This post is an account of my fourth fumbling attempt to get into homebrew – yielding a drinkable, dark, rich beer; albeit a slightly odd one. Otherwise this is a not-very-exciting log of the creation of Y-Brew 0x04 – Dark Elder Saison. It’s actually a bit messed up and when I next try a similar thing I’ll be doing it completely differently!
OK, only the 4th brew in – but went a bit “silly” for this one back in July. The nucleus for this is a can of Cooper’s “Stout” (yes, from the local Tesco-megahypermart I’m afraid) – but I mixed it up big time. Steeped grains, weird yeast, and an odd ingredient. I bought a vial of liquid White Labs Saison II yeast with this crazy thing in mind. The poor beasties were cultured up once in sugar for an elderflower fizz, then some of them split off this culture were then cultured up in dark DME and put in the fridge for a couple of weeks until 16:00 Saturday July 20th, when I started it culturing again in another 1.5l ~1040 batch of dark DME. By 16:00 the next day I had a thick layer of yeasty beasties ready to play…
The weekend before doing the brew Kat had harvested some elderflowers and made a tea, which has been sitting in the fridge for a week steeping. (I was away on my sudden, unexpected, EBBC trip.) The tea had a particularly “herbal tea”-ish flavour with a distinct but not really punchy elderflower note. There was about 800ml of this tea. A “secret ingredient”?
This was my first attempt to brew using some real malts and grains using a “steeped grain” method to get colour and flavour, with the fermentables coming from the kit-tin and some added dark DME to boost the ABV of the final beer. This is also the first time I’ve tried using a brew-calculator, specifically the Brewer’s Friend website – so the full “recipe” can be found here: Dark Elder Saison. With the recipe devised I used, for the first time, the services of The Malt Miller to buy my grains, next day delivery – no fussing about.
Brew Ingredients
For steeping the grains I brought 4 litres of water to 71°C and dumped in 200g chocolate malt (rich toasty flavours and dark colour), 200g roast barley (dry toasty flavours and dark colour), 200g flaked wheat (theoretically for head retention), and 150g caravienne malt (a little caramel richness). After 20 minutes this was at 61°C so I blasted it with a little heat to get to 67°C – not sure if there was any point to this really. TBH I’m not really sure about the wisdom of combining this set of added grains with the “kit” tin, I was just bored with kits but still had the tin lying around! It got another 25 minutes steeping and was then put through a chinois (fancy strainer) into my 10 litre stock pot. The grains were then rinsed with 2 litres of 70°C water, then an extra litre of cold tap water. This process – steeping – is just to obtain flavour and colour from the grain, it isn’t a proper brewing “mash” that yields fermentable sugars.
“Hopback”
The stock pot was topped up with water to 10 litres and 1.7KG of DME added along with 700g of dark muscovado sugar. As the wort heated a 1.7kg can of Cooper’s Stout was added – yes, too early and shouldn’t have boiled as it is a pre-hopped extract? Oh well. As soon as a rolling boil was reached 20g of whole-hop Simcoe (14.1%AA) was added. Then 25 minutes later 20g of Sorachi Ace (13.2%AA) was added. I like Sorachi Ace, the idea was that I think it would compliment the elderflower flavour. Five more minutes and “flame out”. The hot wort was poured through a “hopback” (chinois again) containing 37.5g of Sorachi Ace (to use up what I had left from the bag), the hops were additionally rinsed into the fermenter with 2 litres of cold tap water. All of this went into a 25l fermenter along with the 800ml of elderflower “tea” (hm, probably should have gone in at end of boil to “sterilise”).
Icy Bath
The fermenter was plunged into an icy cold bath and took about an hour to come down to 20°C, the OG was, amazingly, as-desired at 1074. The yeast culture (with excess liquid poured off) was pitched… cap and airlock fitted… and the beer was left to sit “blubbing” away…
… three months later, “blubbing” was still happening but at an incredibly infrequent rate. I’d never intended to leave the beer this long of course, but work and life just got in the way so there it sat for all this time. Finally I’d had time to gather and clean enough bottles to finish this bugger off. I siphoned the beer out of fermenter into another vessel that has a convenient tap and filling wand for bottling. I had 19 litres of beer at FG of 1014 – just over 7% – tasting pretty good too. Rich, quite banana-y alas, though I don’t mind that. The brew was primed with enough brown sugar to give about 2 vols of CO2, bottled, and then popped into the airing cupboard (about 22°C) for 4 weeks. Now… what do we have…
Dark Elder Saison
…verdict: not an easy-drinker. A 500ml bottle is a little hard going for me, but Kat and I can share and enjoy one. This is good, it is a sipping beer not a quaffing beer. The summer ferment peaked above 25°C and I guess this is where some strong banana-y esters have come from, these have cleared a little since bottling but are still distinctly present. A simple description for the beer would be: dark-bitter-chocolate-coated-overripe-banana. Not really what I was aiming for! And those elderflowers? No sign of them really, so the beer hasn’t come out true to name or intention. Next year I hope to revisit the recipe but trying for a cooler temperature fermentation. Definitely without the Cooper’s kit tin, and maybe by then I’ll be all-grain. As for the temperature, it is about time I tried making myself one of these “brew fridge” setups… if only I had space for it. As it stands I have a beer that we’ll be happy with over the winter. In fact it seems to be getting better with time. Or maybe it’s just “growing on me”. Next up… the saison yeast lives on! I rescued and “washed” it and knocked up another brew using something “different” from the back yard. Y-Brew 0x05 is on its way.
Colin joins the Dark Side