Great first showings--Sea Symphony Strong Ale and Saison de Potiron

This weekend, I sampled both the recently-bottled Sea Symphony Strong Ale (or Barleywine, but it's a little outside of style guidelines...and deliciously so!) and the young Saison de Potiron, and they were both wonderful and wonderfully surprising.  On Friday night, I tasted my 11.6%ABV behemoth of a beer, the Sea Symphony Strong Ale, hopped with Chinook, Falconer's Flight, and the Falconer's Flight Seven Seas (Cs) blend.  It was very lightly carbonated at this stage, but the taste was wonderful.  The beer had notes of honey, pine, burnt sugar, citrus, flora, apricot, with lots of warming and a beautifully sticky mouthfeel.  I am so excited to enjoy that wonderful beast of a beer over time.  It is probably my favorite beer I've ever brewed.

The Saison de Potiron is showing amazing promise.  The WLP568 yeast RIPPED through this beer.  It is already deliciously dry, in the proper farmhouse ale fashion.  The yeast profile will develop over time, but I am already getting the wonderful peppery notes, with fruity esters in the background.  It already has a delightfully "Belgian" taste to it, so that has me very excited.  There's a nice nutty caramel malt background, with the proper light, spritzy farmhouse ale body.  The pumpkin made it just about the most wonderful color I've ever seen.  Tawny, autumnal orange-amber.  Mmm...just delovely.  The pumpkin added that delightfully earthy, squashy note to the beer as well.

Wow, it is so exciting to be back in the game.  Scarlett the Galway Girl on tap right now...used it to make some ale grilled onions to put on a buffalo chicken pizza tonight...freaking delicious.

Prost!

Brew Day--Saison de Potiron

Saison de Potiron
As the weather grows colder and leaves change to their autumnal reds and oranges, we beer lovers need a tasty brew that can reflect the change in the season.  The Franco-Belgian style known as "Saison" (French for "season") is a relatively free-form style from the farmhouses of Belgium known for its spicy, complex, almost peppery yeast character.  The most common versions (Saison Dupont is the most popular) are around 6% ABV, dry and very light in color, with lemon and pepper notes.  However, it is now widely accepted that in the Franco-Belgian farmhouse ale tradition, the saison beer would literally change with the season, with the Saison Dupont style most prominent in the spring.  Summer meant brighter, more wheat-forward, lower alcohol saisons, while wintertime saw a hearty, darker, high gravity saison.  An ideal autumnal saison would be slightly higher in alcohol content, copper/amber in color, malt forward, and perhaps containing some beautiful fall pumpkin (potiron) meat.  As a homebrewer, I certainly couldn't ignore my inner mad scientist, and of course I had to go with the pumpkin option.  Thusly, I have named the beer "Saison de Potiron," which plays on the fact that it is indeed a pumpkin saison beer but also the fact that "saison de potiron" translated literally means "pumpkin season."

The recipe follows a grain bill relatively similar to a scotch ale.  I used Maris Otter, a base malt that I have been borderline obsessed with ever since I started brewing all-grain beer.  A Belgian brewer probably would not use MO (Pilsner malt is the most common base grain for Belgian beers), but I wanted that extra maltiness and depth for the beer, given the cooling weather.  The wort poured out a beautiful amber with bright orange hues in the background...ergo, this beer will be autumn in a glass.  Here is my recipe:

OG: 1.068 (depending on how much the yeast attenuates, should be somewhere between 6.5-7% ABV)

9 lbs Maris Otter
8 oz Belgian Biscuit malt
8 oz Special 'B' malt
8 oz Red Wheat malt
1.75 lbs roasted pumpkin meat

1 lb dark brown sugar

.75 oz Czech Saaz hops @60 min
1.25 oz Saaz @5 min

WLP568 Belgian Saison Blend

Normally, I would use the Saison Dupont strain to get the proper complexity going, but that yeast thrives between 80-90°F, and I just don't have those kinds of temperatures to work with anymore, now that it's September.  WLP568 yeast is said to have the traditional characteristics of the Dupont strain without the finicky nature and need for high temperatures.  This will be perfect for this time of year, and depending on how things work out, I may harvest the yeast and make it one of my "house" strains.  I have had such great luck harvesting and reusing yeast in the past, I definitely want to get into it again.  It saves a lot of money (about $7/batch) and gives me some consistency.  Also, there are a couple of strains (especially WLP002/Wy1968 for English ales, WLP300/Wy3068 for wheat beers, now a huge fan of WLP250 for American/clean ales) that are amazing for some of my favorite styles of beer.  I will use my next two batches of beer, this saison and my Belgian mild, to test Belgian strains and see what I want to have in house for brewing those tasty Belgian styles.  And now...brew day pics!

BrewPal is a wonderful brewing app!  I use it for every batch!

Beautiful whole-leaf Czech Saaz cones boiling away

Relax, don't worry, have a homebrew(ed stout)!

Back in the game!

This weekend, with my car getting fixed and WCC having a day off on Monday, I was finally able to go home to Andover, MA and get my kegerator and C02 stuff, along with my kegs.  This means that I finally get to drink up my first Princeton batch of beer, the Maris Otter/Willamette SMaSH bitter that I brewed way back in late August/early September.  It tastes great, and I originally wanted to naturally carbonate it with some malt extract for some semblance of "real ale" authenticity, but I really want to start drinking this guy now, so I'm probably going to force carbonate it.  Depending on how I like the flavor, I may throw in a bag of whole keg hops for a little English hop freshness (gotta stick with Willamette to keep this beer Single Malt and Single Hop!).  I can't wait to finally be drinking this stuff, though.  I'll probably keg it tomorrow and that will put it ready to drink this weekend!

Since I finally have my lovely car back, I'll be brewing at a much higher rate again.  I'm really liking the idea of an amber-pumpkin-spice-autumnal-Franco-Belgian-saison-thing...so that's probably what I'll go for next.  It'll be a great cold weather/Thanksgiving/etc beer!  Stay tuned!

P.S. Trying new things!

Last night, I had the pleasure of indulging in some commercially made brews at Sunset Grill and Taproom in Boston. I tasted wonderful specimens of Saison, Rauchbier, and a Mocha Porter. I would really like to explore the first two styles a bit, as they were beyond intriguing. The Saison was bright, refreshing, citrusy, and altogether not all that comparable to other beers I have tried. The rauchbier was REALLY interesting stuff. Rauchbier is beer made from smoked malts, instead of the traditional kilned malts (crystal, Munich, mild, pale, chocolate, the list goes on...). This gives the beer a, you guessed it, very smoky flavor that went awesomely with burgers and would be great with other stuff too. I do think that if I were to make some, I would probably want to make a smaller batch of the stuff, because it is definitely not an everyday kind of beer...but boy is it good.