Today’s brewers often face tough choices when selecting malts. For a classic European style, should you opt for traditional European malts? Or, for certain styles, is it more authentic to embrace local grains, wherever you are?
With Blackberry Farm Classic Saison, the brewing team at Peaceful Side strikes a balance. “Weyermann is the beer’s roots,” says head brewer Seth Carter, “while Carolina Malt House pays homage to the locality of the beer.”
For the base, they pair Weyermann’s Pilsner with a relatively less-modified two-row, custom-malted in Cleveland, North Carolina, about 240 miles west of the brewery over the Great Smoky Mountains. Carter describes the custom two-row from Carolina Malt House as lighter in color, closer to pilsner.
Classic Style, with Local Drawl
The brewery also incorporates malted wheat—a red winter variety that also comes from Carolina Malt House. While this wheat makes up only 10 percent of the grist for Classic, the brewery has experimented with amounts up to 50 percent for saison variations. “That’s kind of the fun with saison,” Carter says. “It’s whatever you want for your palate.”
Going with 50 percent wheat increases the saison’s final gravity to about 1.007 (1.9°P), compared to the typical 1.005 (1.2–1.4°P) seen when using 10 percent wheat. Thus, the brewers slide that scale to adjust the gravity and mouthfeel to suit their tastes.
Despite the wheat, Classic keeps a crisp profile. To keep the pH in check, the team uses acidulated malt to target a pH of 5.4–5.5 in the mash. They adjust the wort to 5.3 pre-boil, and it ends up at 5.2—or just slightly below—at knockout. The water also plays an important role in that profile. “Our water is a little hard, being close to the Smoky Mountains,” Carter says. “We like that about it, and we use a fair bit of calcium sulfate to enhance the Noble hops and the mineral quality naturally present in the beer.”
While they keep the hops Noble, they’re not an afterthought. “Our intention is to really showcase those hops,” Carter says. The early additions—at first wort and then 20 minutes into the 80-minute boil—provide a clean bitterness. For those, the team has recently been favoring Helios, a high-alpha variety with a clean profile. For Classic’s classic flavor, they add East Kent Goldings with 20 minutes left in the boil, then Saaz and Styrian Goldings at flameout.
Saison Fermentation
The yeast often take center stage in this style, and Classic Saison’s signature character is largely driven by White Labs WLP565 Belgian Saison I. Derived from the house culture at Brasserie Dupont in Hainaut, the strain is as well known among brewers for its peppery profile as it is for its tendency—depending on how it’s managed—to stall in mid-fermentation.
Carter offers several tips to avoid this. First, he recommends oxygenating the wort thoroughly—more than you normally would for a beer with a moderate starting gravity. Second, he suggests knocking out at a slightly higher temperature. During the summer months, the brewery knocks out at 70°F (21°C) and lets the beer ferment naturally. In winter, the knockout temperature is closer to 75°F (24°C).
Another way to keep this strain happy is to allow its temperature to rise freely. “It might scare people, but we don’t use temperature control on this strain,” Carter says. “If you cool it with glycol before it’s ready, the yeast will drop out. I think that’s where people run into issues.”
Carter says Classic’s fermentation temperatures can sometimes hit the low 90s Fahrenheit (mid-30s Celsius), but it typically peaks at 88°F (31°C). “The numbers freak people out,” he says, “but it works.” Notably, at Brasserie Dupont, they also allow the temperature to free-rise into the 90s Fahrenheit (mid-30s Celsius) during fermentation.
Carter says Classic Saison follows a temperature curve, rising to its peak and then naturally cooling as the fermentation slows and the gravity drops below 2°P (1.008). “You’ll start to see some yeast drop out at this point, and that’s when you can begin to lower the temperature,” he says.
It typically takes about 10 days for the beer to reach that point. The team then brings it down to 70°F (21°C) for about a week before cold-crashing and preparing it for packaging. They don’t filter it: “Once the yeast drops out, it’s out,” Carter says.
They’ll re-pitch WLP565 for multiple generations. In early pitches, Carter says, the yeast exhibits more bubblegum notes; over time, it develops more of the classic Belgian spice notes, such as black pepper and coriander. Carter’s familiarity with the yeast has made him more attuned to those subtle differences—he’s been working with this strain for nearly a decade now. For brewers who want to enhance the spice phenolics, he recommends under-pitching.
Once the beer is ready for packaging, it follows three different paths: bottles, cans, and kegs. They force-carbonate for the cans and kegs, but the bottles are still package-conditioned. For bottle conditioning, the brewery uses the same WLP565 strain, sometimes sourced from a freshly fermenting batch, targeting carbonation levels as high as 3.5 volumes of CO2 in the bottle. The beer is ready to drink in two or three weeks, but Carter believes the sweet spot is between four and six months.
For Carter, picking a favorite package for the Classic Saison isn’t like picking a favorite child. “Bottles,” he says. “There’s something to be said for bottle conditioning. It’s kind of a lost art, but if everyone could try bottle-conditioned Classic Saison with some Atlantic oysters, that’s one of my favorite things.”
Origins and New Beginnings
When Roy Milner started a brewery at Blackberry Farm in 2011, he took inspiration from Old World brewing—and especially from one beer in particular: Saison Dupont.
“It sparked his love of saison,” says Matty Hargrove, regional sales manager at Peaceful Side Brewing.
Unable to find similar beers around Knoxville, Milner created his own version at the luxury resort in nearby Walland, Tennessee. He teamed up with brewer Ron Downer to design the beer he wanted to drink—the Classic Saison, inspired by the classic saison.
That beer quickly won a national following, and the brewery grew, at one point enjoying distribution to 39 states. Milner and his team opened a production facility in Maryville in 2014, and five years later they opened a taproom.
More recently, the Blackberry Farm resort began looking for new ownership to take over the brewery and the brand. They found it in Oldham Hospitality, owners of the nearby Peaceful Side Social restaurant. In late 2023, the Oldhams acquired the brewery and renamed it Peaceful Side—but they keep the Blackberry Farm brands alive and kicking, and Classic Saison remains a staple.
Hargrove explains the Peaceful Side name: “It’s a laid-back area, known as the peaceful side of the Smoky Mountains,” he says. Sounds like the perfect place to enjoy a bottle of Classic Saison.