“A Bitter Summer” Saison – First Taste
Well, my first take on a Belgian farmhouse ale turned out pretty good! Always room for improvement, but that’s to be expected. This is definitely the lightest beer that I’ve brewed to date and the color came out very similar to what I had hoped. It’s a lovely golden straw color, although it’s a bit hazy because I forgot to add my irish moss. Whoops. Oh well.
The flavors are there and I can definitely pick up a lot of spice, predominately clove flavors and a bit of pepper. There is also some pronounced fruitiness. Increasing the temperature of fermentation over the last few days to the low 80′s helped bring out some additional fruit and spice flavors. The thing that seems to be missing is any sort of creaminess from the wheat or Belgian biscuit malt. The flavors of the biscuit malt are there but I don’t get much additional texture.
I might have gone a little bit heavy on the hops here, as it definitely has a lingering bitter finish. It almost crosses the boundaries to a pilsner with the amount of drying bitterness it finishes with. I like that, but it might be a little heavy for the style. I was shooting for a dry beer and I succeeded there, and I personally like the bitterness that comes with it.
My final gravity came down to about 1.004 (!) from 1.055, which put my abv right around 6.5%. All in all, I’m pretty happy with this beer. I think the next time around I’ll dial down the bitterness and toss in some sort of additional grain to help boost some complexity in the malt bill. But this one came out pretty close to what I was hoping for.
Let me know if you want to taste and we’ll have ourselves a beer.
Homebrewed Saison using Wyeast French Saison Yeast
