Saison Brew Day

I'm falling behind on blogging, but a couple weeks ago now (March 28th), we brewed our lightest-colored beer ever - a saison! We were looking for some variety from all the dark beers we've brewed, plus with the weather getting better we wanted a nice lighter flavored refreshing beer. There aren't a ton of great Spring seasonal beer styles, but Amy and I both love saisons and found a good recipe online.

This was our second attempt at using a yeast starter. It was much smaller this time, despite the same batch size, because the saison is so much lower gravity than the breakfast stout. We used Fermcap this time and there was no foaming over while boiling the starter!

The biggest problem with the brew day this time was the mash temperature. We used the auto-calculated strike temperature in BeerSmith of 160F, but ended up with the initial mash temperature of about 157F instead of down around 149F. I had to mix in some ice to the mash to get it down to temperature. The biggest concern with the temperature being too high is that it would result in a lower-attenuating wort. The recipe calls for a starting gravity of 1.040 and a final gravity of 1.008 for an ABV of about 5.5%. The low final gravity is from a highly attenuating wort. If the mash is too hot then the wort won't get to as low of a final gravity, resulting in a lower-alcohol (and potentially sweeter?) beer. Our starting gravity ended up at 1.036 instead of 1.040 too, so that will also contribute to a possibly lower alcohol. We'll have to wait and see what gravity we reach after fermentation to see how much of a problem the temperature was.

After the brew day, I spent some time adjusting the numbers in BeerSmith to hopefully calibrate it better to what we're seeing in reality. I changed the grain absorption rate slightly to match the water we're losing during the mash so that we're better at hitting our pre-boil wort volume. I also changed our brewhouse efficiency so that we should get closer to our intended starting gravity. The third thing I changed was the mash tun temperature, which was listed as 71F originally. Since we're doing BIAB, the "strike" water is actually in the pot getting warm along with the pot itself, so it's not getting poured into a mash tun and losing temperature from the cool mash tun itself. By making BeerSmith think the mash tun temperature was actually around 155F, it looks like it'll give us a more accurate strike temperature, so that after we pour the room-temperature grains in we're at the target mash temperature. I'm looking forward to brewing our next beer and seeing if the number adjustments help us get closer to the targets in the recipe.

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