Saison


Cooking with Beer: Palisade Peach Tuna Poke

This fresh and peachy poke bowl gets a quick splash of classic saison or mixed-culture farmhouse ale—and it’ll taste great alongside the rest of it, too.

Recipe: Wunderkammer Sumac Wheat

The beers of Wunderkammer get their own rustic character via locally foraged ingredients, mixed cultures that include Brett, and a stripped-down, old-fashioned process featuring direct-fired kettles and fermentation without strict temperature control.

Brewing Saison: The Taste of Rustic

Whether they’re working in farmhouses or warehouses, today’s saison brewers are united in their pursuit of rustic character. While that goal is abstract, they achieve it via concrete choices about ingredients and process—and the ways to get there are as varied as the brewers and beers themselves.

Five on Five: Saison

It may be more story than style, but these five examples inspire the five brewers who recommend them.

Video Tip: Grist and Mash Choices for Mixed-Culture Farmhouse Beers

Crooked Stave’s saisons get a mix of grains meant to contribute to the texture and feed the yeast and bacteria during extended secondary fermentations. Founder and brewmaster Chad Yakobson explains the reasoning.

Video Tip: Dialing in Mouthfeel and Bitterness in Brett Saisons

Crooked Stave founder and brewmaster Chad Yakobson explains how you can adjust grist, pH, and hopping levels for various mouthfeel and flavor outcomes in farmhouse-inspired beers with Brettanomyces.

Video Tip: Exploring the Wider Potential of Hops, Saison, and Brett

Brewing saisons with Brettanomyces offers an enticing opportunity to fully embrace Noble and Noble-esque hops, including newer varieties such as Adeena and Loral and later kettle additions to encourage biotransformation. Crooked Stave founder and brewmaster Chad Yakobson breaks down some possibilities.

Video Course: Chad Yakobson’s Guide to Brewing Saisons and Wild Beers with Brett

Crooked Stave founder and brewmaster Chad Yakobson, one of the industry’s foremost experts on Brettanomyces, leads this in-depth course on brewing and fermenting funky, farmhouse-inspired beers.

Recipe: Oedipus Mannenliefde

Dry and spicy yet hop-forward, this lemongrass-laced saison from Oedipus in Amsterdam recently took home its third World Beer Cup medal.

Special Ingredient: Lemongrass

Exotic but familiar, the tropical plant lemongrass is far from being one of the traditional beer ingredients … yet its flavor and aroma fit right in with the others.