Saturday October the 29th 2011, was the Northern Craft Brewers first visit to the Sun Bar and Hotel in Lancaster. Members from as near as Lancaster to as far afield as Congleton, Doncaster, Leeds, Keighley, Bolton, Heald Green, Bradford and by ferry from The Isle of Man made the journey in wet weather, to chat, drink, learn and share brewing knowledge with like-minded craft brewers. The day started with an informal gathering in the Well Room (with the glassed-over deep well giving some people vertigo if they had to step over it!) The Sun offers an eclectic range of beers both on tap and on hand-pull, there were some excellent Belgian beers sampled by the group, Rodenbach Grand Cru, Matilda from Goose Island (Belgian style), Abbye des Rocs Brune and Blanche de Honnelle, To name a few.

The group also sampled some fine beers from the local Lancaster brewery along with some, great continental lagers on tap at the bar. The members of the Northern Craft Brewers didn't disappoint either with an eclectic range of home brewed beers in a range of styles, being passed among the members for sampling, and discussion.

"I'm a little Teapot" Steve Wright in full flow

A Talk, Tasting and Yeast Re culturing Session by Steve “Apparently I’m a little teapot” Wright

Steve Wright had kindly offered to host a talk on Saisons, and offered out plenty of Home brewed samples, to the group along with a few commercial examples of the style. Saisons are a family of Belgian beers from the French-speaking part of Belgium, especially Hainault. They are dry, hoppy, quite bitter for a Belgian, and refreshing beers brewed for continental summer weather but still great on a wet autumnal day in the north west.

The book by Phil Markowski “Farmhouse Ales” is highly recommended, if you want to learn more about the style but, the article in CAMRA's Beer magazine on brewing Saisons which advocates chucking in a load of spices and fermenting saf-04 at 25c+ is not.

Brewing these beers is a lot about the particular yeasts, which mark the family, and Saisons are commonly fermented at high to blood-warm temperatures. Often starting at 22-24c or higher, and ramping up to as high as 35c! The “yeast among yeasts” of this style is a mixed strain used by Brasserie DuPont. White Labs and Wyeast have made an apparently cleaned-up version of a single strain available as wlp565 / wy3724 –but both have a bad reputation for stalling. A mixed-strain is available on limited release from white labs as wlp566.

Four ‘attempts’ at the style of varying quality were brought along by NCB members, 3 brewed with yeast re-cultured from Saison DuPont bottles and one with WLP565:

• “Saison de Sauvin” by Steve Wright, a very dry "white wine" beer that was unfortunately a little bit band-aid-y with some harsh TCPish tones. Little of the Nelson Sauvin remained. Brewed at 28-30c with a DuPont re culture finishing incredibly dry at 1001.

• “Fantome de l’Abbaye” brewed with the Wyeast 3725 “Biere de Garde” strain from Fantome at 22-25c which stalled/slowed to a crawl at 1.023. Hopped with a mix of saaz and Styrian celeia, finished with champagne yeast to get down to 1.002

• “Saison Derriere” brewed by Ben Short during the 2010 heat wave with a brew-belt on at around 30-35c and entered at the Skipton event last year.

• “A Beer for all Saisons”  an excellent beer by Rich that came 4th in the mixed Belgian and French class in the Bristol National. This was brewed using 4kg Pilsner, 1kg Munich, 200g Acidulated and 100g wheat. The acidulated was to add a touch of sour which was only just noticeable in the end.  Brewed with WLP 565 which only got to 1.010 (from 1.063) with temps ramped from 20 to 28C.

The similarity of Orval to Saison (rather than other Trappist) styles was briefly mentioned as was the sharing of their primary yeast. An example of a wit beer brewed with the wyeast3789 Trappist blend which includes Brettanomyces was shared around and then Steve’s Orval copy “Le Caneton Vert Dans Les Couches”  that was now  8 months old and dominated by Brett was shared about. The beer took 2nd in the Bristol national competition. Rich also shared a brett-dominated Flanders ale.

Finally we moved on to a few commercial examples – one of the newest breweries in Belgium, Lion a Plume Saison and their hoppy refreshing Saison. A Biere de Garde as a comparison of what Saison isn’t “la Goudale” from Brasserie Gayant and finally the giant-among-men that is 75cl Saison DuPont.

The dregs from DuPont and Lion A Plume were captured and mixed with sterile starter wort and given away to NCB members keen to play with this family of beers.

The group would like to thank all the new members who took the trouble to come and join us last Saturday afternoon hopefully you all enjoyed yourselves, and will come to some of our future meetings.
I am sure we will be re-visiting this excellent Venue in the future, If you get the chance to visit the Sun in
Lancaster do so, it offers really good food and ales.
Several members also popped round the corner to the truly fantastic coffee roaster and coffee shop Atkinsons which also stocks a great range of craft beers.

We Hope to see you at the Next meeting in Halifax in December