Flathouse Saison

One of the many advantages of spending 18 hours brewing is that you're bound to have some wort left over. I realized when I overstuffed my mash tun on my Heady Topper clone that I'd have some strong last runnings in my mash tun. Once I collected that, I figured I'd collect the final runnings from the rest of the beers on the triple brew day and make something with it at my apartment. I had a pitch of WLP Saison II sitting around as well as some grown up dregs from The Bruery's Saison Rue, so I figured I'd make a Flathouse Saison (as opposed to a farmhouse saison) in the apartment.

The home brewery.

To make it even more special, I used the ounce and a half of hops that I yielded from my summer hop crop. One ounce of mostly dried then frozen Chinook at 60 minutes and a half ounce of Cascade at 5 minutes.

Home grown hops!

I combined the six gallons of final runnings from all of the beers and ended up with a 1.032 OG. I boiled it down to four gallons and still only saw about 1.045 gravity. Seeing how I wanted to have six gallons of moderate strength saison, I needed to add some more fermentables. In went a 1lb pack of amber DME and a 3lb liquid munich malt can, both I had sitting around. That gave me a final gravity of 1.070 for about five gallons of beer - too high. After I transferred to carboys, I added a gallon of chloramine treated tap water to each of the fermenters. According to Beersmith, this yielded a 1.055 OG on both. In went the yeast and I watched the race start.

Back to basics. This ice bath worked surprisingly well, taking about 25 minutes to 65 degrees.

I'm excited to see how it turns out. The malt will be pretty wild: traces of Pilsner, English pale ale malt, American 2-row malt, and of course Munich. Comparing the yeasts will be the most fun though. The Saison Rue yeast was finished fermenting in three days, while the WLP Saison II yeast took six days.

Early in fermentation

High krausen. The Saison Rue is on the right and is significantly lighter.