Brewday - Yorkshire Rhubarb Belgian Saison
So in my capacity as @withinthewalls I’ve been helping to organise the Cawood Riverside Beer Festival, namly choosing the beers and doing the design and web stuff. This also lead me as a homebrewer to be invited along to the Jolly Sailor Brewery in Selby (who also run the Jolly Sailor Inn in Cawood) to brew a single cask of something a little special for the festival.
The head brewer Steve asked me to suggest something a little different and from the serious lack of craft Belgian beers from local breweries I thought the tried and tested recipe of my Jörmungandr Saison would be an interesting one to do as a base, and wanting to have a sour beer that wasn’t too extreme for the locals, we decided to blend it with locally grown forced Yorkshire Rhubarb. Helpfully sourced by our local greengrocers Luvfresh in Selby and grown on a farm in Howden just down the road.
The first process I did was taking 4.5kg of the rhubarb and adding 3L of water to the washed and chopped veg. I then added 1kg of sugar and simmered the rhubarb until it was fully macerated, then came the tricky process of sieving the liquid from the pulp. At the end I was left with 5L of colourful rhubarb syrup.
On Saturday myself and a fellow homebrewer Ian assisted Steve with a 50L brew on the Jolly’s Development Kit. Based on my recipe Steve crunched the numbers and adjusted for the increased volume and we mashed with 70.3% Pilsner Malt, 19.6% Wheat and 10.1% Vienna. With three 60g charges of my homegrown Fuggle hops for bittering, mid and late addition. It was a great opportunity to learn some of the numbers and science of brewing from Steve as I’ve always avoided too much maths in my brewing. Nice for someone to do all the complicated calculations that I usually trust to Brewers Friend, lol.
Anyway after we left Steve has been keeping us updated on the beers progress, the Fermentis Saison Yeast made quick work of the wort. Meaning that after just three days it had fermented to 1.008 and it was time to add the rhubarb syrup. By the way things are going is should be racked into a cask by the end of the week, leaving a nice couple of weeks for it to condition ready for the Festival on Sat 4th May. Excited to see how it turns out.
