I love this idea! I am going to be doing a Saison on the light end of the spectrum:
20 IBU
6 SRM
5 ABV
With the following spices:
0.50 oz Coriander Seed (Boil 5.0 mins)
0.50 oz Orange Peel, Bitter (Boil 5.0 mins)
0.50 oz Seeds of Paradise (Boil 5.0 mins)
0.25 oz Orange Peel, Sweet (Boil 5.0 mins)
I have 1 oz. of Hallertauer slated for late additions. Given all the above, how much Nelson Sauvin do you recommend for replacing the Hallertauer?
Since I’ve been asked for in via PM a couple times, here’s my general Saison recipe:
90% Pilsner
10% Munich
aim for 1.048-1.050
20 IBU Willamette @ 60’
1 oz Nelson Sauvin @ 20’
1 oz Nelson Sauvin @ 0’
WLP565 or WY3724, depending on my mood/inventory
I’ve also replaced the Nelson Sauvin with Amarillo to good effect. I may try a full on ‘clone’ of Tank 7 next spring because of it.
75 W is big enough for heating up a water bath containing 10 gals of beer 20 degrees above ambient temp IME with one data point, my first and only saison using DuPont yeast so far.
A good aquarium heater provides pretty control of fermentation temp, generally within 1 deg F. As you deviate further and further from ambient the water bath temp and the ferm temp can vary up to 2 deg F if the water bath is shallow relative to the fermenter.
So I contacted both Wyeast and Whitelabs today to ask about the two strains and whether they could confirm that both are the same. Neither would confirm nor deny that they were outright and stated that they were either not privy to the other’s origin or genetic testing has not been conducted but there was one interesting reply from John at Whitelabs:
Hi Gary,
I don’t know what strain the 3724 yeast is so I cannot say if it’s the same, but chances are that even if they started out as the same strain, there is bound to be some mutation/drift between the two companies over the years so they may be slightly different now. I have no information about the origin of the 3724 so I can’t even say if they started out the same or not, however every fermentation is unique and can produce different flavors. I’d say just stick to the one you like the best!
Cheers!
So it seems to make sense that there is the possibility that even if the two strains were at one point identical there is the possibility that they are now possibly slightly different.
I am so glad that this topic came up! I have been babysitting a WY3724 saison fermentation since the end of April. It stalled when the temperatures dropped below 70 °F in the utility room, picked up again once we had a heat wave at the end of May, and a week ago it was sitting at 0.005 above FG. It tasted great and I can’t wait to keg it. So next time I am definitely going to use the 90 °F water bath. Thanks for the tip.
If you have a digital temperature controller, you can switch it to heating mode and use it with a heating pad or desk lamp with a small (25w or so) light bulb in your fermentation chamber.
I recently picked up something very similar to fermwrap but it’s designed to heat reptile cages. Basically the same heating element but about half the cost of fermwrap. I flip my digital temp controller to heat and plug it in.
I have a small one for one gallon jugs and a large one for my bucket. I’ve used both to take a saison from around 75 at ambient to 90.
Resurrecting a long dead thread…
If one were to ferment a batch with WY3724 at 90F, would that yeast be re-pitchable? I’ve read how yeast that are stressed by high gravity or other factors are not the best candidates for re-pitching. But if this strain is happy at 90F then maybe it’s OK.
I never repitched when I did it. But I agree that ,since Wyeast says that it prefers 90F for fermentation, you should be able to repitch it when it was used at its optimum temp.
EDIT - You could make a pretty good argument that it’s better to repitch the 3724 used at the warm (proper) temp, rather than yeast pitched @ 67F that got stressed and stalled out (which happened to pretty much everybody that used it for a while).
Again, following up on an old thread, thanks for posting your recipe Amanda. My SO has grown to like saison very much, so I now have a great recipe to try out for her. I have a fern wrap and its about to get quite warm here, so I will be giving this a go soon. Thanks again for all the input. Great thread!
Thanks. I want to try a couple of saisons next and could easily arrange the schedule for repitching. I’m going to first try the “lighter version” above by AmandaK and yso191, which should be ready by Summer. After that I want to try a brett saison (http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f71/saison-brett-255734/) which will have to sit quite a bit longer. This will be my first foray into something other than standard APA/IPA style, but fear is slowly giving way to confidence, and it will be fun.
I pitched wlp 570 into 12 gallons of wort once it had cooled to 96F. The fermenter was an Igloo ice-cube cooler and I just closed the lid and let her rip. Beer was just fine without any off flavors, fusels or aggressive phenolicky character. Good to know about the 3724 strain as I’ve experienced “the Stall” several times with it. I have no psychological problem with pitching yeast at 90F.
On May 10, I brewed a saison basically taking Amanda’s base recipe and adding .5 oz of fresh cracked black pepper and 1 oz of fresh tangerine peel to the last 5 minutes of the boil. I bottled it two weeks ago, and am enjoying the first bottle now. My wife and I love it.
This has been an adventure and an education, though, on several respects. My OG was 1.051, but the 3724 cranked away for 6 full weeks at 90F. I almost ran out of nerve, and had to get ahold of myself to leave it at 90 the whole time. I kept my hands out of it until the airlock went silent, and it bottomed out at 1.080.
One interesting thing (to me, anyway) is that neither of us taste the pepper at all. We might taste the orange, but overall we pick up more of a bright, lemony taste than orange. When this first started to ferment, I could smell the black pepper through the airlock. It faded over time, though, and I get no sign of it now. The Nelson Sauvignon white wine taste is the most prevalent, though very much in balance. I would be interested in strategies to bring a bit of the black pepper into the finished beer.
Another interesting thing is that when I tasted it at bottling two weeks ago, I could taste the typical Belgian banana and bubble gum esters. Today there is no bubble gum and just a whiff of banana. I can’t believe the difference two weeks made.
I also didn’t know whether it would carbonate satisfactorily given that the yeast clearly love 90F. I primed it for 3.5 volumes (not willing to risk higher in my plain brown bombers) and left it at about 70F for two weeks it worked just fine.
Could there be a better hobby?
Thanks dcb for this info. I also made this beer and it’s been fermenting at 90 for one week. I was wondering about conditioning temps, now I know
I recently made a Saison and added a tincture of black pepper, cardamom, and grains of paradise soaked in vodka. I added this to taste art kegging so I could control the amount. It came out great.
Could you post details of your tincture, speaking to someone who’s never done it? How much of each spice, soaked in how much vodka, and for how long? And about how much of this did you end up adding to your beer? I get the generalities of the process but don’t understand where to start in terms of quantities.
I cracked 1 gram of grains of paradise, 1 gram of cardamom, and 2 grams of black pepper and soaked them in about 4 ounces of vodka. I let them sit in there for a few days, but based on the aroma, I think a few hours would have been sufficient. I then dosed a few measured tasters of the cold, uncarbonated beer with different measured amounts of the tincture. I don’t remember the details on that, but it was something like a couple of ml of tincture to a couple of ounces of beer. When I decided which one I liked best it turned out that I would need to add the entire 4 ounces of vodka to the batch (and maybe a little more if I had had it) to reach that level of flavor in the 5 gallon volume of beer, so I just put it all in and called it good. I strained it through some cheescloth covering a straining and it kept the little bits of spices out of the keg.
The flavor is noticeable but not overpowering. I did something similar with fresh orange peel and coriander. It is a nice way to split a batch of saison.
Thanks-- this is plenty to get me going. I’m thinking I’ll make a bit if this and try siring the finished beer.
So my 3724 seems to have stalled despite pitching and keeping at 90. OG of 1.051, and 12 days in was only down to 1.026. I have bucket ferm wrapped with Johnson A419(?) set at 90. Any thoughts, should I have had it set a little lower to account for fermentation heating it up? What’s my next step now? Rack to a secondary with 05/001/1056? I did read that first pitch if this is usually difficult, but can’t see saving for re-pitch if I finish with another yeast unless I secondary.
Just let it ride. It will get there.
