Best extract saison kit?

The surly cyincale partial mash is BAD ASS. Its 26 bucks at northern brewer. I think it was 33 with shipping. Its super dry and apricotty. I just finished a keg of this stuff yesterday. So sad to see it go. The hops it comes with are columbus for bittering, and steryan goldings. not sure what the grist is made up of. I know it has acidified malt, and oats, but I couldn't tell beyond that. The LME it comes with is 6 lbs of belgian pils.

 

If you're looking for more ABV, sugar would work as well as honey in the boil. Also, adding sugar (or honey) won't make your beer drier than if you didn't add it. You'll still have the same amount of unfermented sugars left at the end. But it may be drier than a typical beer of that (higher) OG/ABV.

 

At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeonly old-time Walloon, I'll say it anyway. A good saison doesn't need 'some extra kick'. A little sugar? Sure, but don't go crazy, and use it to hit your OG, not 'boost' it. What I mean is, if you want to add a completely fermentable sugar to boost perceived dryness, do it by scaling back on the amount of extract slightly and make up the difference with the sugar - instead of just tossing in sugar on top of everything else.

The reason for all of this is that, if you do things right and use the proper yeast, attenuation will NOT be an issue. And, if you don't plan for it, you could very easily end up with a boozy 8 - 9% abv "super saison" when what you wanted was something refreshing for hot-weather quaffing in large volumes. And besides... chances are that if this is only your second batch, you probably aren't well equipped to brew a great high gravity beer yet anyway. (forgive me if that's not accurate)

If I were you, I'd keep your first saison recipe as simple as possible and save the the oak/rosewater/honey/etc. for future batches. But I'm a curmudgeon, remember?

Seriously: It doesn't have to be crazy to be delicious. The only time I ever tried making one with extract, I think it was my third batch of beer and it was fermented with a kolsch yeast because the LHS didn't have any saison. Then, at the urging of JonnyLieberman, I fermented it hot anyway. And I added the dregs of some Fantome bottles to it. And the result was (not surprisingly) NOT my finest batch of beer. It was also the style that drove me to start brewing all-grain. But nevermind that...

Knowing what I know now? IF I were to brew an extract batch? I'd use a mix of pilsen DME, munich LME, and cane sugar. Since the munich LME (iirc) is usually a 50:50 blend of munich and pale or pils malts, you can use a higher portion of that than would seem reasonable for a saison if we were talking about grain.

Just very quickly throwing some stuff into promash, it looks like 2.5 lb Pils DME and 2.5 lb munich DME + 0.5 lb of cane sugar will land you at ~ 5 SRM with a nicely fermentable 1.045 wort. With a saison yeast, that is going to net you a 5 - 5.5% abv beer and is, imo, a good starting point. It's also a relatively simple canvas to show off the yeast and any hops that you choose to use.

 

A resident of Wallonia, one of the provinces of Belgium.