Brewing a super session saison

So, as you can probably guess, I love Saisons. The typical story told about the style is that it emerged from farmhouse brewing traditions in France where they needed a beer for their seasonal farm workers to keep hydrated while working. If you know anything about saison today you’ll know that it’s not exactly something that you’d want to drink a lot of and then go try to wield a scythe and get some work done. So it’s likely that the first saisons were much lower strength beers than what is typically available today. The BJCP has mentioned “Table Saison” as a variant of their 2015 definition for the style that ranges 3.5%-5% I actually wanted to make something that was even lower alcohol than that (if possible, I have this curse about trying to make session beers and they end up being 6-7% somehow). My goal was to make a beer that was around 2.5% abv, but hopefully didn’t taste too watered down.

Farm Hand’s Ale (15 gallon batch, 30 minute boil)

  • 10lbs Northwest Pale Ale Malt
  • 2lbs Flaked Oats
  • 1.5lbs Aromatic Malt
  • 1.5lbs Munich Malt
  • 2.5oz Glacier Hops 3.2%AA FWH @30 minutes
  • 2oz Glacier Hops 3.2%AA @2 minutes

I decided to go with the high % (though maybe not a terribly high amount) of aromatic malt for this to help give it a good malty flavor despite the small amount of malt being used. I included the oats to boost the mouthfeel of what is likely to be a rather thin beer otherwise. I used glacier hops because glacier hops are the best, and did a 30 minute boil because I like to shorten my brew day.

I mashed this beer rather thin since my HLT is my old 10 gallon boil kettle and I wanted to get 15 gallons of runnings so I mashed in with 9 gallons of water to achieve a mash temp of 155F and then sparged with another 9 gallons of water after about an hour. It took a while to get to a boil and my 19 gallon kettle was pretty much maxed out, I actually saved a few gallons off and added them to the kettle as I went to chill. Otherwise the boil went fine with no major hiccups.

I split the wort among 4 fermentors, 2 2.5 gallon and 2 5 gallon batches were all pitched with different yeasts. The 2.5 gallon batches got my wasp yeast for it’s inaugural batch and the other 2.5 gallon got some of my local yeast, that was harvested from a plum blossom. I think I need to just come up with a name for all of the local yeast captures, since they are all pretty much the same yeast. The 5 gallon batches got my hefe/brett (probably needs a better name) culture and my abbey culture that had been revived from a jar of yeast that has been in my fridge now for 3 years and 4 months, ha!

The original gravity came out to 1.031, which is 6 points higher than I was shooting for meaning my efficiency was 88.5% which seems incredibly high to me, I wonder if the thinner mash had something to do with that? So I guess this could possibly qualify at the low end a Table Saison depending on attenuation. All of the batches took off fermenting pretty quickly. I will post tasting notes when they are ready.