Calling Saison brewers

The Homebrew Forum

Help Support The Homebrew Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Buffers brewery

Complicated Brewer
Supporting Member
Joined
Dec 11, 2019
Messages
2,358
Reaction score
2,419
Location
Bognor Regis
Just brewing my first Saison. Using GH recipe with Belle Saison yeast. OG was 1.054. Set the brew fridge to 24C for the first 4 days of fermentation then increased to 28C as per recipe. After 6 days SG is 1.003! ashock1
Looks OK. Smells OK. Tastes OK. Is that normal? I've never had a beer go below 1.010 :confused.:
 
As much as I love Belle SAISON it is an absolute monster in terms of attenuation I have had it go as low as 1.001 but the beer I have made with it has being consistently tasty.

Only issue is how damm strong your beer can be with out meaning to be, before I started reducing down my grain bill I ended up with a fair few beers in the 6-7% range which while nice beers wasn’t quite what I was going for.
 
Last edited:
As much as I love Belle Saison it is an absolute monster in terms of attenuation I have had it go as low as 1.001 but the beer I have made with it has being consistently tasty.

Only issue is how damm strong your beer can be with out meaning to be, before I started reducing down my grain bill I ended up with a fair few beers in the 6-7% range which while nice beers wasn’t quite what I was going for.
Yes, that's my only concern now. What was going to be a +5%ish beer is now heading towards 7%! ashock1 Oh well, more sleep juice :laugh8:
 
Yes, that's my only concern now. What was going to be a +5%ish beer is now heading towards 7%! ashock1 Oh well, more sleep juice :laugh8:
You can get non-diastatic Saison yeasts though I have not tried them personally I think for me part of the appeal is that they tend to be quite dry. I would actually be quite tempted to try making a genuinely session like SAISON, but it just seems wrong to make a beer with a sub 1.030 OG.
 
I recently discovered Belgian Saison recently and love it. As an extract brewer I tried the Brewferm kit and now have the Mangrove Jack's craft Saison in the FV. The Brewferm went down to 1.002 and was nice and dry, 5.5% ABV. The MG one started at 1.041 and is on track to hit 1.002 or below and therefore will be similar ABV. I only added 0.4kg of light spray malt as fermentables as you could end up with a head banger, with more sugar which in my opinion is not the saison style.
 
You can get non-diastatic Saison yeasts though I have not tried them personally I think for me part of the appeal is that they tend to be quite dry. I would actually be quite tempted to try making a genuinely session like SAISON, but it just seems wrong to make a beer with a sub 1.030 OG.
I was speaking to the Lallemand guy about Farmhouse which is their non diasaticus yeast and how it compares to belle saison in performance and flavour. He said it's a little fruitier and not as peppery. It also doesn't get as low on the attenuation so advised that if you wanted to get it into the lower single figures that you would need a low mash temp. I have a pack but haven't used it yet.
 
Other nice yeasts with which you could brew a saison: MJ M41, M31 and M29. I brewed one before summer with the M31, and got down to 1.000. You should take into account that in original saison beers brettanomyces (variant) was also working, and as such they got crisp dry beers.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top