Ginger/Orange Saison - make 5 gallons in 6Q pot in 1 Hour

[TonyKZ1]

Wow, this sounds neat. I've to try this recipe out, even though I finally have a bigger 5G pot rather than the 12Q that I had used for so long. And a couple 6.5G fermenters that were passed along to me. I'm assuming when you fermented this, you kept the Brewdemon fermenters cool, probably ~65*F or so, in a chilled cooler/fermenting chamber or just let them ferment at room temp?

[mashani]

Well, I suggest you wait until I actually taste this after it conditions, and then I can tell you if you should use more or less hops and/or more or less orange and/or more or less ginger candi syrup. Although that would be to my tastes, so yours might be different.

So as far as temps, this being a saison, I did not use any temperature control beyond the room temp of my AC and intentionally moved to a warmer spot in my house and let it get as warm as it wanted during fermentation - it got up to around about 79 degrees at one point. Mostly it was between 72-74.

This yeast (French Saison strain) is totally happy anywhere in the 70s, and even 80s are ok. I would not recommend keeping it below 70, unless you are trying to minimize its saison characteristics. It will ferment fine in the 60s, but will be less saison like. This particular yeast strain is pretty much impervious to temperature fluctuations, so no matter what you do you will get beer. But staying 70+ is best to get a nice dry and flavorful saison.

Now if you were to use a liquid strain labeled as "Belgian Saison" then you have a totally different animal on your hands, and you have to ramp up the temps into the 80s at least and keep it hot or it will stall out. That yeast actually likes it in the 90s.

Also one other thing you need to know about French Saison strain - it is not normal beer yeast, but a mutated strain of Saccharomyces var. Diastaticus. That organism would normally be considered a beer spoiling agent, except this is a good mutation of it that makes good flavors. But *it will eat lots of things that normal beer yeast will not*. That is why it ends up at 1.003 or 1.000 or 0.997 or whatever. My experience is that it does not matter how much malt you put in the beer - it is likely still going to end up at 1.003 or 1.000 or 0.997 or whatever. This yeast doesn't just eat complex sugars that your normal beer yeast won't, but it will actually eat unconverted starch too (so obviously complex sugars due to mash temps have little effect too, extract will ferment out without a problem, etc.). The whole "BU:GU" scale for hop load required to "balance" is inappropriate for this yeast. I've had 1.07 and 1.08ish OG beers without any sugar end up at 1.003 or < just like their 1.05ish counterparts. % of attenuation means nothing like a normal yeast, it will just eat stuff, as long as it's warm and happy. It will be tart and dry no matter what. That is why I really now only brew 1.05ish beers with French Saison, I don't really need 9+% ABV and it's stupidly easy to end up with that with this yeast. Consider that this 1.049ish beer is around 6% abv due to the attenuation. A 1.07ish beer would be ~9%. A 1.08 beer would be ~10%. They pretty much will all end up with the same FG. As in not very much.

So if you use French Saison type yeast, sanitize everything extra carefully, and disassemble and sanitize your spigot if you are using one. And your racking/bottling equipment. Because if you do not kill all of it, you will in a future batch start to get gusher infections and bottle bombs as it wakes up and eats stuff in the bottle that your regular yeast didn't get.

[monsteroyd]

Interesting; This is my standard process for making a 2.25 gallon batch. I never thought of doing it for a double batch. I will give it a try. Once more Mashani blows me away with his great tips. Thanks, man.

I do a orange saison using frozen orange juice and figure the orange juice is x amount of sugar (I take the sugar grams per serving times the number of servers. BrewSmith seems to agree with me on my OG) I also do Lime aid, and any other juice that might work ok with belle saison.

Monty

[mashani]

It works fine, just tweak your hops a bit. More of an issue if using normal yeast. Not so much for Bella Saison.

I've got a big bottle of plum juice (not prune, but actual plum) - and am thinking of doing a batch of Saison with it.

[mashani]

Popped my tester bottle. It is good if you like Saisons. I deem it a success!

The hops are not noticeable as "hops" they blend in nicely and don't in any way make you think it's not a saison. I taste the pear and tart cherries in the background, some lemony citrus, and a good bit of tangerine/mandarin orange/zest like flavors. It's noticeably gingery and peppery in the background, in a good way. Ginger is well below the level of regular ginger ale (not the strong kind, the Canada dry kind) but without the sweetness. So you notice it, but not so much that it's overpowering flavor wise or conflicting with anything else. Perceived bitterness is "plenty", it's not sweet, the ginger is enhancing the bitterness too in its own way. Any more bitterness would just be distracting and unnecessary. Has some saisony bubble gum going on too, I think the ginger is bringing out what little the French Saison makes and enhancing it (French Saison is not as bubblegummy as Belgian saison, it tends to be more citrusy/tart). But this has nearly as much perceived bubblegum as Dupont. I'm finding that surprising, but in a good way. I just wasn't expecting it. It has to be the ginger kicking it up.

Lots of the stuff is kind of "standing apart" right now vs. blending together, but that will change with some age, so it will get even better - this is quite young.

But I'd say nothing is wrong with this recipe if you like saisons. I might tweak something if I did it again, but I don't know what that would be yet, I wouldn't make any decisions until I tried a 6-8 week old bottle. I'll update the post later if I think it would need some tweaking. But that of course would be to my tastes.

EDIT: as it slightly warms stuff blends together a bit more and the bitterness mellows a tad then it's even better, so yeah, it's going to be really quite nice at 6-8 weeks I think.

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[mashani]

So this is really good now and it's half gone... (I will try to save a bottle for folks to try at a meetup) and I wanted another quick batch of table strength Saison, and didn't have a lot of time to brew (I'm baby sitting 5 dogs!).

So I did a similar thing for a 3 gallon batch, with a 10 minute boil. This would be like what Monsteroyd does quite often I believe.

So 2 jugs of near freezing water instead of 4.

Did a similar high concentrated 1.25 gallon 10 minute boil of:

1# Wheat DME
2# MoreBeer Extra Light LME

Boiled that for 5 minutes

Added:

1/3oz Sweet Orange Peel
1/8oz Grains of Paradise

Boiled that for 4 minutes

Added:

1oz 14.2% AA Jarrylo hops

Boiled for 1 minute

Turned off heat, let stand for 20 minutes with lid on the pot.

Put 1 1/2 gallons of water in fermenter, poured this in, topped up to 3 gallons. That got my temps to 68 degrees without spending any time chilling besides the lid on hop stand. Which is just dandy for this.

Pitched full pack of Bella Saison

And that's about it.

So this will have orange, and mellow banana, pear, and spice from the Jarrylo and orange peel, and the citrusy/tart/spice/pepper vibe from the Bella and GOP.

Will be 1.001 or 0.997 or something dumb.

OG was 1.044

Will turn out to be 16-18 IBUs after the stand/steep, which is plenty when it's that dry.

Start to finish this beer took 45 minutes to make (with jugs of water put in freezer about 3 hours before my estimated finish time).

My bet is it will be quite tasty too.