Farmhouse Ales vs Saisons

Confused by this. Don't really understand how this is any different than, say, Britain's most popular comfort food

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-s...-tikka-masala-on-the-back-burner-9760080.html

Are you willing to elaborate, or pehaps start your own thread about naming, etc.?

 

Are you saying that "comfort food" is non specific ?
Some beers such as IPA and mild go back a long way and don't bear much relationship apart from the name with the beers which gave them their names. Same with Stouts and Porters which originally had no roasted grains.
But Saison never was a style , just a name collectively given to the rustic beers brewed for drinking in vast amounts during harvesting.They could have been anything, basically using what the farmers had to hand. The only common factor would be very low strength.So a strong beer claiming to be a saison is an impostor.

 

Edit: Please note, the following refers to commercially brewed saisons. I think what Belgian farmers might have been brewing prior to WWI for their seasonal farm workers is a separate, and more complicated, issue.

I'm afraid I don't understand why there should be anything elusive about marquis observation. Please correct me if you have contrary information but my understanding is that Saisons were revived from near extinction in Belgium in the 1970s and 1980s. I would argue that these Belgian examples share some fairly strong stylistic similarities. Further, several of these Belgian breweries claim to have based their recipes on historical recipes dating to the early 20th C and earlier although most will acknowledge that the modern Belgian Saisons are higher gravity than those brewed in the 19th and early 20th C. I don't recall any North American examples of Saisons until the 21st C so they were at least a quarter century late to the dance. The Americans have since promulgated the notion that the style is so loose that anything can be called a Saison. I don't buy it. It isn't that far removed from claiming that any tree can be called an Acer since there is so much variation among maples.

 

Where's the parallel between a Sunday roast and saison?

Related to the scrapple conversation a few days ago, I have been seeking out a proper Sunday roast in NYC since I moved here - yet to find one. The best in the city is my own!

 

I see it this way...
Farmhouse ales are beers brewed on a farm, and are seen as (at least) two more specific styles:
Saison
Bier de Garde

Saisons are what the landowner gave to the workers.
Bier de Garde is what the landowner kept for himself.

I could be making this up...

 

Thanks for the comments. Ultimately I think the question at issue is what does it take for there to be a new style and when can one say that what was historically not a style has become a style.

While I agree that historically, way back when, there was no consistency to what constituted a saison beer from place to place in a particular region in Belgium and so it wasn't really a style in the first place, I'm not at all clear why the brewers in the country in which such beers were brewed should not be allowed to look to that past and develop a style based on one or some of the historical recipes. Nor do I understand why, if there was no style in the first place, that the difference between low ABV beers which were not even part of a style and the ABV of a beer such as Saison Dupont should disqualify the brewers of that beer from using the word Saison for the name of a beer which was "inspired by" some of those low ABV beers.

And what I think was trying to say with the roast beef example is that it does not seem to me that because a particular food or meal can become associated with a particular combination of other foods and become an integral part of a national cusine does not seem to me to necessarily mean that other nations and food preparers outside that nation or the present era in that nation should not be able to use the same naming for roughly the same food/meal preparation and end result. Your great-grandfather most likely enjoyed a Sunday roast, but that roast would have had different preparation parameters and accompanements than the one you may have this week. Similarly a Sunday roast in Australia, or America will have some differences from the one you will enjoy next. Should we disqualify them from using the name Sunday roast?

 

Thanks for the observations. See my reply to Marquis. I have no reason to disagree with your description of history. But as I said in my reply to him if there was no style before and brewers in that country choose to create their own version of one (e.g., Saison Dupont as an example), it is not at all clear to me why a 6.5% ABV should prevent Dupont from calling their beer a Saison. Nor is it clear why that fact that the beer is inspired by a subset of beers commonly brewed once upon a time before there was a style should be disqualified from being given the name Saison by its brewers. As for American versions that's a different topic for a different time I think.

 

The parallel? I tried to address that in my reply to Marquis and so won't repeat that here.

Re your experience with a search for a proper Sunday roast, I'm on board with the idea that the best you could find is your own. I have the same experience with a proper pot of Chili or a loaf of Sourdough Bread!

 

The problem is that if you use the word "saison" to describe a particular sort of beer with no style provenance then what do you call an actual example of a rustic Belgian farmhouse beer? Look at the beers being passed off as Scotch Ale these days.Enough to make a Scotsman weep into his kilt.Brewers really ought to inform themselves better before labelling their products.

 

Are there actually any rustic Begian farmhouse beers any more? And if there are what would be wrong with the farmer simply calling it a Saison or Farmhouse beer? Especially since it is for their own consumption anyway and most likely never even crosses the radar. And since the Belgians started it all in the case of Saisons it seems to me we should honor their wishes.

For similar seeming case, if we look at Porters/Stouts they range in ABV from less than 5% to well up around 15-18%. There may be some adverbial modification of their name but the other names (porter/stout) endure.

Edit: And while I don't know labeling conventions outside the US all that well, here in the US every bottle of beer must be labled with information about either the physical location of the brewery or the primary business location of the brewer there seems to be little problem knowing in which conuntry a beer is brewed for most all cases.

 

From what I have been told, all sasions are farmhouse ales but not all farmhouse ales are sasions, it uses a particular yeast. Very similar to the distinction that comes with bourbon, all bourbon is whiskey but not all whiskey is bourbon. Cheers