|BACKGROUND|

Sangria is probably the most enjoyable way to stave off scurvy. Traditionally considered a Spanish-originating beverage, a more modern interpretation of sangria blanca (white sangria) has become popular as well, opting for some fruit substitutions and white wine instead of the typical red. The combination of wine and fruit, plus often times some extra sugar and brandy, helps establish it as a common summertime beverage.

Unfortunately, since wine grapes are more of a fall crop, brewing anything from scratch with grapes ends up being more of an autumn type deal, unless you want to pony up the money for wine must that’s gonna come out of a kit you can buy year round.

On another spectrum of Spanish influence is the religion of Santeria, which is most certainly more than just what Bradley Knowles sings about in one of the more popular Sublime songs. Santeria itself is a fusion of Catholicism and Afro-Caribbean customs, much like this beer is a hybrid of saison and wine. Rich in lore and culture from the Yoruba tribes, Santeria hails typically from the islands that were typically under the rule of the Spanish Empire, similar to Voodoo.

Now, I admit, I wasn’t particularly hinging too much on the influence of Santeria in making this. Predominately, I was looking for a particularly Spanish sounding name for a sangria-beer hybrid (further known as the “sangriaveza”), and I was intrigued by the concept of the orixá. In Santeria, the orixá are the human form of the spirits in traditional Yoruba lore. They’re are meant to guide creation and particularly humanity on how to live and succeed on Earth, which I found particularly uplifting and, well, somewhat inspiring and apropos for the beer itself.

But enough about religion. Back to talking about beer.

Last year, I realized that a local produce supplier had access to fresh wine grapes and I was more than happy to finally make a beer I had conceptualized after the season for grapes had passed. While Grimace was good, it wasn’t quite what I had envisioned for a “wine-beer” hybrid, at least definitely not near to what breweries like Dogfish have pushed out over the years.

This year, I opted to make something much more grape forward. Instead of making my own must and having to go through the whole process of juicing, straining, and processing my own grapes, I just ponied up like $20 extra and got a whole 5.3 gallon bucket of must. I was pretty confident that would be enough for whatever I could think up and whatever was leftover could be made into wine, which is the final foray of homebrewing that I hadn’t officially tackled yet. Well, unless you want to consider using bread yeast and grape juice at summer camp to make prison hooch when I was like 15.

Isolating the ingredients of sangria was easy enough. You get your wine, you get your citrus, you add some sugar and a little booze. Mix it together and, voila!, you’ve got a pitcher of sangria. I had the wine figured out, the sugar and citrus was easy too, but getting the booze into the mix was truly the wildcard of this batch.

Without committing the faux pas of using distiller’s yeast and ruining a perfectly good batch of beer, I borrowed a trick from one of my favorite breweries – Jester King. Well, trick might be a strong word for what happened, but it’s definitely an influence. Through the help of a frequent trade partner of mine in the Austin area (what up Rene!), I managed to get most of the initial run from JK’s SPON line in 2016 – including the cross-contaminated SPON Flor, which I think was my favorite out of the whole series. In a nutshell, some of the barrels they were using for SPON got “infected” by the sherry flor in other barrels that JK was using to age beer, meaning that the flor had migrated across their storage area and gotten into the SPON. It ended up giving this really nice depth to the batch, despite it being an accident, and I knew what I could do.

Turns out, getting sherry flor is not only hard, but there’s also minimal information about using it, particularly in beer. In my query, I found two resources to help me on the journey: the first being Ryan Brews, another homebrewing blog, and reddit user yeastieboyz3711, who had done some detailed posting about using sherry flor in mead making. With the little amount of guidance I could find, I managed to wrangle two different strains of sherry flor – the Vierkas flor and one from Germany, a sherry flor pitch from Arauner Kitzinger. Dilligence pays off.

And so, another round of mad scientist type behavior ensued.

Them Digits

Batch Size: 6 gallons

Mash Temp: 152 F for 60 min.

Boil Time: 60 min.

Batch Efficiency: 72% (from the grains)

Original Gravity: 1.064 // 15.7 P

Final Gravity: 1.012 // 3.1 P

Estimated ABV: 8.8% (from FG + 2% pre-ferm in the must)

IBUs: 52 IBU

Color: 6.0 SRM // 11.8 EBC

Recipe

Malts

4# Pilsner Malt| 50%

1# Rye | 13%

1# Spelt | 13%

1# Flaked Oats | 13%

14 oz. Piloncillo Sugar | 11%

Hops

1 oz. Hallertau Blanc (7.9% AA) @ 45 min. | 28 IBU

2 oz. Nelson Sauvin (11.9% AA) @ 5 | 18 IBU

1 oz. Hallertau Blanc (7.9% AA) @ 5 | 6 IBU

Yeast

1x packet of Vierkas Sherry Flor

1x vial of Arauner Kitzinger Sherry Flor

1x pack of Wyeast 3711 (French Saison)

Spices and Stuff

3 gal. Chenin Blanc Wine Must (OG: 1.072)

2x Oranges, dehydrated in oven @ 200F

2x Lemons, dehydrated in oven @ 200F

2x Limes, dehydrated in oven @ 200F

2x Pink Lady Apples, dehydrated in oven @ 200F

Water Shit

1 mL 88% Lactic Acid

1 tsp CaCl

|BREW LOG|

Since the relatively unknown variable of the sherry flor was pretty crucial to the beer, I was sure that I wanted to make a healthy starter with both packs of the yeast. I mean, I needed one, but I got two, so why not just pitch ’em both and see what happens? Using 1 L of water and .3# of Pilsner DME, I made a starter and pitched both packages of the flor into it. True to form, as Ryan had noted, I saw little to no activity for the first 24-48 hour, to which I then had a light krausen going with some mild airlock activity, meaning we were in business.

Once brewday actually arrived, the first step was actually to get everything I needed ready for the batch. Most crucially, this meant I needed to dehydrate a lot of fruit for this batch. Not only did I not have access to a proper dehydrator, meaning that I was going to have to do this in the oven, dehydration in general is not exactly a speedy process.

Following directions I found online, I organized my thinly sliced fruits on baking sheets and put them in the oven for, I think, a total of 4 hours, going through the whole brew day. However, the juice was worth the squeeze as I ended up with some perfectly dehydrated (and sanitized!) fruits of my labor. I’m sure to some sangria purists, the combination of citrus and apple seems odd, but I was basing this batch off white sangria, which usually uses apples, peaches, and blueberries in lieu of citrus like regular red sangria. I felt that meeting somewhere in the middle of the road was not only beneficial to the flavors I wanted, but I was also super leery about using blueberries, as I didn’t really want any sort of coloration from them. Settling on a mix of lemons, limes, oranges, and apples, into the oven they went until they were sufficiently dried out.

Fresh Dehydrated

The only real hiccup in this whole thing was really the wine must. I had personally picked up my bucket ‘o must from the distributor a day or two in advance and during transport to the walk-in cooler at work, the must was constantly hissing, building up pressure, and spitting liquid like an angry cat. To me, this was a bit of a red flag that there was definitely some fermentation going on inside, but it was generally calm if I kept it chilled.

The beer portion of the sangriaveza was a 3 gallon saison. While it took the same amount of time that brewing a regular amount, the idea was then to blend the must with the wort to end up with the final product. Admittedly, I’m not used to working in such small batches, so it felt weird to measure out only 2.5 gallons of water for mashing and adding in only a mL of lactic acid and a tsp of CaCl for adjusting (still blind). Once everything was heated up to temp, I mashed in the grist, landing comfortably at 152F, hoping to have some light residual sweetness for the batch, pending on how the yeasts behaved.

After 60 minutes, it was the sparge like usual, using 3.5 gallons of water to batch sparge with. At this point, I took a gravity reading for pre-boil, showing that I was actually slightly high by comparison, which was perfectly okay by me. Meanwhile, I went upstairs and crushed the piloncillo/panela sugar with a rolling pin. Turns out those bricks were harder than I thought. The sugar itself was almost this middle ground between turbinado and molasses (so, I guess like brown sugar?), having this nice figgy, caramel sweetness to it with some dark fruit tones. Once the beer was at a boil, I dropped in the whole brick’s worth.

From there, it was just a matter of adding in the hop additions. With three dosings, there wasn’t particularly much to do aside from add in the whirlfloc tablet. I chose the Hallertau Blanc and the Neslon Sauvin particularly for their notable white wine flavors, which I thought would really enhance the wine side of the batch.

Upon opening the must bucket to start mixing, my suspicions were confirmed about the wild fermentation of the must – there was definitely a slight tang and a hint of carbonation. This was only further confirmed by the fact that the producer clearly states on their site and the bucket that the SG of their musts are 21 balling/brix to start with, however I had measured it at only 18 brix, meaning there was already about 2% alcohol in solution already. I ended up contacting the company about it and they pretty much told me “that sucks”, so I’ll be a bit more apprehensive about it next year. On the other hand, I took this as a bit of a Choose Your Own Adventure – do I add the must to the kettle and make sure I pasteurize anything in it or mix it live and see what happens? I opted for the latter. Gotta seize the carp.

After the cutting the heat and chilling the wort down to ~65F, I racked 3 gallons of wort into my brewing bucket. Now, I haven’t typically used this in a while, but I was also still using the Fermonster carboys I typically use for the previous two batches of beer, leaving my with only some 6 gallon glass carboys or a 7 gallon brew bucket. Brew bucket it was, with the bonus added feature of having a solid 6 gallon marker on the side to indicate that my proportions were correct.

Into the fermenter went 3 gallons of wort and 3 gallons of must, with the residual 2ish gallons of must going into 1 gal. carboys to be fermented as just straight wine. It’s also worth noting that the fruit finally made their appearance in the form of going into a sanitized hop bag with marbles, fresh off the cookie tray and right into the fermenter, racking the wort on top of them for maximum contact during fermentation. All that was left was to pitch the big ol’ starter, stick in the blow-off tube, and let everything chill. Taking a gravity reading after making sure everything was well blended together, I got an SG of 1.064 (a nice middle ground between the 1.072 of the must and the 1.058 of the wort).

CB Must gravity Saison gravity Mix it all together gravity

After a week and a half of fermenting with just the sherry flor, I took a quick gravity sample to see where the beer was at and it was hovering around 1.014 (1.016, adjusted), so I decided to pitch a packet of saison yeast to help finish out the fermentation and get it as dry and saison-like as possible. I also felt that I had enough flavor from the fruit, which was also floating on top of the beer, despite a healthy amount of marbles as an attempt to weigh it down, so I sanitized my hands and grabbed the bag out, allowing fermentation to resume quietly for another week or two.

At that point, it was time for bottling. Upon bringing the bucket upstairs, the first thing I noticed was that there were the remnants of what looked to be a pellicle from Brett. Knowing that it was probably from whatever was in the must, it made sense, but I was admittedly a little surprised as I’ve never really gotten a proper pellicle before, seeing that most of my work with Brett fermentations is typically as the primary fermenter rather than secondary. I also knew it wasn’t going to be the sherry flor since that typically doesn’t rear its head until about 14% alcohol. There was definitely some funky aroma coming out of it, but not a super crazy amount of it.

Knowing that I had a definite amount of beer, I made a simple syrup for priming using a cup of sugar (~ 7.3 oz.) for the 6 gallon batch. Racking over into the bottling bucket, I indeed got the full amount out of the carboy.

Taking a quick gravity reading, the beer clocked in at 1.010 (1.012, adjusted), meaning that the saison yeast didn’t seem to actually do too much. I figured, if anything, it’d at least ensure a proper carbonation for the batch. Taking into consideration that initial 2% alcohol from the initial spontaneous fermentation of the must (which would technically have been blended out to 1% in the 50/50 blend), the beer ended up around 8.1%. Into the bottles it went. Unfortunately, I hadn’t managed to get the screw tops for the wine bottles that I had gotten from a local vinyard, so I was unable to bottle some of the beer in the 750 mL bottles like I had planned, but a few 22 oz. bombers helped offset the extra gallon of beer compared to the typical 5-5.5 gallon batch I usually shoot for.

And so began the bottle conditioning.

|TASTING NOTES|

The beer pours a nice, bright straw color with a decent pale white head that fades quickly and doesn’t really linger. I chalk this up to having a strongly diminished protein content from being blended out with the must, seeing how sparkling wines and ciders don’t typically have the greatest of head retention. But hey, at least it looks really nice. It cleared up super well.

Initially off the nose, the Brett is very prevalent, throwing a light tartness and a bit of that barnyard funk to it. Beyond that is a vinous, grape quality, which is also to be expected. There’s definitely a little bit of saison buried deep in there, but it’s pretty overwhelmed.

As far as the taste goes, I had tried it at two different points: once at homebrew club about a week and a half after bottling and the day before posting this article. Initially, at the hombrew club tasting, the beer was a bit closer to what I had initially planned. It was like a sangriaveza mullet – saison in the front, wine in the back, with just a dash of citrus and hops. Pretty nicely balanced, and a hint of the funk starting to rear its head. I figured that, given some time, it could actually mellow out into a fun beer. Given another month, the beer is completely different. Despite even being kept cold the whole time, the brett has gone pretty apeshit as far as throwing flavors out. The saison is definitely there, but instead of being a fun, pleasant, Thiriez saison, it’s a super barnyard-y, funk fest like Boulevard’s Saison Brett with a few years on it. The white wine ended up also getting slightly amplifed as well, with the fruit getting decidedly more muted. It’s almost like if you took a shot of De Proef’s Surly Bird or an aged bottle of Orval and dropped it into a glass of chardonnay. It drives into the slightly plastic-y phenolic zone as well, but that does clean up with a little bit of breathing and warmth, making me think it might be a little bit of Octyl butyrate. I don’t hate the taste, but it’s a bit outside of my typical comfort zone for what I prefer for a funky saison.

The mouthfeel is actually great, though. Despite not having much in the way of head retention, the beer itself is spritzy, light, and pretty dry. It definitely isn’t overly thin, but it’s definitely on the light side. If it were super off the charts bretty, this would be a really great saison.

One of the regulars at my bars actually told me this is the best beer that I’ve ever given him because he fucks with the barnyard heavy. Personally, I think the roll of the dice on not pasteurizing the must was a step in the wrong direction. Not that I particularly regret it, because I think the beer has some potential to actually get even better. For this, I think I really need to play the long game and age the bottles further to see if the Brett will clean itself up. If that happens, I think this could end up being a stellar ass beer. Until then… I at least know someone who’ll gladly take it off my hands, if need be.

|BONUS SECTION|

Now, I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about the wine portion a little bit, since I did get the extra 2 gallons worth of must fermented out.

Turns out, even without blending or aging it on oak, Chenin Blanc grape must makes a damn fine white wine.

Using the other ~2 gal. of must left over after blending, the ones I threw into the 1 gal. carboys, I just added in a 1/2 packet of Red Star’s Côte des Blancs in each jug. That’s it. That’s literally all I did to make wine. It’s just as easy as making cider.

Now, the funny thing is that Red Star describes the wine yeast as being a “slow fermenter”, as well as saying “This strain will not ferment to a dryness at the low end of the range, leaving residual sugar resulting in a sweeter wine”. This is not my case. Now, I might attribute a little bit of that to the fact that the same strain of whatever Brett that went ramapant in the sangriaveza would absolutely have been present in the must. But the wine fermented out to straight up .999, which I would decidedly not consider having residual sugars, haha.

At the same point, I’m also not too mad. I can get down with a nice Riesling every once in a while, but that’s my line in the sand for sweeter white. I’d be more inclined to just get a bottle of Welch’s white grape than drink a Moscato. This is definitely a dry white, but it doesn’t seem to be overly dry. By that I mean, since it doesn’t have any of the oaky tanins from a barrel, it doesn’t completely dry out the mouth. It definitely has the fruitiness that the yeast strain is known for, as well as a nice acidity and a medium body. For my first official foray into being a vintner and not a brewer, I’m right chuffed.

Ending up with 9.5 750 mL bottles from the two carboys, by the time I got around to bottling the wine, I had gotten my fancy NovaTwist caps (which are awesome, just sadly not available in the US), meaning that we were a go on bottling the wine.

Adding in the 2% alcohol from the spontaneous fermentation, the wine itself clocks in comfortably at 11.6% abv, which is about correct per the style. It’s still got a little bit of haze in suspension, despite adding in some BioFine before bottling (which is mostly due to my laziness about buying/using bentonite), but someone who I talked to about wine making said that it’d definitely settle out over time.

For a first stab at it, it’s really good. I feel like it’s definitely gonna be a fun side project going forward from here.