This week we tried our saison for the first time and we're thrilled with the results. The beer has a nice citrusy lemony flavor and a great flavor contribution from the French saison yeast. I think as Spring rolls into Summer this will be an excellent warm-weather beer - just like a saison should be!
While this is technically our second beer where we used a yeast starter, it's the first one we're tasting as the breakfast stout still has a few days to go before it's ready. Honestly it's a bit hard to say what the flavor improvement might have been compared to pitching a yeast pack directly into the beer. With a beer this light too, the difference in yeast count between the smack pack and the starter probably wasn't that high anyway. Still, it would be a lot of fun to do a comparison test at some point where we split a batch of wort and use a starter in one and a smack pack in the other.
The other new thing we did with this beer was use fermentation control all the way from the start of fermentation. There is a ton of (mis)information on the internet in the home brew community about the right way to control fermentation temperature. The core of the confusion comes down to the "ideal temperature" for the yeast mixed with the fact that a wort at the height of fermentation can be as much as 10F degrees higher than ambient. So if my saison yeast likes 71F, do I set my temperature-controlled room at 71F ambient and let the beer naturally rise above that during early fermentation? Or do I try to control the ambient temperature in a way that keeps the wort temperature closer to 71F?
I talked with the owner of my local home brew store about this, and he said to just set the ambient at the desired temperature for the yeast (71F in this case) and then don't worry about the wort temperature. The issue with trying to use something like a thermowell (putting the temp controller sensor inside the wort itself) to control the ambient temperature is that by the time you've heated the air around the wort enough to get 3+ gallons of wort up to temperature, the air temperature can be well over 100F. Then just because you're turning the heat source off, you still have super-hot air that ends up causing the wort to overshoot the desired temperature.
If we were using a heat source such as an electric wrap around the fermentation vessel, where it turns off all heat completely as soon as the wort reaches temperature, then it might be a different answer. With our setup though, we went with just setting the temperature at 71F and left it there for the whole fermentation, even if it meant that the actual wort temperature was rising above that during some of fermentation.
Again it's hard to really say specifically what this particular beer would have tasted like without temperature control, or with a cooler ambient temperature during the height of fermentation (more experiments ideas!), but the fact that we used temperature control and the yeast starter this time with tasty results is a great sign that, at the very least, we don't seem to be screwing anything up. Hopefully I don't eat those words in a day or two when we try the breakfast stout. :-)
One thing I noted in the brew day post for this beer was that we came in 4 points shy of our 1.050 original gravity target. Conveniently our final gravity also ended up 4 points low of the recipe (finishing at 1.004) so we still ended up right at our target of 5.5% ABV. Apparently the issues we had with the strike temperature didn't hurt us too much.
As for the name - it's mostly just a reference to the French saison yeast we used, but also sort of borrows from a funny little interaction with a waiter in Paris when we were there for our honeymoon. Amy was trying to order another of the same beer (Une autre de la meme chose) but butchered the phrase. The waiter just smiled at us and happily brought her beer. Just one of many cases of the Parisians being so much nicer than their reputation. :-)
[ Saison Brew Day ] <---
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