Today is my first brew day of 2022. It's the mark of a renewed passion for brewing, and renewed commitment to blogging. I didn't blog for a few years, I lost my interest in the hobby of homebrewing along with the time to do it. Recently that interest has been sparked once again and I was looking back at all my old posts. While I realize I'm not the best or most interesting writer/blogger, I personally find value in having the history of the writing. It vividly brings back memories of what I was writing about and I remember things I may not have otherwise.
Today's blog will be the documentation of a brew day for a Farmhouse Saison. I've brewed this beer in the past for a end of tax season party at work. I supplied this Saison and a NEIPA which was my first attempt at that style back in 2018 or 2019. Both beers turned out well and both beers disappeared in 2 hours (both five gallon batches). There were about 30 people attending the party and the feedback was all positive. Today's brew is not earmarked for a party, but I want to recreate that beer using the same recipe and scaling it up to my current 11 gallon batch size. Hopefully it will be as good as I remember.
When I created this recipe I remember doing a fair amount of research into the style and what may have historically went into a Saison. I may have taken some liberties with adding vegetables into brew but it turned out well so I'm going to stick with it this time around as well. I start by baking the sweet potato until fully cooked, waiting for them to cool to mash temp, then adding them to the mash.
The corn sugar is used to dry the beer out similar to the way you would use it in a double IPA. This seemed to work well last time so no changes there either. Saison must have a dry finish, the beer should be very well attenuated the corn sugar helps with that.
I'm adding a significant amount of sulfate to my mash water because it helps with that dry and crisp mouth feel, and Belgium water seems to be higher in sulfate than chloride. (https://byo.com/article/saving-saison/) I don't believe I did this last time I brewed it but experience gathered since then tells me this is a good idea.
The brew day went fairly well although I was rushing around most of the day trying to put equipment back together I had been cleaning all week, fixing my Tilt Hydrometer TiltPi setup, and baking 10lbs sweet potato for the mash. I missed my OG by a few points ending up at 1.049, not too bad, much better than the last time I brewed this beer.
I did have one costly mistake, my temp probe cable was wrapped through my mash tun handle, when I went to move the mash tun for cleaning the ripped the cable off the ends, pulled the Wort Hog controller end right out of the frame. I ordered a new temp probe and cable, coming to a $100 mistake, ouch!
If you're reading this post you can see the fermentation reports on the What's Brewing page in the menu of this blog. It's fermented very fast and was down 20 points in 12 hours, has slowed down since then but I've been ramping the temperature to encourage 3711 French Saison to through out those beautiful phenolics and esters.
I'll follow up this post with some tasting notes when the beer is ready.
End of brew day fallen soldiers
Started the ferment at 70 degrees, will ramp to 77
