White Wine Saison- AG

Just brewed this beer as per the recipe exactly - now I don't have any experience fruiting beers, but I have heaps of saskatoon berries (similar to blueberries) ripening up by the river near my house at the moment.

I was thinking about racking this beer onto a few pounds of pureed sanitized saskatoons for a week or so just to give it a bit of color , a littttttle flavor, and hopefully not a lot of sweetness.

Do you think this would be a good candidate for fruit or will the Nelson hops / 3711 conflict with a fruit addition?

 

This is the first time I've used Nelson Sauvin hops, so I'm not sure. You could always try splitting the batch so as not to risk the whole volume if the results weren't great.

 

It's only been in the bottle about two weeks, but here it is. The Nelson hops are definitely present on the nose, but not as prominent as I was expecting. This was the first time I used RO water and tried to build my profile, so I'm guessing I probably didn't add enough CaCl or something. This is also my first time using a Saison yeast, and right now it tastes very reminiscent of a Hefe to me. It has promise.

Thanks for the recipe @FATC1TY!

 

Looks delicious. Interesting it tastes like a Hefe to you.

I ended up racking my whole batch onto about 2.5 lbs of saskatoons. The fermenter looks entirely purple, but when I pull a sample to check gravity, there is only the faintest pinkish hue, and the flavor from the berries is essentially non detectable. I think what I have here is a slightly boozier saison from the added sugar from the berries. I finished at 1.004. Cold conditioning for a few days and will bottle. I will post a pic when it is done !

I should add my sample tasted very very VERY white wine-ish. Its so dry, it tastes like a glass of pino grigio. I can tell I am going to like this beer.

 

Saskatoons are similar to blueberries, aren't they? I racked a mead onto blueberries last year, and their flavor was also undetectable in the final product. I'm thinking that certain berries just don't have a very assertive flavor.

 

Yes Saskatoons are very similar - I think I would have to double or triple the ammount to get the color I wanted, which would reduce the batch size too much I think. It's funny because my hands were stained purple, and the fermenter is so dark... I'll take a picture of one in a thicker tulip glass, maybe that will show the colour - stay tuned

 

Two weeks in the bottle was definitely too early to try this beer. Here is a little over a week after the previous picture, and it's clarified a lot. The yeast dropping out has definitely caused some of those hefeweizeny flavors that I was experiencing to go away, and now it's tasting much more crisp.

 

Here is the finished Saskatoon Berry edition of the White Wine Saison:





It tastes really good. The Saskatoons turned the fermentor a dark purple, but honestly, its like it just made the SRM go up, where I was expecting the pale color of the base beer to simply take on a pinkish hue.

The color is very nice though, and if you look at just the right angle you can see the foam is slightly pink, as is the beer. Would probably add another pound or two next time.

Taste is great - very white wine indeed, not too sure if the berries are bringing much to the table or not, I guess that's why it would have been nice to split the batch !

Cheers!