brew day : rye saison

saison is one of my favorite styles of beer and types of yeast to use. its also the only beer i can brew during the summer because it requires high fermentation temperatures (~75-90F). if you're not familiar with saisons, try saison dupont, it's the benchmark of this dry, refreshing, hoppy farmhouse ale.for this beer im going in a slightly different direction than the guidelines describe. a large portion of my grain bill is going to be rye to give some interesting complimentary flavors. ive had good luck using wyeast's french saison (3711), belgian saison (3724) and my favorite: farmhouse ale (3724). unfortunately the farmhouse ale strain isn't available this year so i am using french saison which was re-released as a seasonal (and soon to be year round from what i hear).

i made a rye saison last year, and while it was good, i didn't get a lot of rye character, which is common for probably %90 of beers with 'rye' in their names). soooo... this time i upped the percentage of rye and dropped the late kettle hops.

rye saison - 5.5g
5lb Pilsner
1lb Vienna
5lb Rye Malt
1oz EK Goldings (60min addition)
wyeast 3711 slurry, 2 minutes of pure o2

this is about %45 rye. this past winter i made a roggenbier that scored ~38-41 of 50 in two competitions and was made of about the same amount of rye. other experiments with rye utilized grists of lower rye percentages just didn't do it for me. the hefeweizen yeast didn't over power the rye character so i don't think the saison yeast will either.

sparge went fine until the last gallon, then it stuck. unstuck it and got boiling. overall a pretty uneventful brew day. i did however collect some last runnings, boiled them down for an hour and fed a few jars of various brettanomyces slurries.

at 1.048, i came up a few points short of target original gravity @ 1.051 but i'm not too concerned.