Friday, January 23, 2015

Scrappy Hound House Saison #2

My first iteration of my quest for a house saison turned out pretty good.  It's a little more phenolic than I'd like, but it's drinkable, clean and pretty tasty.  I think that to get a beer that's closer to what I envision in my head, I need to split yeasts.  Wyeast 3711 is an absolute monster and will take the beer down to 1.000 no problem, but the flavor profile isn't exactly what I want.  I'm going to look into splitting yeasts, going with a more belgian yeast up front and finishing it with 3711.  Unfortunately, that won't be until batch #3.

In the mean time, I'm going to do another batch with 3711 and play around with salts.  I posted a brewing water summary and I'm going to push some of these ions to their upper thresholds.  I read so much about ranges of Calcium, Sodium, Sulfate, Bicarbonate that I want to see what happens when you go over the upper limit in these ranges.  I don't care if the beer doesn't turn out perfect, I'd rather see what I like and don't like about high ion concentrations in beer and then adjust accordingly.  Plus, at the end of the day I'll only be out 10 bottles if it's truly undrinkable (which I suspect it won't be).

My process will be as follows.  Brew up 3 gallons of saison wort.  I'm going to add some salts to hit my mash pH of 5.2-3 and establish a base line of:

Ca 80 | Mg 1 | Na 47 | Cl 55 | SO4 95 | HCO3 134

I'm then going to ferment the beer with Wyeast 3711 as normal.  Post fermentation, I'm going to split the batch three ways and dose each with a concentration (ppm) of either CaSO4, CaCl2 or NaHCO3 to obtain the following concentrations:

Adding CaSO4
Ca 197 | Mg 1 | Na 47 | Cl 55 | SO4 375 | HCO3 134

Adding NaHCO3
Ca 80 | Mg 1 | Na 162 | Cl 55 | SO4 95 | HCO3 441

Adding CaCl2
Ca 185 | Mg 1 | Na 47 | Cl 241 | SO4 95 | HCO3 134

I'm gong big instead of going home.  These elevated levels push conventional reported limits where the beer starts to taste a little off.  I'm ok with that and I think this will be valuable in the future.  What if I make the perfect beer by adding 440 ppm of bicarbonate!?  Won't know until I try.  Also, once these are bottled, I'm going to blend a little and create super beers with elevated levels of everything

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Scrappy Hound House Saison #2

3 gallons
75% efficiency
60 min boil

4 lb Belgian Pils (80%)
0.5 lb White Wheat (10%)
0.5 lb Vienna (10%)

0.5 oz Tettnang (60 min)
0.5 oz Tettnang (15 min)

Wyeast 3711 @ 62F ambient.  mash at 152F. 

OG 1.046 | FG 1.006 | ABV 5.3% | IBU 24


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