The story of Belgian farmhouse ales could fill a book—that is, if there were any real historical information available to fill the pages. Nevertheless, tales of ghostly rustic “saisons” fill our imagination, burnished in the fading golden light of an early harvest, dripping with romance of a connection to the land. The beer itself often has to work very hard to maintain the image. It’s an illusion, but boy, what a pleasant one. Because the history is so sketchy and contradictory, I’m just going to bullet- point it. You can connect the dots as best you can while we’re waiting for someone to figure this out.
- The late, great Michael Jackson wrote in his World Guide to Beer in 1977, “In the south of the country, top-fermented beers are sometimes called saisons.” He was pretty capable of ferreting out obscure styles, so he either missed it, or saison just wasn’t much of a thing then.
- The Belgian Brewmaster G. Lacambre wrote in his Traité Complet de la Fabrication des Bières in 1851 that “saison” indicated a beer brewed “en saison,” indicating a winter-brewed stronger beer: between 4.5 percent and 6.5 percent ABV at the time.
- Lacambre also details a couple of dozen regional styles in Belgium. None of them resemble modern saison.
- The beers in the current saison-producing region of southern/southwestern Belgium were amber-to-brown in Lacambre’s day. There’s no mention in Lacambre’s book about farmhouse anything. There were rural breweries, but from photographic evidence, these were multistory brick buildings in large compounds employing twenty or more people. This makes sense when you consider the variety of tasks—barrels, brewing, delivery, horses, cleaning, coal furnaces—and the considerable amount of manual labor required.
- The only historic beer with the word saison in its name was Liège saison, a poorly attenuated 2.5 percent ABV brown ale brewed from malted spelt, oats, and/or buckwheat, or sometimes broad beans. It’s utterly unlike today’s saisons.
It’s clear that much about the origins of saison/farmhouse ale is confusing. The fact that we use these two words pretty interchangeably just makes my point. I’m going to call them saison since I’d rather appear sophisticated and use French, but you can plug in “farmhouse” if you’re that crunchy kind of person. So let’s suspend disbelief on the history until something comes along and bursts our fantasy. Let’s move on to what we can be sure of about this sprite of a style—today.
Modern Saison
First, saison is quite pale, and a light haze is typical. From a flavor standpoint, the malt character is limited to a very narrow range: grassy, bready, crackery, possibly with delicate accents of light kettle- corn caramel or malt ball. Period. No raisin, no toast, not even that little biscuity edge pale-ale malt sometimes brings. Of course, there are many delightful variations that shoot off in just about every direction, but we’re going to limit ourselves to the historical-ish center. We’ll talk about the yeast character later, but it is my personal opinion that this should be the absolute star of the show. Saison’s unique fermentation character largely defines the style. While it’s assertive, it is also subject to distortion and dilution. As malts get darker, flavor chemicals with sharper edges are created, and while these are delicious in the right context, it’s been my experience that they also detract in lighter styles and compete with the peppery yeast nose.