be to use the methodology
that I had followed in making pumpkin ale, do a brew in the bag batch and add the
roast chestnut straight into the mash.
Unfortunately I don't know where my chestnuts were from, so I
cant vouch that they are local. But I thought they would suit a saison because
the dryness of the beer would allow the the chestnut to shine.
Fiddling with the funk
I decided to make two different versions of the beer from the same batch. In terms of style - I think there are 3 main thrusts:
1. Plain saison (dry crisp ale fermented with saison yeast)
2. Funky Saison (dry and crisp but with pleasing funk,
either "barnyard" or "fruity" - both analogous in my palate
to that "scrumpy" taste)
3. 1 or 2 plus hopped to within an inch of its life like a
pale/IPA.
I wanted to see if I could successfully reproduce some of
the lovely fruity funky flavors that Saison IV and others exhibit so well. In
order to tell what was responsible for what, I split the finished batch into
two, bottled the first as it was and poured the last gallon into a demijohn
with a vial of "brussels" brett yeast (bretttanomyces). The Yeast
Bay describes this as a classic lambic flavour, so i'm expecting lots of farmyard straw flavours. There hydrometer reading was 1006, leaving enough sugar
in for the Brett to eat as a secondary, where it should enter a
super-attenuating state, and produce all those funky flavors. I have checked and there is visibly a layer of small bubbles at the neck of the demijohn - exciting stuff!
Lastly - I am increasing of the opinion that life is too short for unhoppy beer. Sure there are some
great examples that you can buy. But you can buy them, so I remain to be convinced that I need to be
lumbered with 20 pints of the stuff myself, especially when I might end up there myself if I botch a
batch of beer. So I also added plenty of flavour (also a bit of whatever was left over) and dosed with Apollo and a heavy hand for some proper hoppiness.
