We bottled our experimental saison mini-batches last night.  Other than almost forgetting the priming sugar, and needing to sterilize a few extra 12 oz. bottles when our 25 oz. bottles were too big for our caps, everything went pretty well.  We had five 1-gallon growlers with different yeast strains, and we didn’t want to cross-contaminate.  So we sterilized our tubing and bottling tip between each batch.  That was time-consuming at first, but we got better with practice.

We started by taking gravity readings of each batch.  Three of the batches (the plain saison yeast, Brett. Bruxellensis and Bret. Lambicus) were all right around the target gravity (1.014).  But the Brett. Claussenii and Belgian Sour Mix batches weren’t quite done (1.018 and 1.020).  But we were done waiting (and they were done bubbling), so we bottled them anyway. We tasted the gravity samples for each batch, and there were definite differences between them.  The plain saison was very dry.  The Brett. batches all had some funkiness to them, though it was hard to tell them apart.

Then we siphoned them straight into a racking tip.  There was a little more loss than with a single big batch, but we wound up with around 4 gallons bottled (6x 22 oz. and 32x 12 oz.).  And it was definitely more bother than doing a single large batch.  But I think it’s worth it for the chance to try a ton of options all at once.

We have long wanted to brew our own saison.  After all, it’s the style of beer that really opened my eyes to the possibilities of beer and got us more interested in brewing and sampling as much as we could.  But it was only recently when I started reading about saison in the Oxford Companion to Beer that I really understood just how complicated it is.

First of all, while there is a general style of base beer that is the most popular for making saison, you can in fact make sour beer from any base beer.  And then there are several different species of Brettanomyces yeast, each with its own character and intensity.  There are also a couple different kinds of bacteria that sour beer.  And of course, there are a bunch of variables in the souring process, such as when you add Brett./bacteria (primary fermentation, secondary, bottling), or how warm you ferment (Dupont is supposed to ferment at 90°, for example).

So, we found a Saison Dupont clone recipe online that looked about right, and picked up five different vials of yeast: a straight saison yeast, three different Brett. yeasts (B. bruxellensis, B. claussenii, and B. lambicus), and Belgian Sour Mix (with Brett. and bacteria).

This was our second all-grain brew, and it went pretty smoothly.  Our 5-gallon water cooler mash tun didn’t hold temperature, but we kept adding hot water until it was warm enough.  The mash and boil went great, and after adding water to make up five gallons, the gravity was exactly on target (1.057).  We also used fine mesh hop sacks this time instead of cheesecloth, which made for much less gunk to filter out of the wort.

After the boil, we put the wort into our bottling bucket and filled five 1-gallon growlers, one with the Belgian Sour Mix, the second with just regular saison yeast, and the last three with saison yeast and one kind of Brett.  We’re hoping this will help us figure out what kind of saison we want to brew a larger batch of later this summer.  And if everything works out, this should be a great way to try out a bunch of different options in small batches.  There are so many options, especially for mead and cider, and it would be nice to have a good process to try out a lot of options and see what we like.