Saison history question

OCB has a nice Saison/Farmhouse Ale/Biere de Garde entry written by Phil Markowski

I particularly like his closing statement, "Over time, perception of Saison as a Belgian style may well shift to it being primarily associated with American craft brewers, just as the British derived India pale ale style has essentially become American."

 

A lot of harvest takes place in the autumn and laborers' parched throats need wetting. The beer had to survive the summer. Or so my logical brain thinks.

If you have not read Markowski's Farmhouse Ales, get yourself a copy and read it. My recollection is that it gives an impression that the modern saison style derives from rustic brews with mixed fermentations, so possibly lacto, brett, and wine yeasts in the original. Today's commercial saisons are likely be much cleaner, and those spices may be more emphasized due to artificial selection. Those historical saisons experienced uncontrolled temperatures and bugs; they probably would be tough to pigeon hole into a narrow style profile, as we modern folk are apt to do.

 

The history of Saison is an odd one that needs more research. You've got the basic story down - the romantic image of field hands being offered a freshly dippered mug of frothy oddness to slake their thirst.

The only problem is in talking with Randy Mosher, who's been digging through old French brewing logs. There's just not reallly any mention of the style. It is entirely possible that what we think and cateogirze around the notion of "Saison" is an invention outta whole cloth.

 

You can throw Scottish beers ito that argument.
Styles change and evolve. Even during the 19th century IPA was changing.Mild was strong and pale.Few beers nowadays bear much resemblance to their forebears.

 

I think beers change and evolve for different reasons though...sometimes palates change, sometimes ingredients become scarce, other times a lack of imagination is the culprit.

 

Honestly, today's perception of saison is heavily influenced by Saison Dupont. The yeast strain available to homebrewers that is supposedly the Dupont strain, however distantly or not, WLP565 (don't know what the Wyeast one is) is notorious for stalling. Increased fermentation temps tend to keep it from stalling without the normal adverse affects of fermenting as warm as the 80s or even 90s normally do.

Long story short, the warm temps for saison yeast is probably more of a modern thing. As are most of our ideas about styles.

 

With Scottish ales the problem is too much imagination and no respect for reality.Smoked and peated malt, low hop usage , long boils, where did they get this from?

 

These apocryphal notions have their roots in imagination, palate variability, and poor research. They become amplified and perpetuated by brewers on a quest to replicate the misunderstood beers or to distinguish their beers. Someone says he tastes something slightly smokey. Maybe there's something to it, maybe smokey was the wrong word, who knows. Some homebrewer tries to duplicate the effect and doesn't taste it, so he looks to add smoke to the beer. He's a homebrewer, and that makes him only a half-witted historian, and he reasons that peated malt lends smokey flavors to Scotch, I'm trying to replicate a Scottish beer that is supposedly smokey and I can't get the smoke to come out, the secret must be peated malt. Beer evolution through ignorance. At least, that's my guess. But so what? A broken clock gets the time right twice a day. Some misunderstandings may result in good beer.

 

Not sure on the peated malt, longer boils. But, typically speaking (certainly not always) they did use lower hopping rates.

This snapshot from the 1830s shows it was about half the average of English beers. http://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/2011/11/england-vs-scotland-part-1a-1830s.html

 

There is a swing back to those styles of saisons happening right now. Chad at Crooked Stave is pretty much leading the charge with quite a few "wild" saisons coming out of his brewpub, and Trinity brewing along with Funkwerks are doing similar experiments. Hell, wlp670 used to be a seasonal, and is now available year round. That says a lot for the use of brett in a farmhouse style beer these days. I love it, even when the beers aren't great, at least they are still interesting.

 

It's essentially because American brewers view the saison style almost completely through the lense of Saison Dupont, and the yeast from the Dupont brewery is the most commonly used saison yeast. This particular yeast likes to ferment hot. That's really all there is to it. Other yeasts for saisons don't like heat any more than any other Belgian yeast, but they were gifted with the "Belgian Saison" label by Wyeast and White Labs.

I'm always amazed at how dominant this beer and yeast is in defining a whole style of beer production (minus the spice part, obviously). I think only Anchor Steam is more dominant it its style.

 

No it doesn't. It says this:

"Their [William Younger's] 100/- has 50% more hops than any of the English beers. While their 80/- has almost 50% less than the average of the English beers. Nothing much more I can say about that. Except this: Scottish beers weren't always less heavily hopped than equivalent English beers."

I should know, I wrote it.

I've looked very hard and have found no evidence of Scottish beer being significantly less heaavily hopped than English in the 19th century.

 

I haven't done the research you have on this topic, obviously, and I would like to preface this by saying I meant no offense. But if you will humor me, I will try to explain why that isn't the conclusion I arrived at after reading your piece.

The quote "Scottish beers weren't always less heavily hopped than equivalent English beers" implies that you found examples where Scottish beers were more heavily hopped. Or, at the very least, not less heavily hopped. But finding an exception to the rule does not disprove the rule.

In the first table you present, William Younger's 100/- does use more hops than its English counterparts. The other example in the first table, William Younger's 80/- uses less hops than its English equivalents. So your first table is a 50/50 split.

In your second table, both of William Younger's beers use lower hopping rates than their English equivalents. In reference to this table you write: "The Scottish beers are less heavily hopped, managing only about half the average of the English beers." So, in your own examples, 75% of the Scottish beers you highlight used lower hopping rates than their English equivalents. I admit it is a small sample size from one Scottish brewer, yet this is the same sample size you used for your other assertions. Hence my conclusion after reading your article that while Scottish brewers did not always use lower hopping rates, they tended to use lower hopping rates.

I know you have researched brewing logbooks extensively. If it is your experience from viewing a much larger sample size than the tables provided in this particular piece that it was a crapshoot as to whether or not hopping rates were lower or higher, I will certainly defer to your knowledge on the subject.

 

Also, and I have wondered this multiple times in reading your blog, isn't it misleading to say that there isn't a basis to Scottish beers being less heavily hopped than equivalent English beers based on brewing logs from the 1830s on? From what I understand of brewing history (again not as well versed as you are) Scottish brewers were more aware/influenced by English brewers in the 19th century than they ever had been in the past. So logically you might notice a closing of the gap in brewing logs during that century as opposed to say the 18th century.

 

In the 19th century, it's all very complicated.

The London breweries I used for the copmparison were heavy hoppers. If you look at brewers from other parts of England, in general, they hopped their beers less. The hopping rates varied between different styles of beer, different breweries and over time. It's difficult to make any sweeping generalisations. There are plenty of examples of William Younger beers that were, by anyone's standards, extremely heavily hopped. And more heavily hopped than a similar London beer of the same period.

That said, Scottish hopping rates appear to have declined more quickly than English at the end of the 19th century.Youinger's XP and XXP - their IPA's - started out with a level of hopping similar to English Pale Ales, but over the years it dropped.

After WW I Scottish hopping was pretty low in their standard Pale Ales. Lower than equivalent English beers and often lower than London Mild. But it's a bit difficult to directly compare English and Scottish beer by then, because they had diverged so much. What the Scots called Pale Ale was more like English Pale Mild.

Then there are the Stouts. The Scots developed a crazily sweet type of Stout between the wars, often with just 45-50% attenuation and sometimes under 2% ABV. It's impossible to compare with English beers, because there are no equivalents.

It's certainly untrue that the Scots used minimal quantities of hops. In the 19th centiry, British brewers used way more hops than everyone else. Really crazy levels. I've just finished a book of historic beer recipes. When I plugged the hops into BeerSmith, even knocking down the quantities from the original to take into account deterioration in storage, a ridiculous percentage of the beers came out with theoretical IBU values of over 100. Barclay's Imperial Stout was over 200.

 

Look

Looking forward to reading your book!

 

Just curious: where did you read that?

 

http://beeradvocate.com/beer/style/129

Also covered in this excellent book: http://www.amazon.com/Farmhouse-Ales-Culture-Craftsmanship-Tradition/dp/0937381845