Saison Brew Day

Saison Brew Day:

Back from NHC 2014, I find myself with 7 packs of dry Belle Saison yeast from Dan Star.

I did some research on the yeast, found that it attenuates like a man mad, getting down to 1.002 without a lot of effort.  This works just as mom starts to bug me for beer.

A slightly hop forward take on a Saison.  I have a small pile of Southern Hemisphere hops, so I decided to make Motueka and Wataku the stars of the this beer. 

I'm still playing with the new mash tun.   It looks like about 8 gallons of strike water will be the key to hitting the probe and have enough water over the false bottom to get the grain all wet.  I may have to swap the false bottom out in a smaller beer in order to get the grain submerged, luckily my old braid from the cooler will fit into the ball valve in this one.  Of course you should change as many variables as you can, so I also switched brewing software, started to use BeerSmith and that is still taking some tweaking(any tips would be awesome). 

So the brew went well, besides being a few points  shy, of course I have been chalking this up to working out the kinks in software and gear. 

I always have my saisons ferment hot, and I find ambient temps just fun to run them.

 Needless to say, running saisons at 80+F, the fermentation is quite active.  Now we are a week into fermentation the aroma is great, I was expecting more phenols,  but I'm not smelling them now.   I couldn't find a whole lot of information on this yeast strain as far as flavor characteristics, so I am interested to see what it does.