Simple Saison

[John Sand]

I love it Monty. It's great to experiment with small batches. Faster boil, faster cool, less expense on materials. And best of all, sounds like a lot of fun!

[monsteroyd]

Oh man, John. I am so doing a black saison. Gotta get some burnt err... black malt.

Monty

[mashani]

I am using Beersmith 2 and I just can not hit the estimated OG. I forget what it was but I am over it. I must be losing some water somewhere. Also I noticed a really weird thing in BS2. If I checked the box on the LME that said I added it after the boil, my IBU's went from like 20 to 50. What is up with that? No way 2oz Hallertau for 20 minutes is going to give 50ibu. Anyway using BS has been interesting, but weird stuff like that makes me wonder if it is too AG for me.

RE: OG - check your boil off rate, maybe you are underestimating it.

RE: late addition / IBUs.

Well see... by doing the late addition you are starting with a 1.02 or 1.04ish wort (I'm not sure how much water you actually had in that pot but somewhere around there)... instead of a 1.06+ish wort. A low gravity wort will utilize the hops better then a high gravity wort during the boil. That's one of the "advantages" of doing a late extract addition, you can get your hop utilization to be more efficient and use less hops to achieve the same result.

In my head based on the formula I have "embedded" (Tinseth), 2 oz of 4.2ish IBU hops in a 1.030 wort at 2.5 gallon final volume is going to be around 42 IBUs even at 20 minutes. In a 1.020 wort that calculation gives me 47 IBUs. But I think the formula is wrong once your wort gets that low gravity, so ~40 IBUs is still probably closer. But beersmith is not crazy.

Now reality is depending on how old you hops are and storage conditions you may get nothing at all near those numbers, but for fresh properly stored hops of that AA level they are close.

I imagine towards the end, I will even need to start in on the darker DMEs. Hmm.. a black saison, the style guide just flew out the window.
Monty

With some crystal and more munich in the mix (which you get with the Darker DMEs) then up to 20 SRM just call it a Biere de Garde and your still in style! Even if you run out of saison yeast and use a clean American yeast or lager yeast, you could call it one of those if it's a saisony grain bill with some crystal and extra munich goodness.

[monsteroyd]

Again I bow to your wisdom, Oh Great One!

OK learned another new thing here. So by starting with about 1 gallon and adding about 1.5lbs of DME, based on the 1lb DME to 1 gal = 1.040, I'm getting roughly 1.060 and you're saying that the lower the gravity, the more bitter from the hops? I assume up to a point. I think I have the beersmith set up wrong. I think it thinks I am using more water, like 1.25 gals or something, and since I start with 1 gal, and I boil, I must have less than that. I'll need to re-do my boil off for a gallon with a 30 minute boil. That should tell me the amount of water / DME and gravity. Dang this beer stuff is turning into chemistry class. Hopefully it won't be too bitter, but I'll still drink it.

I really need to re-read Palmer's book again. Might make more sense this time.

Thanks
Monty

[mashani]

Beersmith might be using your full target volume to figure it depending on how it's set up. Beersmith is a real bear to set up and have work right with partial volume boils. If you did it in a 1 gallon boil then you would have lower utilization (less IBUs) then it says.

I doubt it will be "too bitter" regardless, unless your hops were fresh. In general we who homebrew do not gets the IBUs we think we are getting based on the software because we are often using 6 month+ old hops that were stored in unknown conditions until we got them in our hands - so the AAU numbers on the hop package are no longer correct, so if that's what you plug in, well... it's wrong to be frank. The effective AAUs in the hops goes down with age and storage conditions, and the amount of this degradation is actually hop specific since they all have different oil makeups. Hop union and other places have some information published that tells how much degradation over time for various types of hops, but their numbers are based on a specific storage condition, and we simply do not know what they were until we got them for the most part... and we don't have the equipment to test them and find out for real.

So basically RDWHAHB.

[BigPapaG]

Hey Monty,

I did a Black Saison using Midnight Wheat.

This adds the black color without all the roasty bitterness.

If a little roast is desired sub out some of the midnight wheat for a small amount of black malt or roasted barley. (the roasted barley is preferred by me over the black malt... Preference, that's all)

[monsteroyd]

Awesome BigPapa. I just ordered some roasted barley for a steep. I figure that with using dark DME ought to work. I kinda want to see what roasted bitter and saison yeast do. I'm sure the farm kid who had to make the beer looked away and over roasted the malt sometimes too. I think it will be more authentic.

Also I adjusted my boil size and my boil off, went back and adjusted BeerSmith for adding the LME at the end and lowered my AA% from 6.9 to 5 for my 3 month old frozen hallertau, and now my second batch is estimated at 44.3 IBU. It will be a learning experience. Can't wait to see how much more bitter this will be over the others that had hops boiled at a much higher gravity.

Didn't brew tonight but finished up labeling my christmas present to my best buds. A six pack of 6 different kinds of beer.

beerpresent.jpg (192.52 KiB) Viewed 696 times

Monty

[mashani]

Awesome BigPapa. I just ordered some roasted barley for a steep. I figure that with using dark DME ought to work. I kinda want to see what roasted bitter and saison yeast do. I'm sure the farm kid who had to make the beer looked away and over roasted the malt sometimes too. I think it will be more authentic.
Monty

Honestly back in the day the kilned malt was a lot more sketchy then our modern malts. Nothing was kilned as uniformly light as our pilsner or light 2-row base malts except totally by luck or accident or if the dude doing it was amazingly proficient, as there was no such thing as precise temperature control. (FIRE! FIRE!). So yeah, if you want to brew real old school European beer feel free to throw in a handful of any brown or roasty thing you want at random.

So yeah Monty, I like your style, being somewhat of a "medieval" brewer at times too (except for the sanitation part LOL).

[BeerRust]

Getting crazy with this style......Love it, keep making what you like!

[monsteroyd]

OK last night I did another batch, this time with exactly 1 lb of golden DME, and then 3 lbs of ultraLight LME after boil. Did about a 20 minute boil of 1oz Hallertau in a gallon of water with that 1 lb of dme. I hit the estimated OG right on the nose. Yippee! Of course I pitched rehydrated Belle Saison. I feel like I've got my boil off and my equipment profile dialed in perfect for my process. So another batch into the pipeline, this one all barley malt. I did add 4 oz of table sugar to dry it out a bit, predicted ABV is going to be high for style, but pfft!.

As soon as my roasted barley gets here, I'll be doing that black saison.

For some unexplainable reason I feel like adding in a big time Bwahahaha! Or maybe that should be Bwahohoho for Christmas.

Monty

[mashani]

Your making me want to brew another saison. The only reason I'm not is because I already have 4 of them in my pipeline, and I take advantage of winter temps to brew other styles.

[monsteroyd]

Hey just cause I'm nuts don't mean you have to be too.

Monty

[monsteroyd]

OK I didn't make more saison last night because I had a bottle bomb in one of my 6 packs and it ruined a bunch of labels and made a mess, so now I have to hope that 3 of the six pack holders dry out and still look OK. My beautiful 6 packs... sniff.
But I'll get them re-labeled for Christmas since after about 4 pm today I am off for the rest of the year.
I did get some chocolate malt and some roasted barley yesterday (I ordered 5 lbs of each, what was I thinking?) My question for the is how much do I use for a LBK sized batch, and I know I want to use the roasted barley, but should I add in the chocolate malt too? Also I assume that I should steep these, or do they need mashing? And I am going to use 1 lb of dark dme for my 1 gal hop boil (along with the steep water), and add a lb of wheat DME and 2 lbs of LME at flameout.

Black Saison
===========
.5? lb roasted barley steeped
.5? lb chocolate malt steeped
1 lb dark dme
1 oz styrian 20 min
1/2 tab wirlfloc 10 min
at boil end
2lb light lme
1lb wheat dme
Belle Saison yeast re-hydrated

Another thing I am thinking of trying is making a simple saison (1 lb wheat 2-3 lb barley) and throwing in a can or two of concentrated orange juice. I've done a 3 Orange zest and juice saison with the Mr Beer saison and it was really good. I'm curious how the juice compares to the zest for the orange flavor. Also I think it might be interesting to throw in some white grape juice like what Haerbob was going to do. Or even some frozen lemonade or limeade would work. Probably not authentic, but this is the saison style busting experiment anyway. I do have 4 more LBKs to fill after the Black one.

Monty

[haerbob3]

It depends on how much and how intense you want the bitterness from the dark malts less steep, more mash. There is not much sugar to be gained from these grains.

[monsteroyd]

Hmm.. I just want darkness, not much bitter.

Monty