Extract Saison

So you want to learn to brew beer? This is the perfect recipe to start your career into home-brewing. Using the defined malt extracts and hop schedules, you'll have a delicious saison to drink in just a couple weeks!

Ingredients:

7lb Golden Light Liquid Malt Extract

1lb Brown Sugar

2oz. East Kent Golding Hops

1 Package Saison Yeast

Bring 6 gallons of water to a boil. Once the water reaches a boil, add 1 oz. of the East Kent Golding hops. After 30 minutes pass, add another .25 oz. of East Kent Golding hops. 50 minutes into the boil, add the remaining .25 oz. of East Kent Golding hops, the 1lb of brown sugar, and your wort chiller if you have one. Adding you chiller at this point of the boil serves to sanitize all of your equipment to help prevent infections during fermentation. If you don't have a wort chiller, no worries, just omit this step and add the hops as recommended.

If you used your wort chiller, cool down the wort to 75ºF (24ºC) after the 60 minutes of boil time has elapsed. If you didn't use a wort chiller, consider moving your brew kettle to a sink, safely, that is filled with water and ice to rapidly cool down your brew to a reasonable pitching temperature for your yeast.

You might notice that you don't have the full 6 gallons that you started with, this is intended. As we boil our wort, we can expect a boil off of about a gallon per hour, so if you now have 5-5.5 gallons, everything is just as it should be.

If you have the proper equipment, take a gravity reading and you should have a wort with an original gravity of 1.048-1.065, depending on your equipment efficiency.

In our case, we used White Labs WLP566 Belgian Saison II to get our beer started. If you can't find this yeast, Wyeast 3724, Omega OYL500, or Imperial IYB-56 Rustic will all get you to a delicious beer.

Let your fermentation vessel continue to do it's work for the next two weeks at the temperature described on the yeast packet. After the two weeks has passed, you likely have beer that's ready to drink! Your finished beer should have a final gravity of 1.002-1.008, resulting in an ABV of 5-7%.

Now, carbonate your brew to a volume of 2.5(bottles)-3.2(keg). If you're new to packaging your beer, follow these guidelines about how to store your beer for consumption!