In my county there is a 10,000 year old pictograph they call “She Who Watches”. Its in a State Park and you can only see it if you take a tour. So one time I took the tour. The guide told this long story of how the tribal matriarch was walking along the river and she got in a wrestling match with some mystical spirit. She grabbed the spirit and threw it at the rock and it stuck there, forever banished to watch the river. The guide asked the group what we though. I said “looks like a racoon to me.” The look on the guides face was priceless, like the myth was the way it was and he had never though that it just might be a picture of something they artist may have seen commonly walking around the area. Maybe the simpler explanation is more likely to be true?
Point being, we like our stories. Imagine waiting two hours for your turn to hike out and see this artifact and when you finally get there the group asks the guide what it is and he just said “I dont know, maybe its a racoon.” We prefer to invest in a long winded ridiculous story instead.
So, using Mosher’s point of view, was the first german lager brewed by a monk in a cave high up in the alps? I doubt it. Were some early lagers brewed in some cave more conveniently located? Maybe
I’d like a link to that podcast, if anyone has it.
Especially the saison thing is intriguing, and ties in to the many many doubts I have regarding anything saisonesque which we consider etched in stone.
Way I see it, “seasonal farmhouse ale” is a much more apt description of saison, which (again entirely IMHO) should never have been considered as a style at all.
The beer world loves its stories. Perhaps in the future they will tell of how IPL was invented by folks from Illinois who needed to travel west with their light lagers and added extra hops as a preservative for the long journey across the plains on I-70 to Denver. Then some beer history expert can point out that the I in IPL doesn’t stand for Illinois, it stands for Indiana
The Iowa Pale Lager was actually an Iowa Common that kettel soured and then cooled in the snow, which is where the saying “dont eat the yellow snow” came from.
Summing things up and sprinkling some of my ideas in and around it all: what we think of as Saison is probably derived from Dupont’s interpretation of the idea that seasonal workers need to drink too. Is it a farmhouse ale? No, since Dupont is obviously not a farmhouse brewery. Is it a farmhouse-style ale, even if perhaps not a historic one? Hard to say but probably not, given the evidence.
So yes, everything we know about saison is wrong but at the same time, Randy confirms everything I consider to be definitive about saison: it was never a style as such, and apart from its utilitarian origins, there’s not a lot you can pin on it. For ease of reference, I consider saison to be “something that’ll make people treat it like a saison”, but I’ll call it farmhouse ale(°) unless I’m feeling fanciful.
°) farmhouse-style ale to be more correct, but who is ever truly correct about farmhouse ales anyway?
The parent strains from which all modern larger strains are derived were selected at 13C/55F, which is the year-round temperature below the frost line in many places around the globe. The area were ice was used before introduction of mechanical refrigeration was cold storage.
I kept looking for the “like” button on these posts! I enjoyed the podcast and all the discussion that followed. It reminded me why I have stayed with the hobby for seven years across two states, three job changes, elder-parent care, a doctoral program that has kinda harshed my brewing time, and so on. I find brewing fascinating and relaxing (in the way that hobbies that take us away from other parts of our life are relaxing, even during the frustrating moments) but I also really like homebrewers. Glad to be part of a community united under the umbrella, “We may not agree on other things, but we agree malted barley wants to become beer.”
From a little tour of a Bavarian lager cellar, 4 meters down in rock. Natural temp he said, year round. 3oC. Bräuerie Eck in Böbrach, Bavaria, at about 1900 ft elevation, near the Czech border.
