In 2015, while I was working on my book The Secrets of Master Brewers, I happened to look up BeerAdvocate’s list of saisons.
While that list includes some foreign beers, it’s largely populated by saisons brewed in the United States. The number of beers listed there under a particular style is one way to track its popularity, simply based on how many breweries have made one—there are tons of IPAs, for example, but precious few dark milds. A decade ago, however, only pale ales and IPAs had more entries than saison. Even now, it’s still in the top five among styles on that site.
Anyone who was into craft beer 10 or 15 years ago may recall that saisons were not a commercial juggernaut. Though a few breweries made regular examples—such as Ommegang Hennepin or Brooklyn Sorachi Ace—only Boulevard Tank 7 ever really enjoyed wide distribution or sales.
So, why did saisons briefly capture the imagination of seemingly every brewer in the country, despite the evident lack of demand?
When saisons first appeared stateside, the style was nearly extinct in Belgium, and the few surviving examples were what we might call “clean” today—that is, fermented by house Saccharomyces strains rather than funkier mixed cultures. Yet they were exotic—they tasted like nothing else, and they came with this romantic story about rustic farms and the workers who slaked their thirst with beer out in the fields.
In his books and articles, the famous British writer Michael Jackson championed Saison Dupont, which became an archetype for brewers who wanted to capture the long-lost rusticity of a preindustrial age. Here, we consider these “clean” saisons inspired by the Wallonian tradition and how they managed to transfix so many brewers.
The Most Hand-Crafted of Craft Styles
We know a lot more about home and farmhouse brewing traditions today thanks to the work of Lars Marius Garshol, Mika Laitinen, and others. Twenty years ago, however, nearly all our interest was refracted through a single style.
For drinkers in a country whose beer production had been entirely industrialized, the stories of saison were magical. I toured Brasserie Dupont in 2011, driving out through the crazy quilt of mismatched fields in Hainaut, about eight miles from the French border. It was a bucolic tableau, and the lovely old brick brewery looked like the old farmhouse I’d hoped it would be.
Brewer and co-owner Olivier DeDeycker told the story of his process, which led naturally to the history of saison. “With this barley malt they are brewing some beer, and that beer had second fermentation in wood barrels,” he said softly, in French-accented English. “It was drunk in the summer by the people who worked in the fields. So, we speak of a beer with a low alcohol content, high bitterness, no residual sugar—so, a refreshing beer. It was what we call in Belgium bière de saison, saison beer, brewed in the winter and drunk in the summer.”
Writers called it “rustic,” and it was. (Literally: The word comes from the Latin rusticus, meaning “from the country.”) For American brewers familiar with Dupont or Vapeur, saison looked like a playground for anything nonindustrial: unmalted wheat, spelt, rye, old hop varieties, additional ingredients such as herbs, spices, or fruits. And that yeast! It was the most Belgian of all the Belgian strains, with prominent phenols, plumes of fruity esters, and occasional musty funk or acidity that hinted at something wild.
Saison Dupont was and remains one of the most impressive beers made anywhere—incredibly effervescent orange-gold, the intense peppery hop, and that spicy-phenolic yeast. It was as far out as you could go on the nonindustrial spectrum—the last stop on the line.
Yet it also hinted at a hidden world of flavor and character waiting to be discovered, if you could only visit enough farmhouses. Writing in these pages, Joe Stange calls saisons a “story,” and he’s surely right about that. Americans fell in love with the style because it was the antithesis of homogenous industrial beer, and they wanted to capture some of its story in the glass.
In Search of Rusticity
In 2019, I visited the Brasserie de la Senne’s Yvan De Baets at the brewery in Brussels. Near the end of our time together, I asked him about saison.
In the past 20 years, Yvan has emerged as one of the candle-keepers of the Belgian flame. He has studied his country’s tradition extensively, collected many historical texts, and wrote memorably about saison in Phil Markowski’s 2004 Farmhouse Ales. Yet when I asked him about saison, he grew silent and shook his head.
“Honestly,” he confessed, “it’s very difficult to explain to someone else because we always have our own definition. For me it’s more like an absence of cleanliness—but even that’s not a definition. It’s something you feel.”
De Baets eventually came back to that rustic quality and how he approaches it at Senne. “A way to give rusticity is to use noble but rustic grains. Malted barley is of course there, but using grains like spelt and rye and possibly wheat will help. Spelt was extremely common in saison-making back in the days. We also use an ancient variety of winter barley. Winter barley has always been the barley for making saison. There are also two ancient types of hops there. … The Belgian variety is Groene Bel—it means ‘green bell’ or ‘green cone.’ It was the typical hop.”
When it comes to its ingredients, at least, the most famous saison isn’t especially rustic. Dupont is an old brewery and farm, but its saison is made solely with pilsner malt. It’s not spiced. And unlike many contemporary interpretations of saison, it contains no funky yeast.
Yet the brewery and its processes are traditional. Until the 1980s, Dupont still malted its own barley. Its gas-fueled, direct-fired kettle and squat, square fermentors remain throwbacks to the 19th century. Dupont does everything it can to coax flavor out of its beer; mashing begins with a ferulic acid rest at 113°F (45°C), and the brewers slowly ramp the temperature up to 162°F (72°C).
The open flame darkens the pale gold wort into an orange-like hue over a 90-minute boil. Most famously, Dupont allows the fermentation to rise to blood temperature in those fermentors, and they are sticklers about refermentation in the bottle.
Dry-Hopped Tradition
Yeast may be the essence of saison, but hops are at least a close second. Dupont’s saison is notably bitter, with herbal-spicy hopping—as are many other saisons from around Belgium, including those from Blaugies, De Ranke, and Senne.
Even if we often associate dry hopping with American craft, De Baets points out that the practice was very common in Belgium in the 19th century. “Not for every style,” he says, “but for instance the saisons, it was very often used, the technique of dry hopping.” While hops are an important part of Dupont’s profile, the brewery only started offering a dry-hopped version in 2010.
And of all those thousands of saisons that American brewers have produced, the one that really caught fire was dry hopped. In 2008, as the brewery was expanding, Kansas City’s Boulevard introduced its Smokestack series of stronger beers. One of them was a saison brewed by its brewmaster at the time, the Belgian-born Steven Pauwels—Tank 7.
Other U.S. craft breweries were producing saisons by then, but Pauwels often found them too sweet and overly spiced. “It was just the wrong expectation of the beer,” says Pauwels, who’s now the co-CEO at Great Lakes in Cleveland. “It was supposed to be super dry, super effervescent, very drinkable.”
Tank 7 was unusual by the standards of the time. It came in at a booming 8.5 percent ABV, and the rustic grains Pauwels chose were those grown around Kansas City—wheat and corn (although the latter is no longer part of the recipe). And while many breweries wanted yeast strains associated with classic saison producers, Pauwels chose Westmalle’s for its versatility in the brewhouse. In so doing, he showed how brewers could branch out to other Belgian yeasts and find plenty of character.
Finally, he topped off Tank 7 with Amarillo in the conditioning tank. “It was during the rise of Amarillo in those days,” he says, but he chose lots that had more of an earthy quality. “Amarillo was one of those hops where it was that lot from that grower that we needed to make Tank 7.”
The Spirit of the Belgian Story
One of the best saison brewers I know, Upright’s Alex Ganum, offers a synonym for “rustic” when I ask him about saisons.
“Another way to look at it is character,” he says. “Just about everything that goes into producing the beer will play into it.” He then goes on to list five qualities he likes to see the yeast produce:
- earthiness, or else it should help to draw herbal-earthy character from the other ingredients;
- a dry, mineral-forward finish;
- pleasant spicy character;
- a broad spectrum of esters; and
- a slight twang, like you might find in a weissbier strain.
I’m not sure American brewers tackle any Belgian style as well or as entertainingly as they do saison. The limitations of other styles appear to inhibit them, with American versions often fine but safe. Saison is so amorphous—more story than style—yet American brewers somehow find the essence of it, whether that’s a rusticity or Belgian-ness. Sometimes a story offers better insight into a beer than technical details.
Ganum drives this point home when he tells me a fittingly farmy story about one of his early saisons: “Back when we were running [our butcher shop], our hog rancher kept bugging me about using his triticale, which was the animal feed,” Ganum says. “He grew it himself and was proud of the quality, but I dismissed it early on, thinking, ‘How good can animal feed be?’ Well, that was dumb. ... He eventually just dropped off a bag and it turned out to be incredible, so we asked him for a pallet and worked it into the Five.”
Brewers love the vivid, unexpected flavors that can be found in saisons. They’re complex but dry, often stellar with food. For people who’ve devoted their lives to beer, saisons offer a rare combination of delicacy and complexity, intensity and harmony. Somehow, American drinkers still haven’t fully taken to them—yet—but that hasn’t stopped brewers from trying to convert them.
Pauwels says he hopes that will change.
“Everything is cyclical,” he says, suggesting that saisons could mount a comeback. He still loves Belgian beers, in general, and we spend a moment talking about how CO2 integrates in a bottle-conditioned beer. He then returns to the realm of story: “I think if people start traveling again and go to Belgium and come back and say, ‘My God, in that pub I had a Saison Dupont—it was an amazing beer. How can I get it?’”
Might they then return home to find their local brewer already makes something like it? We can hope.
Want More on Saison?
For much more on this style, including a range of perspectives from respected saison brewers, look for these articles at beerandbrewing.com:
