Lemon and Thyme Saison

[Gggsss]

All right all….

Fancy knocking up a version of a beer I love. Partizan do a Lemon and Thyme (not lemon thyme) Saison. Anyone have any idea of how to/how much add the lemon and thyme (to be present but not dominant). I brew 10L batches. I’m gonna use my usual saison recipe as a base.

1.8kg Pilsner Malt
500g Flaked Rye
100g Caramunich 3
90g Rice Hulls
5g Saaz 60 Mins
20g Saaz 5 Mins
Lallemand Belle Saison

The usual temp (ramping incrementally) - if anyone has instructions on the best way the ferment this yeast please advise.

How to add lemon (zest or peel) and Thyme (fresh and/or dried)? Some late boil/flameout and “dry hopping” around 5 days before bottling (or so)…

Any ideas????

A million thanks in advance

 

[JonathanMSE]

I've literally just finished brewing a saison with lime zest in.

I couldn't tell you how it turned out yet.
But I added 25g of zest (no pith hopefully) in the last 5 mins of the boil.
I added it into a hop spider.. which it promptly blocked! So I'd either add it directly to the wort or in a bag.

I also had coriander seed.. not quite the sane as thyme. But I put 24g of that in for theast 5 mins too.

 

[Gggsss]

Thanks for the reply. What is your volume in the FV?

 

[JonathanMSE]

I got about 22.5 litres into the FV.

 

[nickjdavis]

Whilst I cannot help you with the Thyme element, I did bottle a couple of weeks ago a Lemon and Lime Saison. Early sampling is very positive indeed...not a huge amount of Lime but the Lemon is definitely there albeit certainly not overpowering or dominant.

I used 30g of dried Lemon Peel in the last 5 minutes of the boil along with 7 Dried White Limes for 10 minutes.

Then once fermentation had died down I added 5g of Kaffir Lime leaves and 4 crushed sticks of fresh Lemon Grass, both for 7 days.

Batch size was 20L

 

[samale]

I have a lemon and rosemary rye Saison in the bottles. My advice would be to start low. I added 5g of rosemary at flameout for a 20 litre batch. For me the flavour is too strong. It's over 10 weeks in the bottle and it's still not mellowing.
I dry hopped with the zest of two lemon's.

 

[Gggsss]

Thanks for the replies everyone. Loads of decent info. I’ve used fresh citrus zest a few times and found it very strong, to the point of almost being like a perfume. Would strips of peel be better? Do you guys zest or peel????

thanks in advance..

 

[clib]

I use zest. Sometimes the juice too. And my usual approach now is to add citrus and herbs etc by making a tea for each flavour when I bottle the beer. Then add the tea in stages until I feel the flavour is enough. Remove the wax from the lemon, it will ruin head retention if you don't. You can also make a tincture by soaking zest or herbs in vodka and adding that.

Also. I am a Belle Saison fan. But I recently had a Saison du Pont and as soon as I tasted it I thought, blimey, that's like my beer at home. Which is a Belgian blond kind of thing that was fermented with M31. Not exactly the same obviously, but I thought it straight away. Much more like the archetypal Saison than Belle Saison. I'm wondering if anyone else will think the same.