Saisons: A Need for a New Distinction?

Let me start off by saying, I am a huge fan of the saison style, it is easily one of my favorite beer styles. And one of the great strengths of the saison style is it's malleability as a style. However, I personally find the waters to be a bit muddy these days, and before you tell me that I'm an idiot, or that I'm wrong, let me explain to you why: In this, the season of renewed interest in the sour beer, a style like the saison (one that undoubtedly has some quite funky roots) has countless iterations in the market that feel more like wild ales than they do saisons. At this point I feel it necessary to pause for a minute to address an issue that many of you reading this have just summoned up in your minds in order to dismiss the point I'm moving towards, yes I know that the historic saison was not much of a style at all, the history, blah, blah, blah, but the times have changed, and while there are certainly (as mentioned before) many distinct iterations of the style out there to this day, saison means a certain (and slightly more specific) thing to a large portion of the craft consuming population. With this being said, might it be time to create a specific stylistic distinction between the brett leaning saisons (fantome beers, saison brett, crooked stave saisons, etc.) and those that are more traditional (in the contemporary sense) (hennepin, foret, tank 7, dupont, blackberry farm, etc.)? I say this as a consumer, seeking to be able to tell, by the bottle what I am purchasing beforehand, granted, I always look these things up generally anyway, but would it not be useful to know there was funk simply by the style listed on the label? Many of the saison/farmhouse ales do mention this in some form but there is hardly a standard. Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting any mandatory thing, just a way of further clarifying the nomenclature we use. Thoughts?

 

I agree with said addendum, the crooked stave level of sourness to me is much more than moderate sourness, on the point of removing certain, styles, I'm not necessarily against that so long as they are removed for the purpose of clarification or removing redundancy (ex. american imperial stouts vs. russian imperial stouts)

 

Like I said before, not about some kind of mandate, just a general effort at labeling clarification, and how we choose to classify things on BA and in writing

 

In regards to why not on a brett anything, I would say because the prevalence of brett and likewise organisms in saison far dwarfs its use in anything else save for wild ale and sour beer styles, it would be generally safe to say that few people have ever picked up a sour stout by accident assuming it was simply a stout, however, because of the interchangeable use of saison and the term farmhouse ale, one could easily make this mistake with countless saison/farmhouse ales on the market.

In regards to the blending question, the same thing could be said for most anything that has turned or succumbed to age as the ingredients dictate, so what the style really says is what the brewer generally intends you get out of it, and since very few beers on the market are intended to not be opened when they hit the shelves

(meaning that whether or not a beer can age is generally immaterial to the brewers general intent that you drink it when you buy it, if they intended you to wait, they would just hold onto it longer, no? there are very few beers that suggest you not drink them immediately after purchase, they may say you can age it, but few say you have to)

As far as the finer minutia of where to draw the line, it's certainly a good question and one I don't have the ultimate answer for, but I'd love to hear suggestions, (it's kinda why I wrote this post in the first place)

 

I'm not against removing styles, I think that the idea is to clarify the information presented to consumers, which could be done by removing some styles, and adding others when necessary, for example, the session IPA could easily be removed, but I would argue there is often an intense difference between the more heavily bretted/wild strains of saison and the others, so much so that, someone who did not get what they expected would be inevitably either disappointed or confused as one tastes very little like the other on a basic level

 

So maybe I have (beyond the extent of bretts presence in saisons to begin with) placed a bit too much emphasis on ingredients, that is to say, I don't think this is a game of coming up with a bourbon specific (in regards to material composition) level of stylistic standard that mandates what percent of the yeast in a beer must be brett etc. that being said, though I don't know the measuring standard for this, I do know that there have been some attempts made (though I must confess I have no clue how effective they have been) to establish a way of measuring sourness in a beer. I feel as if, (assuming there is a way to establish the degree of sourness) there might be a quantifiable threshold a beer could cross in which it stops being something of a saison dupont, and starts being more of a crooked stave Surette.

 

Interestingly enough, and more to the point, the last bjcp guideline states both that,
"Bitterness is typically moderate to high, although sourness can be present in place of bitterness" and,
"The balance is towards the fruity, spicy, hoppy character, with any bitterness or sourness not overwhelming these flavors."
This would seem to suggest to me that, that from their view, within the confines of the style, the sourness (if present at all) should serve in an ancillary capacity, complementing the other flavors, without becoming the dominating feature.
So to shortly clarify my initial suggestion, since it seems it was not succinct enough for you, I think it is certainly fair to say that the more sour branch of the saison family is still a part of the tree, but it is far too distinct from other saisons to be labeled the same way, and it would be good if we could establish a benchmark model of clarification/distinction to remedy this, as too often the terms farmhouse ale and saison are used interchangeably, and often, you don't really know for sure what you are going to get without considerable research into a particular beer.