This month, Kathy wanted to brew a saison, and I wanted to experiment with some secondary fermentation.
Thus, we decided to brew a pretty straight-forward saison base, complete the primary fermentation, and then split it four different ways: standard secondary fermentation, dry hopped in secondary, mixed with lemongrass and rose hips in secondary, and finally, with the dregs of an Allagash Tiarna pitched in secondary.
We just finished racking to secondary last night. The FG read 1.004, which was below our expectation. WLP655 has a pretty high attenuation (78-85%), but this is still surprising. Another beer we racked to secondary last night, a basic IPA, also read below 1.01 (it was 1.007), and we're using a cheap hydrometer, so perhaps it's just the equipment.
Here's the breakdown of the four versions:
- Base beer: The original saison with no additives. Our "control" version.
- Dry hopped: One gallon with 0.25oz Mosaic pellet hops added.
- Lemongrass and rose hips: Kathy chopped two stalks of lemongrass and boiled it along with 2oz of rose hips in a hop sock, then cooled everything and added it to the 5gal fermentor pictured above. We racked about 2.5gal of the saison onto this mix. Using the Ale Pail wasn't ideal - originally I wanted to use the 1gal fermentors for this version, as well - but we hadn't considered how difficult it might be to retrieve the hop sock full of lemongrass and rose hips from such a small bottle. In the future, we'll have a better system in place.
- Tiarna dregs: On a previous brew day, Ian, Kathy, and I drank a Tiarna (excellent beer, by the way) and decided to save the dregs. I fed the yeast with a small amount of simple syrup twice over the weeks that followed. The yeast remained viable even without refrigeration (the room in which the bottle sat was probably around 50F), but I'd almost certainly refrigerate the dregs next time. This is my first attempt at repitching dregs from a sour beer, so I'm curious to see what happens.
Recipe Specifics
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Batch Size (Gal): 5.75
Total Grain (Lbs): 13.5
OG: 1.053
SRM (estimated): 5
IBU (estimated): 26
Brewhouse Efficiency: 56%
Wort Boil Time: 90 Minutes
Grain
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81.5% - 11 lbs. Pale Malt (U.S. 2-Row)
7.4% - 1 lbs. Vienna Malt
7.4% - 1 lbs. White Wheat Malt
3.7% - 0.5 lbs. Caramel/Crystal 20L
Hops
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1 oz. Sorachi Ace (Pellet, 12% AA) @ 30 min.
Yeast
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White Labs WLP566 Belgian Saison II
Water Profile
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Profile: Carroll County, MD
Mash Schedule
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Sacch I - 60 min @ 152F
Notes
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Fly sparge, collected just over 9gal and ended up boiling about 8.5gal, estimating a 1.66gal/hour boil-off rate over a 90-minute boil (it was extremely cold, dry, and windy on brew day, and I was boiling with an outdoor burner).
This actually ended up being a low estimate, and I pitched the yeast @70F into about 5.75gal.
