A great many brewers seem to have conspired to make a mystery of saison. Yes, of course, there is such a thing as a “traditional” saison—a beer and style that we’ve come to define in a certain way—but this is one of those beers that actually fails the quantification test for a very simple reason. Originally, saisons were made with…well, whatever was laying around at the time. Saison is the poster child of a “local” beer. Its origins give us a place to start (farmhouse beer, lowish in alcohol to keep the field hands from being hammered on the job, spicy-but-not-necessarily spiced), but we should be treating that much more as a jumping-off point than a destination. Even before saison came to the attention of (sometimes brand-new) professional brewing concerns, saison recipes varied substantially due to the hyper-local nature of their recipe formulations. Local ingredients made saison what it was, and while we tend to think of that in terms of yeast, grains, and spices, there’s no reason to exclude hops from that list.
And oh my, how you can do things with this beer by manipulating the hops! That’s probably true of any beer that isn’t malt-aggressive, really, but particularly this one because
- we’re not being held to any kind of “historical” standard (as we might be for, say, Czech Pils), and
- this is a Belgian and French beer style originally, so people are going to not only appreciate but expect an array of flavors, which really opens up the doors when it comes to playing with the hops selections.
Most brewers tend to obsess over the yeast strain selection and treatment (“I totally fermented this in my oven! You can’t get too hot for a saison yeast!” Side note: yes, you certainly can) and whether to add actual spices or just rely on other ingredients to give you that traditional spicy character (real quote from a competition beer I once judged: “I sourced the spices from a woman who lives on top of a hill near my house”). However, I think that hops are the neglected middle-child of saison brewing. Let’s not fall into that trap.