|BACKGROUND|

Retirement is (usually) a special time in a person’s life. For my father, I’m sure it is bittersweet. For the past 42 years, he’s been a teacher. He’s been through the ups and downs of No Child Left Behind and the rise of standardized testing. He’s taught kids who ended up being parents and taught their kids. And now he’s finally getting out of the business.

As a celebration of the occasion, he asked if we could brew a batch – which is a rarity – for his retirement party. For someone who has been my brewing partner/sometimes benefactor for the past 6 years of brewing, who was I to not acquiesce? Plus, it was a relatively easy request: attempt to recreate a beer he had enjoyed recently, Propolis Brewing’s Beltane. Also not something I was averse to as I also think that beer is mad tasty.

Considering that I’m fairly confident in my ability to brew a decent saison, he had little work to do in the way of convincing. So, I did a little research and slightly tweaked my existing base saison recipe to fit our needs, mainly lowering the alcohol a little to make it more sessionable than the original and my base. Admittedly, I also neglected to include the propolis culture, which is something that Propolis Brewing is accurately named for. In the end, my goal was a floral, crushable, easy-drinking retirement saison.

This also presented a slight challenge, as I was now going to have to brew on a hard schedule. This was only compounded by the fact that April and May were batshit crazy months for me to schedule around (and also the reason for the lack of posts). The gastropub I work at was about to have its 5th anniversary and I had volunteered to spearhead the process of doing 5 collaborative beers with local breweries. Plus, I had that Protest the Hero concert that I made a beer for (They also got in contact with me, they liked the beer a lot!), and I also had a tattoo appointment (that didn’t pan out), plus, ya know, my 40-45 hours a week at my job to do as well.

Time was not on my side.

Them Digits

Batch Size: 5.5 gallons

Mash Temp: 148 F for 60 min.

Boil Time: 60 min.

Batch Efficiency: 67%

Original Gravity: 1.045 // 11.2 P

Final Gravity: 1.003 // 0.8P

Estimated ABV: 5.5%

IBUs: 35

Color: 7.0 EBC // 3.6 SRM

Recipe

Malts

6# Pilsner Malt | 60%

2# Spelt | 20%

1# Rye | 10%

1# Red Wheat | 10%

Hops

2 oz. Saaz @ 60

2 oz. Hallertau Mittlefruh @ 10

Yeast

Wyeast 3711, fermented @ 78F

400 mL of Bootleg Biology Funk Weapon #3 starter, fermented @ 78F

Spices and Stuff

1 tab WhirlFloc @ 15 min.

2 oz. Elderflower @ 5 min.

Water Shit

4 mL 88% Lactic Acid

1 tsp CaCl

|BREW LOG|

Now, this actually starts slightly before the official brew day, as I built up a nice starter of the brett a few days before the brewday. I needed some brett for this batch, but also for one of the other batches that were on the sitrep for the day. So, using my handy-dandy Erlenmeyer flash, I made a solid 2L start of brett using my pouch of BB’s Funk Weapon #3 that I had picked up during their Spring seasonal release. Once again, one of the rare occasions that I got to see some active fermentation in my apartment.

I got down to my dad’s house earlier than usual for our brew days, with the anticipation of actually performing one of the rare hat trick brew days. Well, technically 2.5, but that’ll be further discussed in the next blogpost.

While the 3.5 gallons of strike water was heating up, I measured and milled the grist for the saison, which was nice and light (comparatively) to most other batches, clocking in only at 10# total. Once the water was ready, everything went into the Igloo cooler, as per usual. I may have assumed the grains were slightly warmer than they actually were, as we came in a little cooler than I had calculated for, but only by half a degree, so no dramatic action was necessary. This was going to be something that I was fine with fermenting out completely and I wasn’t going to give the brett sloppy seconds after the French saison yeast had already had its way with the beer – I was gonna co-pitch this batch.

After about 15 minutes into the mash, I pulled a small sample and set it aside to cool down for a pH check, which was also well in the realm of what’s expected and accepted, coming in at 5.34. After the hour long process was done, I collected the first runnings and batch sparged with 5 gallons of 168F water, making sure to agitate the bed well, then giving the grains a 15 minute rest to reset before doing some light vorlaufing to help compact lightly before collecting the second runnings, yielding about 7.5 gallons into the kettle.

The boil went about as unremarkably as a simple boil can. With the hops in two additions, the only real change up on the process was the elderflower addition. I had done a bit of research and, after reading how everyone else uses elderflowers, in brewing, I opted to add them in for the last 5 minutes of the boil and pull them out with the hops before cold crashing the wort. When they went into the boil at 5 minutes, though, immediately the basement filled up with a fragrance not unlike walking into a flower store. I was a little excited, since it was a sign that the beer was going hopefully be the same. Well, maybe not quite that potent, but that it’d be in the realm of what we wanted.

Post boil, I actually let the bag of hops and elderflowers sit on top of the hop spider and drizzle out as much of the flavorful goodness as I could while chilling. After about 15-20 minutes, the beer had reached 68F and was ready to be transferred to the carboy to ferment away. After racking over from the kettle, I hit the almost 6 gallons of wort with 60 seconds of pure oxygen using an aeration stone and pitched the proofed packet of 3711, as well as a splash (well, 400 mL, to be exact) of the brett starter. I santized my temp probe for my InkBird and wrapped an electric heat pad around the fermenter, set to 78F. This was solely because I know that the saison yeast, 3711 in particular, loves warmer temperatures. Ideally, I’d let it free rise, but it was also still moderately temperate weather for the time of year, so I figured cranking up the heat would be beneficial to the process. In hindsight… perhaps not so much.

The hydrometer showed the wort coming in at roughly 1.045, which was about where I had estimated the batch was going to end up, even with the slightly higher yield. But honestly, who’s gonna complain about a little extra beer? From there, the beer got to sit and ferment for about a week to ferment out.

After 4-5 days, I checked in to see how things were going. Airlock activity had slowed down, and a gravity reading showed that the beer was already down to about 1.004! The wondrous 3711 workhorse will never cease to deliver. I had my dad cut the heat pad and let the beer cool back down to ambient temp, figuring that the brett will chew the rest down and we made plans to bottle and have a week to condition before the official day of celebration.

At bottling, we collected a solid 5.5 gallons of beer, still sitting comfortably 1.004. The batch was primed with a simple syrup of 5.8 oz (.8 cups) of sugar, slightly lower than necessary for the 3.2 vol/CO2, to account for the last few points of sugar in the beer and not completely overcarb.

Overall, the batch looked great, but holy shit was it smelling funkalicious. Bootleg’s website listed Funk Weapon #3 as producing “mild musty funk and ripe tropical fruit”, but this was straight up barnyard and horse blanket, and a lot of it. I rolled with it, put the liquid in the bottles, and crossed my fingers that it was going to mellow out a good deal with bottle conditioning. All that was left was to wait until it was ready to drink.

|TASTING NOTES|

Initially, I had popped a bottle open after about a week to see where the carbonation was sitting and I was… less than impressed. The beer was carbonated, but was just a brett monster with a hit of St. Germaine at the back of the palate. While it wasn’t bad, it definitely wasn’t great, and it most certainly wasn’t what I was going for.

Cue two weeks later and I need to write the blog post and take a picture.

The bottle opened with a determined hiss, but no issues or overcarbonating. Pouring into a 12 oz. glass, the beer has a translucent pale gold in color, but slightly darker than the typical straw gold of “traditional saisons” (whatever the hell that means, anymore). It laid up a nice finger and a half’s worth of fluffy, white head that lingered for a good few minutes before falling into the glass, laying in a nice ring on the surface of the beer.

The nose of the beer, compared to at bottling and from the initial tasting, is completely different. Sure, there’s still the Parliment funk tone, but it’s waaaaay dialed back and I’m getting some hints of the elderflower moving to the front, as well as some light Belgian-esque esters. Specifically, some real faint hints of bubblegum, clove, and strawberry.

The flavor is also improved with the extra time. It starts off up front with the funk, but you get the base saison earthiness and light graininess in the middle of the palate, followed by a slightly lingering barnyard pop wrapped up delicately in the elderflower. It’s got some bitterness to it, which is to be expected, as this beer is bone dry, but it’s not unpleasant. As the beer warms up and breathes a little bit, the brett takes less of a driver’s seat and the saison flavors start to come forward in the beer, with almost a twinkling hint of a slight mineral-y tone.

The mouthfeel is solid, though. Despite being bone dry, which does leave my mouth looking for water not unlike a super dry English cider, the carbonation stops shy of being overly prickly. It’s also not thin or watery, as can sometimes be the case with some super low finishing gravity beers. It’s… well, a decent saison.

Overall, it turned out better than I expected. With the super funky first impressions I had with it, I was bracing for the worst. Not that it was an incredibly expensive batch or anything, but it’d have been nice not to fuck up a batch that I made specifically for someone else, let alone for my dad’s retirement party. So far, only feedback was someone who really enjoyed it, so perhaps I’m just being hypercritical of myself (which is often the case).

If I was going to brew it again, I definitely would wait a few days before pitching the brett and would also not let it ferment as warm. I think that’s a lot of the reason why the funk was more prevalent in the beer as a whole. Not that it’s outside my threshold for enjoyment, but it’s milking those mold titties just too much in comparison to what it was supposed to be. That, and I guess it could be interesting to see just how the propolis cultures would have affected the batch as well.

Not a drain pour, not my favorite, but as long as other people are happy, who am I to complain? Also, the elderflower burps are weird, but not wholly unpleasant.