APA with Saison Yeast

On Labor Day, 09.06.10, I had the opportunity to brew a batch of beer, this time it was an American Pale Ale with Saison Yeast, should be interesting.

The brew day got started a little later than I had wanted, close to 12:30-1:00, but that’s OK because I didn’t really have anything else to do that day. The brew day went relatively well, I did run out of gas so there was a propane run to the store, but that’s no big deal. Also I am using some simple sugars in this recipe, so I pulled 2 Qts of wort and mixed it with 2 lbs of sugar. I reserved these to add towards the end of active fermentation, about day 5. This way the yeast will gobble up the more complex sugars from the barley first. These simple sugars will hopefully help lower the final gravity, which I have been having some issues of too high FGs, I think (hope) it’s my current base malt, Crisp from England. I used Saison yeast with this APA, kind of an American-Belgian fusion. At the 24hr point the wort hadn’t really kicked off into active fermentation, which was weird because it was second generation yeast, so as a safety measure I added a dry pack of US-05 American yeast to each, it’ll be interesting to see how this turns out.

I also had an opportunity to keg the Saison and Pepper Sage Saison, so these will be on tap soon too. I still have the Perle American Wheat and the Grilled Pineapple Wheat on tap, I think the Pineapple will kick first. Then I’ll be putting two new beers on tap, definitely the American Brown and probably one of the Saisons. Then there is still a keg of the CA Red left, the Chocolate Am Brown, the other Saison, and then two APAs. I believe I still have ingredients lined up for two more batches, another PA and an IPA, hophead say what!? Additionally, there has been some minor talk of Garrett and myself revisiting brewing a barleywine together, ala the 2006 Gnarleywine, so I’ll keep you all posted as that develops too.

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