Tag: Citra

I took a few months off from brewing this summer to travel, and work my way through some of my homebrew back log. With any layoff it takes a bit of motivation to get started again. It’s not that I don’t want to brew, it’s just that life is busy these days. I figured my first batch back I should make something I’m comfortable with, so I made my third batch of bitter american clone. If you recall this was the first all grain beer I brewed and I brewed a second larger batch focusing on local ingredients for my club to bring to NHC back in 2013. I’m familiar with the recipe, and have mixed results with it, I have not brewed it enough to have it mastered. The original recipe came from a brew your own article on canned craft beers. When planning to brew this, I focused on using the ingredients i had on hand. I’ve got an over stocked freezer full of hops, and a cellar full of grain just waiting for me to brew. Somewhere along the way, I neglected to reference the original recipe and just used pearl malt instead of the recipe’s golden promise which I do have on hand. These two malts are similar, but from reading comparisons, http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f12/2-row-vs-maris-otter-vs-golden-promise-vs-halcyon-vs-pearl-vs-optic-439642/ they aren’t the same. I’m wondering how big of a mistake this is. The other shift in recipe was to swap out the warrior bittering hops for citra. I’m not sure why I haven’t bought more Warrior, I liked it in the alpha king clone, but more high alpha hops won’t be added to my freezer any time soon.

These are some long, long, long over due tasting notes of my first saison. As I mentioned in the brewing notes, I feel close to this style due to my heritage, having a small farm, and the open interpretation that is allowed with this style. Saisons are an interesting style. The saison style originates in the farm houses of Wallonia and was made with fresh hops, grains, a variety of adjuncts, and spices varying from farm to farm. It was the beer served to the farm hands and was likely a lower abv and had mixed fermentation. From my understanding the style has only a few strong requirements, high carbonation, very low FG, moderate yeast esters and phenols. The style is way more wide open than the BJCB guidelines suggest. I’ve enjoyed examples hopper, much lighter and darker, as well as much lower and higher ABV. Not to mention versions with brett or other mixed fermentations. Some of the best ones I’ve had have been brett fermented.

Brewing is a involved endeavor. To plan and pack all of my…

This is another ‘collaboration’ beer, a friend from BFD brews a fair number of saisons, belgians, and sours. So we’ve emailed back and forth quite a bit discussing brewing a saison together, with the idea of splitting a 10g batch. I just haven been able to to sneak away for that large of a chunk of time. Instead of splitting a batch, I decide to brew solo, and will bring the results to a club meeting. Seem familiar?
I had most of the ingredients for the recipe, but as usual I was missing a few. I had to swap out candy sugar for some wild flower honey. The major diversion from the recipe is the aroma hop, the recipe called for dose of the noble hop Saaz. I swapped it out for bullion which is anything but noble. On an amusing note (to me at least) this is the first recipe I’ve come across with both Saaz and Citra, which are names of our two cats. Since I was missing Saaz, I decided to name it missing cat saison. So maybe next time I’ll stick to the recipe and call it two cat saison.