SAISON LATROBE: TURBID PLUM SAISON

So it’s dark and wet so that’s when I think about doing my yearly lambic beer that I leave out in the garden and let it inoculate with wild yeast and bacteria under my now dormant grape vine. It uses a turbid mash regime and the the general idea is it uses up to 40% raw wheat and then the rest is a simple base malt. At various points wort is pulled from the mash and then boiled so there is lots of starch. Only certain wild bacteria can ferment the starch over a long long time so you get a sour and unique tasting beer due to the bacteria and yeast that fall into it due to your location, environmental conditions and yearly variances.

As its a rare brew I generally have a little read up on it to refresh my memory and I once again came across a simpler turbid mash intended for lower alcohol siaisons posted by the very excellent Hors Catégorie Brewing. This was talking about George Maw Johnson who was the first editor of the belgian brewers magazine Le Petit Journal du Brasseur even though he was from Kent in not Belgium.

So the simpler turbid mash uses the same idea of big brother but it only has one rather than two turbid pulls. The intended use of this is very different though. The cloudy starch filled wort is meant to be fermented with only a traditional yeast rather than with the addition of souring bacteria. This means that there is some sweetness left to taste after the yeast has completed as there is unfermented starch left in the beer. The beer will also have more mouth feel than a modern saison which are crystal clear.

As I like fruit beer and siasons it gave a chance to combine the two but also tweak the recipe and keep a little sweetness in the beer to give the fruit flavour a lift. Modern siasons are bone dry but using the residual sweetness of the turbid mash I may push the fruit and bring it to the fore. With this in mind and using the grape ale I made as a guide I planned a recipe. Moderate alcohol and low bitterness at 17 IBU, with a little tartness from the fruit, some residual sweetness to let the seasonal plums come through but everything in balance.

I would have liked to use 3724 yeast as its generally better with a sourer siason and the plums would certainly add some acidity… but I didn’t have any so I used the traditional Belle Siason. It has a mixed reputation but I actually really like it. I did decide to temper it with a traditional Belgian ale yeast that is not too clovey – Mangrove Jacks M41. Both were co-pitched and allowed to ferment together.

Then I didn’t make the beer… and started with the fruit by making a wine. 3kg of plums were stoned and punched to mash them up. I didn’t add any pectic enzyme but you easily could. The reasoning behind it was that the beer is going to be hazy anyway and the fruit will ferment on its own and then also sit macerating in the beer fermentation to pull more flavour from the skins. I stirred in a campden tablet to kill any wild yeast and let it sit 24 hours to dissipate. Then I added the yeast and some nutrient. Three times a day I stirred the fruit so that it did not allow mold to grow on the surface. Knowing what wine yeast and beer yeast smells like it was a strange aroma of both as it fermented. Once the yeast was really starting to slow down I stopped the stirs and let it sit completely sealed to ferment further.

I made the beer using the petit turbid schedule below. It was labour intensive but good fun and I hit my marks on the step mashes really really well. I suspect that next time I will be frustrated as they will not be as spot on. I also had better efficiency than I expected and had a potential ABV of 4.4% rather than 4% and had a total of 24.5 litres of wort pulled rather than my traditional 22 litres that reduces down to 20 litres in the boil. The mash was cooled over 25 minutes rather than letting it cool ambiently overnight as a lambic beer does. Once in the fermenter the fruit was added, encased in a sparge bag to keep the skins together. There was no need to add yeast as it was with the fruit and no need to oxygenate as it was a huge colony that was still active. Half an hour later the yeast was fermenting very happily, after 12 hours it was absolutely roaring along so much that there were no visible bubbles from the blow off tube but a continuous stream like a hydrothermal vent.

Some people will no doubt think that I should have added the fruit after fermentation slowed down on the beer but I wanted to bottle quickly but maximise the fruit character with alcoholic maceration extracting flavour from the plum skins. Personally I think its a bit of a myth that flavour “boils off” with a strong fermentation. Others may not though. After 10 days I bottled the beer at 2.5 atmospheres. Two beers got a bit of yeast in them as the sparge bag settled in the fermenter but generally the highly floculating Belle and M41 yeast stayed nicely put at the bottom and the bag must have settled slowly rather than with a bump uplifting sediment.

This will definitely become my base for fruit beers from now on. There is more than a hint of plum and it is definitely deeper and more rounded that I have had in my bone dry saisons due to the slight subtle sweetness on the after taste. This sweetness from the starches left in the beer rounds off the fruit flavour rather than it just being one note of sourness and it can be drunk easily. The two yeasts means that the saison character is tempered as expected and allows the fruit to really come through with out much clove interfering. The final beer looks a little hazy but nothing crazy for an ale, colour is a a vibrant yellow orange from the fruit, not as dark or red as I was expecting though! The head is voluminous but disappears quickly but there’s a good refreshing fizz through out. I could add some oats for more head retention but I am very happy with this as it is. Next time I would love to do a blackcurrant, blackberry, elder and black, Jostaberry, gooseberry, greengage, apricot or maybe even strawberry version and I can choose to swap yeasts based on what I expect the acidity to be like, perhaps using 3724.

• Batch: 20L (managed to pull 22litres)
• Start gravity: 1.044
• End gravity: yeah… Probably 1.10ish
• ABV: 6.5 final estimated. Was aiming for 4% from the malt but got 4.5%
• IBU: 17
• Colour: 3ish SRM and then the fruit.

Water profile: Tesco Ashbech pushed to a balanced ale

Chemical		Target
Calcium	Ca	80
Magnesium	Mg	5
Sodium	Na	25
Carbonate	CO3	15
Sulphate	SO4	100
Chloride	Cl	75

OTHER FERMENTABLES!

Fruit	Total	Per Gallon
Plums	3kg	750g

• So you may want to add the plums after regular fermentation starts to slow but I chose to start the whole fermentation on the fruit. It left time to extract deeper flavour from the fruit skins. You could even ferment with a wine yeast and combine before bottling.
• I used Lalemand Belle Saison and Mangrove Jacks M41. Just go with whatever saison yeast you like.
• Stone the plums, punch them into squishiness. Add pectic enzyme if you wish and certainly a campden tablet to sanitise. Leave for 24 hours. Add your yeast then leave them to sit in a fermentation bucket for 12 days. Punch down the fruit cap at least once a day, preferably 3 or 4 times. Took 10 days to ferment almost through and I stopped pushing the cap down due to high alcohol and also a cance of oxidation. Once fermented pour the goo and skins into a sanitised sparge bag and add to the waiting fermenter.

GRAIN BILL

Grain	Total	Percentage	Per Litre
German Pilsner	3kg	75.00%	150g
Torrified Wheat	1kg	25.00%	50g

MASH

• Protein Rest – Start with all the grain and at a mash thickness of 1litre to 1kg of malt. Mashed at 45c for 10 minutes with a continuous good stir. (I slightly over shot and had 4.5 litres of water to 4kg of grain.)
• Gelatinization Rest – Add enough 75c water to get to 51c temperature in the mash. Hold for 10 minutes. I added 4 litres but anything between 1.8 to 2.5 l/kg is apparently acceptable.
• Turbid pull – I pulled 3 litres of wort into a separate pan and heated to 74c for 20min then raised to a simmering boil for the rest of the mash schedule.
• Sacchrification Rest – Stir and add boiling water to get to 70c then rest for 60 minutes Add 250g rice hulls with 5 minutes to go to aid lautering
• Start to lauter the main mash.
• Reduce the turbid section to 70c with cold water and pour into the top of the wort so it can lauter though with the existing mash. Then sparge with 75c water to get the whole wort ready to boil. I did vorluf the first runnings.
• I collected about 24.5l and it entered the boil at 65c for a 90 min boil.

BOIL

Hop	Alpha	Weight	Time	(Per Litre)
Herkules	16.20%	9g	60min	2.2g

• Once chilled to 20c I poured over the plums. As it was active yeast I did not aerate. Started fermentation with no blow off for 24 hours then attached.
• Bottled after 12 days after the beer started to ferment and strongly carbonated at 2.5 atmospheres. Allowed to age for a month or longer and served cold from a fridge rather than cellar temperature.

SOURCES

http://www.horscategoriebrewing.com/2016/02/thoughts-on-johnson-1918-belgian.html

Batch 30: Turbid-mashed Petite Saison and Pomebic

BRAMBLE TIP SAISON RECIPE

Terrible photo, lovely beer.. I do hope to get a better one up with sunlight behind it.

I’ve been foraging for blackberries for a number of years in and around my area and I came to notice that the big bastards on a lot of the paths get a hair cut when they start to get overgrown and post a nuisance to walkers and cyclists. Knowing the kind of date they got cut back means I could forage them to get the tips before they were hacked back and leave productive ones that will produce lots of nice yummy fruit.

Stepping out early on a morning means I was free to wander the streets and marshes of Walthamstow and not fear for being arrested carrying a weapon. I suppose the giant colander I had could be seen as some kind of Ned Kelly-esque armour for my scissor dueling too. After 20 minutes I had snipped off 1.64kg of bramble tips which was filled the 9 litre container I was carrying. I snipped brambles that looked nice and healthy, not too woody and not infected with insects. If there was the odd shield bug or spider, a little flick of the stem stent them on their way before I snipped the top four of five inches of the stem. I took the fresher brighter green of the stem before it looked too tough and turned to a darker green and rougher texture. Some had the odd bloom while others only had flower buds.

Harvesting blackberry tips

As bramble tips are quite floral and delicately flavoured I wanted to make a light coloured and bodied beer that had low bitterness from the hops. The base was a fairly standard pilsner and wheat base with some clear Belgian candy sugar to thin it out a little. Being honest the beer was a little thin as I had terrible efficiency as I was using new kit. I have since gone from 65 to 90% efficiency. I have adjusted the recipe to compensate for you not being terrible like me.

The beer was bittered with a Tettnang added as first wort hops at 70c and then had Hallertauer as a flavour addition. Both have a floral edge to compliment the bramble tips. I looked on the tips as an extension of the hops and kind of added them as a dry hop by boiling them all in 2 litres of water for 30 minutes and adding them a day into fermentation that had really kicked off by that point with high krausen falling. This also gave a little aeration for the saison yeast at that point too.

When it came to bottling the beer smelled and tasted pretty bland and a bit of a let down but as it has aged it has really come into its own. The floral bramble goes well with the piney noble hops and it has an implied sweetness because of this. Colour is very pale and the soft white head sticks around for a while.

BRAMBLE TIP SAISON

• Batch:20L
• Start gravity:1.042
• End gravity: sorry I didn’t check but it dry. Estimate was 1.04
• ABV: 5.5
• IBU: 25
• Colour: 2.5ish SRM
• Mash efficiency 75%

Water profile: Tesco Ashbech pushed to a dry ale

Chemeical		Target
Calcium	Ca	190
Magnesium	Mg	15
Sodium	Na	30
Carbonate	CO3	15
Sulphate	SO4	330
Chloride	Cl	165

GRAIN BILL

Malt	Weight	Percentage	(Per litre)
German Pilsner	2.4kg	67.60%	120g
Torrified Wheat	950g	26.80%	48g
Clear Candi Sugar	200g	5.60%	10g

MASH

• Saccharification rest of 63°c for 60 minutes
• Saccharification rest of 68°c for 30 minutes
• Mash out at 77°c for 5 minutes

1 litre of water was used for every 500g of grain. Vorlaufed until the wort ran clear. The grain may need to be spiked to allow sparge water to pass though. Sparged at 77°c. Keep 2 litres of water available for the blackberry tips boiled later. As high krausen starts to fall (24 hours for me) boil the blackberry tips in the remaining two litres of water for 30 minutes. Strain and leave to cool then add to the fermenter.

BOIL

Hop	Alpha	Weight	Time	(Per Litre)
Tettnanger	3.00%	50g	60min	2g
Hallertauer	3.90%	28g	10min	1.4g

YEAST

• WLP590 Saison yeast rising naturally to 25°c

Bottled after 21 days and strongly carbonated. Allowed to age for a few months and served cold from a fridge rather than cellar temperature.

KVEIK GRAPE ALE RECIPE

Jump here to get to the recips without all this wibble…

Grape ale at 2 weeks (opened as a wet cork was pushed upwards)

Due to hubris and an understanding partner I have planted a Pinot Noir and a Chardonnay grape vine and plan on either a Pinot Wrotham or Meunier to make sparkling wine. The Pinot Noir is the eldest at four or five years old and has previously had the grapes removed to help get a good root stock established. This year was the first I time I left the grapes to harvested, though I did not have enough to make wine. The obvious solution was to combine the grapes and beer to make a grape ale.

Pinot Noir grapes at the start of verasion (posh name for ripening)

Grape ale sounds like a total gimmick and I have never seen a bottle for sale anywhere though there are certainly commercial versions. It sounds like a beer for beer wankers and having read about them I think the ideas and descriptions are a little bit muddled. Grape ale is not a beer/wine hybrid… it is a beer with grapes in like any other beer with fruit. It tastes like a beer first and foremost. The dominant taste is malt and moderate but certainly noticeable hops. Mouth feel is like a traditional ale without the thicker vinocity of a red wine. The grapes do add a slight refreshing astringency and a fresh acidic bite to the beer with a delicate floral fruitiness to smell and taste. Even though I used red grapes and the skins were left macerating in the beer as it ferments this is not like pouring a glass of red wine into a pint of Carling as the grapes.

The chosen 7% ABV is a mid point between an ale and wine and was the starting point of the recipe. Knowing I had 3.5kg of grapes I worked out I could make the equivalent of three bottles of wine. My freebie recipe software was not able to deal with this so I used a Pearson Square to work backwards to determine how much grain I needed to use. Only 2.2kg of malt for 15 litres total to drink at 7%. This grain bill was then divided into two thirds pilsner malt and a third wheat malt to get a balanced base for the grapes to work with. Usually I hate wheat in my own beers but I this really worked well making a light, simple but very nicely flavoured base that really hides the alcohol behind the pleasing fruit.

Grapes picken then plucked.

As the malt was simple this determined that the rest of the recipe was simple too. Hops was mild with only 17 IBU of Saaz added as a bitter addition at the start of the 60 minute boil. No flavouring additions were added at the end so that the grapes could get a decent voice in this beer. Yeast was similarly basic with Voss Kveik used for a reliable fermentation that would really dry the beer out with out too much yeast character added.

Kveik as everyone always tells “you ferments like a beast”

Using the Kveik also side stepped a tricky fermentation conundrum of red grapes traditionally fermenting at up to 30°C as opposed to a traditional ale fermentation of about 19°C. In the end I started the grapes fermenting in my warm kitchen and let it free ride for a week probably at 25°C for a couple of days when it really kicked in. The grapes were picked and crushed in a hop bag to allow the juice to be extracted into some clean sterile water that was boiled and cooled. Campden was added to kill any potentially trouble some wild yeast and possible contamination from a mouse that had nibbled a few grapes. If there had been no pesky rodent I may have considered a wild fermentation for the grapes. The grapes fermented quickly and vigorously with the Kveik for a week (it probably sat for a few days fermented out) before the wort was added and a second fermentation kicked up within 20 minutes. Using the hop bag to contain the skins and seeds meant I could quickly remove them when I though enough tannins had been extracted. Too little tannin and there is no point using grapes but too much would dominate and ruin the beer. Just a week later the beer was dry as a bone and was bottled with only moderate carbonation to be a bit like a pet-nat wine.

The beer will age for six months so it can be popped open for a spring time evening. I was forced to open one battle after two weeks and it tasted even at this young age delicious. The astringent sensation should stay but any slight bitter tatsing tannins develop, acidity should drop to a lovely pleasing zing.

Grapes: L picked and cleaned R after fermentation and a squeeze

I see no reason to tinker with this recipe though it does rely on periodic tasting to determine the grape skin removal. Making this can sit happily between my summer saisons and autumn Biere De Guarde. I may develop another recipe in tandem next year that is far more ambitious using a combination of 71B wine yeast and a saison beer yeast to similarly allow a mid range fermentation temperature but more yeast expression. It should be noted this is virtually the only wine yeast that could work in conjunction with a beer yeast as it lacks the “killer” enzyme. A little oats might be added in that beer for body and spelt or rye replacing half the wheat for some malt character. Hops could be more elaborate with Tettnang replacing the Saaz and some floral or lemon notes in flavour/aroma/dry hop additions. I would love to be able to get some Mandarina Bavaria in conjunction with another hop to work with the grapes. All that is next year and I am more than happy with what has been bottled.

An experiment with the pomace left over from beer and future wines will also be used in a recipe and hopefully a high alcohol aged “cru” beer using EC1118 Champagne yeast and Brett aged on oak… sorry.. the grape ale was really inspiring. 7% and bottled in a wine bottle too!

I would love to hear any one else experience with grape ales like this. Thanks to The Ant 06, Drink more beers, Skindiddy and Walfredo Bramley for ideas along the way.

Sexy.

• Batch:15L
• Start gravity:1.044 grain (plus the grapes)
• End gravity: Probably about 1.00.
• ABV: 7%
• IBU: 17
• Colour: 3 SRM plus the grapes
• Water profile: Thames tap moved towards a lighter beer profile.

EXTRA FERMENTABLES

Fermentable	Wright	Percentage	(Per litre)
Grapes	3.5kg	N/A	233g

FERMENTATION 1 (GRAPES)

Grapes destemmed and crushed in a sanitised nylon hop bag to keep the skins. Juice and the bag of skins left in 2 litres of boiled then cooled water and pectic enzyme and a campden tablet added to sanitise and destroy pectin for 24 hours.

5g Voss Kveik added and alloed to ferment out in ambient conditions of about 25°c using a fermentation jacket to help. Left for seven days though fermentation could have been a lot quicker.

GRAIN BILL

Malt	Weight	Percentage	(Per litre)
German Pilsner	1.4kg	63.6	93g
Acid Malt	360g	9.8	24g

MASH

• 67°c for 60 minutes Sachrification rest

1litre of water to every 500g of grain. Vorlaufed until the wort runs clear. Sparged with water at 67°C to bring it to volume of 12.5L before the boil.

BOIL

Hops	Alpha	Weight	(Per litre)
Saaz	5.3%	17g	1.13g

FERMENTATION 2 (MALT)

Bag of skins and seeds removed and wort poured onto this after seven days. Allowed to further ferment as it wished.

Bottled after a week in 750ml wine bottles with cork. Low carbonation in bottle. Leavesix months before opening.

BLACKBERRY SOURDOUGH SAISON 1

Click here to jump straight to the recipe

The plan was to make a sour saison that was tart and full of blackberry flavour. What I made was a very sour kick to the knacker bollocks saison that was full of blackberry flavour. I’m well pleased with this even if it makes most peoples eyes implode.

12 bottles worth were bulk aged but this was hurredly bottled so some sediment is visible.

If you are reading this after Armageddon then please take note that it was written in a simpler time under lock down during Covid 19. I’m saying this because like a lot of Walthamstows glitterati I started making sour dough. I was off work, dogging was banned and I needed a hobby…. aaaaanyway…

Previous to this I have only made one sour beer and that was using keffir grains as the souring agent. It was bit of a pain in the arse though produced a nice mildly soured sloe saison with the knowledge and kit I had. Since then I have wanted to get a good reliable souring agent that was easily to hand rather than use expensive commercial lactobiscillus cultures that need refrigeration to keep and a good bank balance to buy regularly… which I don’t. Using sour dough seemed like a good idea as it seems happy at room temperatures and I have a happy culture that sits on my shelves. It is fed on spelt or rye flour when ever I can be bothered to make a loaf and it really does the job souring the bread.

This monstrocity is the pellicle that formed after two weeks of the blackberries fermenting and souring. Yummy!

There are many views on how to sour a beer and I will leave that to people smarterer and more eloquent that what me is. Amongst the myriad of methods you can either sour then boil the wort or boil then sour the wort. I decided to boil as usual then sour afterwards as I wanted the starter to be able to interact with the yeast and hopefully create a more complex beer than kettle souring which happens preboil.

Hitting the acid and sacch rest bang on target

I wanted a very sour beer and to create an ideal wort I used both an acid rest in the mash and acid malt. The mash started with the 45°C ferulic acid rest then my usual 63°C Saccharification rest then it had an extra 60 minutes at the same temperature when the acid malt was added. Acid malt can inhibit sacchrification if initially added so it needed this extra step to bring pH down to give the souring bacteria a good head start as well as enough sugar to be in the wort to ferment.

Once I had boiled the wort for 30 minutes without any hops it was then cooled to 30°C and had the sourdough starter added. The sourdough starter was prepared a day earlier using a sterilised jar to minimise any contamination. 50g of the regular starter was dropped into a jar then had 50ml boiled and cooled water and 50g of flour added. This then sat overnight to get happy and vigorously souring. This is the same method with some precautionary sanitising as I use to make a big loaf and as I know it works I was happy to apply it to the beer to get a large colony of bacteria.

L to R Sourdough starter, added to the wort, mixed into the wort.

The wort complete with starter was then poured into a demijohn so that it could be in airtight conditions to sour with out any hint of oxidation. Sitting in my hot kitchen that had daytime temperatures around 25 to 27°C it started within a few hours and by the next morning the airlock was happily burping. Sourdough starters are a mix of bacteria and yeast so this could be either from a heterofermative lactobiscillus strain producing carbon dioxide and/or yeast. I have no way of knowing and all I know is that it was happy and both smelled and tasted not only sour but good after two and half days. In future I may push this longer and also measure the drop in acidity – for now it was just left to do its thing. After this it was added to the remains of an existing beer that had just been racked away onto some fruit.

Post souring but pre blackberries. A slight haze appeared on the soured saison from the souring bacteria.

I chose to put this onto the remains of the existing beer for a number of reasons. One is cost – I have used an inexpensive souring agent and now I get to recycle some yeast. Being honest it was not the monetary value I was interested to but doing as much of the work as possible with ingredients available at anytime. As well as cost the yeast was also extremely happy and potent having gone from the small vial for the initial beers inoculation to a full sludgy cake at the bottom of the fermentation bucket. It was there sitting happy and ready for a new beer to ferment. It also meant I could “reuse” the existing hops in the remains of the beer but also have a soured beer too. Hops generally inhibit lactobiscillus but combining them now meant I could have a reasonable hop profile to about 7 IBU and have a decently soured beer with out the hops interfering and probably aiding the creation of more complexity.

The intact blackberries sanitising with campden to kill any wild yeast and bacteria.

The blackberries were combined at the same time. They had sat for 8 hours in a minimum of water with campden added to inhibit wild yeast and any bad bacteria on the skins. After the water was drained away the berries were smushed by my clean sanitised hands and and poured into the fermenter.

Hideous wort makes amazing beer.

Over the next few hours the sealed lid of the brew bucket swelled with an extremely vigorous fermentation within. After 24 hours the blackberry content had become more visible through the opaque brew bucket sides, turning from a very pale to bright pink as juice was liberated from the berry flesh and circulated in the beer.

BLACKBERRY SOURDOUGH SAISON RECIPE

• Batch:14L (including the 2litres of previous beer)
• Start gravity:1.07 (plus fruit addition)
• End gravity: Probably about 1.00.
• ABV: 7% from the grain, probably 8% with the blackberries.
• IBU: 7 (estimated)
• Colour: 4 SRM before the fruit addition
• Water profile: Thames tap moved towards a lighter beer profile.

GRAIN BILL

Malt	Weight	Percentage	(Per litre)
German Pilsner	2.8kg	75.9	233g
Acid Malt	360g	9.8	30g
Vienna	330g	8.8	27g
Munich	150g	4.4	12g
Caramunich	50g	1.5	4g

EXTRA FERMENTABLES

Fermentable	Wright	Percentage	(Per litre)
Blackberries	1.1kg	N/A	92g

MASH

• 45°c for 60 minutes for Ferulic Acid rest
• 63°c for 60 minutes Sachrification rest
• 63°c for 60 minutes Acidification rest

1litre of water to every 500g of grain. Vorlaufed until the wort runs clear. Sparged with water at 63°C to bring it to volume of 12L before the boil.

BOIL

No hops on a 30 minute boil

FERMENTATION

Sour-dough starter made with 50g base starter, 50g sterilised water and 50g spelt flour. Allowed to get to a vigorous fermentation in a jar before being added to the 30°c cooled wort after the boil. This was allowed to sour in a sanitised and closed demijohn for two and a half days until it was to may taste.

Poured onto 2 litres of left over wort form a previous brew that used the same basic grain bill and was mildly hopped. The WLP4021 Saison II yeast was already active in a healthy colony so the soured wort was not aerated except ambiently when poured in. Sanitised and crushed blackberries added at the same time.

Temperature was allowed to free ride straight up to 28°c using a fermentation jacket to help. Fermentation was very very active but kept in the sealed bucket to allow the blackberries to infuse for 10 days so no observation or measurements taken to minimise the chance of oxidation.

Bottled after three weeks in secondary that allowed sediments to settle. Low to moderate carbonation in bottle.

Any ideas or advice always accepted (as long as you are nice!)

BLOOD ORANGE SAISON RECIPE 1

I feel I should apologise in advance as this is the first beer post I am dropping and writing it on a new bit of blog software so its bound to go fucky…

Blood orange saison (it looked so much better in real life – updates may appear!) It is almost luminous in natural light.

Having had some luck with a Seville orange wine I made a few years ago I decided to make some blood orange wine, then use the left over zests to add to a saison. Saisons are naturally dry so it would be odd to try and keep the sweetness of an orange so no flesh or juice was added. As there was no possible sourness from the obviously absent juice I did not try to sour this with lactobacillus relying only upon the saison yeast.

Only zests were added. No pith and no juice.

The orange zests were added as the wort came off the boil and infuse as it cooled to try and keep as much aroma as possible. To accentuate the zestiness and add some depth I used a small amount of mandarina bavaria hops late in the boil and as a dry hop. The mandarina was added on day six of fermentation when the gravity was at 1.032 sitting five days in a nylon bag before it was pulled out. This is the first time I have ever dry hopped so I was hesitant to use a huge amount playing it quite conservatively. Generally I don’t like overly hoppy beers and saisons are usually mild to moderately hopped anyway. I imagine many will want more of a kick, particularly those over the pond of the American persuasion.

The grains were relatively simple with a pilsner base and oats because I like them and rye because I wanted to test it. The resulting base has decent mouth feel from the oats and tastes wonderfully dry from the slight prickle of the rye. Mash thickness was thinner than my usual with an equivalent of 500g grain to a litre and a half of water during the mash due to oats and rye being thick and gloopy. It had loads of time in a step mash that many will find excessive and I cannot really say if it was truly necessary. I’m a sucker for work and punishment I guess. At lauter it was vorlaufed allowing the first runnings to run through again for clarity. It was then sparged and the grain bed spiked to get as much wort as possible – efficiency was sky high and I initially overshot so made a little extra.

The head stayed for a decent time (for once)

Fermentation was pretty happy using 3724 saison yeast. This yeast can often stall and it did on day five or six when I pitched some Mangrove Jacks M29 taking the chance to dry hop. I prefer this as a second strain to 3711 that is often used to restart a stuck fermentation. Although I did not test the final gravity it tastes bone dry with pleasing bite.

This is certainly my most ambitious beer in terms of recipe using three hops and dry hopping hoping that they can work in conjunction with the orange zest as an adjunct. As the beer has aged the orange flavour has become more pronounced but it is still nuanced and dare I say delicate as I wanted. Next time I may add five or so Seville zests to get a range and depth of flavours. Grain might be simplified to mainly pilsner of have spelt added or replacing the rye. It may also be a split batch with one being aged with Brett or soured to see how they compare. I am very happy with the final beer as it stands now and will certainly make another batch.

Yummy

Blood Orange Saison With Oats and Rye

• Batch:12L
• Start gravity:1.068
• End gravity: sorry I didn’t check but it was bone dry. Estimate was 1.07.
• ABV: planned to be 6.7 but may be more.
• IBU: 25
• Colour: 4 SRM

Water profile: Lovely Thames tap moved crudely towards a lighter beer profile.

GRAIN BILL

Malt	Weight	Percentage	(Per litre)
German Pilsner	3kg	79%	250g
Rye Malt	400g	10.5%	33g
Flaked Oats	400g	10.5%	33g

MASH

• Clucen rest of 45°c for 30 minutes
• Saccharification rest of 63°c for 90 minutes
• Saccharification rest of 68°c for 30 minutes
• Mash out at 77°c for 5 minutes

1.5 litre of water was used for every 500g of grain. Vorlaufed until the wort ran clear. The grain may need to be spiked to allow sparge water to pass though. Sparged with water at 77°c to bring it to 14L before boil.

BOIL

Hop	Alpha	Weight	Time	(Per Litre)
Herkules	13%	6g	60min	0.5g
Tettnanger	3.7%	8g	60min	0.7g
Tettnanger	3.7%	6g	20min	0.5g
Tettnanger	3.7%	8g	10min	0.7g
Mandarina Bavaria	7.2%	8g	10min	0.7g
Mandarina Bavaria	7.2%	28g	Dryhop	2.3g

Zest (no pith) of 10 blood oranges was added at flame out. Stayed in the beer through fermentation for maximum flavour extraction.

YEAST

• 3724 Saison yeast rising naturally to 28°c
• M29 Saison yeast added on day five until dry.

Bottled after 21 days and strongly carbonated. Allowed to age for at least a few months and served cold from a fridge.

Any ideas or advice always accepted (as long as you are nice!)

HOW TO MAKE A FERMENTATION JACKET

Lately I have been trying to get a lot more organised with my temperature control when making beers and wines to try and steer them towards particular tastes. Cooler temperatures mean a slower fermentation and in a white wine can help keep aroma and delicate floral aromas. A higher temperature can mean more fruity esters in a wine or saison beers that I brew.

One easy solution is a little thought to where where they ferment. The colder tiles in the hallway or the cupboard under the stairs can knock a couple of degrees off if I am making a white wine or colder fermented ale. If I need extra heat the kitchen’s underfloor heating can be good to give a little boost at certain times of the year.

Ugly but practical. Just like me.

I have also invested in a small immersion heater that is currently untested in any kind of fermentation so far. In addition or as an alternative I have also made a fermentation jacket to fit around my primary fermenter. Originally a 20 tog duvet it has been cannibalised to fit around the fermenter. This can trap either the ambient heat that fermentation creates or trap extra heat the immersion heater could add. Using it once it managed to easily get an extra 2C to keep a saison beer fermenting at about 28C. In the summer I may be able to use it to get a blackberry or blueberry wine at a constant 29C using only the ambient heat of fermentation or pehaps even higher for a soured saison. When making wine it also means I can choose the time to insulate and raise temperatures to extract water soluble esters when alcohol is low and perhaps remove the blanket and allow temperatures to slowly decrease to limit ethanol extracted tannins as the alcohol level rises during fermentation.

Chop chop.

 

The basic idea is an L shape cut out of the duvet and the longer section wraps around the fermenter and is held in place with Velcro. The shorter flap folds over the top and is held in place by the fermenter handle. This allows it to be easily folder back if I want to take a gravity reading of a beer or wine or punch down a cap on a fruit wine. All in all it took a couple of hours to measure, cut and (crudely) sew together. The total cost was about £10 for the single duvet thanks to Wilko’s and one English pound for 1m of Velcro form a market stall. It should be entirely machine washable and I have enough to make another duplicate and smaller versions for glass demijohns.

First measure your primary fermentor.

I reversed the colours to make it look like a sexy schematic.

C. Measure the circumference around the fermenter and add a third of the measurement to get the total length you need to surround your fermenter and account for the fluffy insulation. Mine was 100cm and coincidentally the duvet was 135cm in total.

H. The hight is just the hight of the fermenter with nothing extra needing to be added.

D. The lid is square with each side bing the diameter of the fermenters top plus 5cm either side to get a nice overhang to keep it all insulated. Mine was 35cm across so the total was 45cm.

The overhang on the florr is folded over then sewn together.

Cut the L shape out with some decently sharp scissors or your girlfriends fabric scissors if she is out the house. I cut one side of the fabric first, then cut the insulation to match it. Then the remaining side had an extra 5 cm added so that it could be folded over when it was sewn together.

After sewing, the Velcro straps were marked up and attached with the crudest sewing possible in terms of appearance but using enough thread to keep them secure when being used. Initially I was intending to have some on the top but the bucket lid is a perfect set up to keep the flap held down. It also means the handle is always available to carry it too.

Frankenstein’s Monsetr had better sewing than that.

 

I also have a section of polystyrene that is two centimetres thick and this will be used as a base if and when I need one, currently it is unused though.

I have a stick on LCD thermometer on the side. Only apply one when the jacket has been fitted so you can position it to be visible near where the two sides of the jacket connect and be seen with minimal disruption to the insulation and possible agitation of sediments.