Saison Tastes Foul...

We brewed a Saison a couple of weeks ago...Recipe can be found here, if you care to see it.

Everything went pretty well, but we had a couple of issues. When we sampled this beer at racking time, we noticed that it had a savory/meaty/smoke-like character that is pretty out of balance for the beer's style. I'm trying to figure out where that might have come from. I have a couple of ideas, but thought I might post here for wisdom.

1. We had a funnel malfunction, resulting in a lot of the wort sediment ending up in the carboy. We had a good 2 inches of trub in the carboy. We racked it off of that around 12 days after initial fermentation.

2. We squeezed juice from the orange into the primary, in addition to the peel and other spices. Could the juice have spoiled it? Is that a no-no?

It's still in the secondary, and still kind of funky. We decided to dry hop it, and add more citrus peel, in the hope of masking that a bit, before we bottle.

Any thoughts on what we did wrong?

You did nothing wrong, I suspect saison will need a bit of bottle conditioning before it tastes "right". But then I've never brewed a saison, so, ignore me.

One thought on the smoky flavor is, did you stir the honey like crazy when you added it to the boil? I would wonder if it sunk straight to the bottom and burned. As long as you sanitized the peel and spices I think that would be fine; the juice from the inside should be sanitary already, I would imagine.

edit: COLObrewer is right; and, there is a good chance you are just tasting some yeast in suspension, bottle conditioning will probably do good things for this beer.

Would I have noticed on the bottom of the pot if the honey burned? Our pot does have a scorch spot, but it hasn't effected any other beer we've made, at all.

Also, that quality was not there when we tasted a sample before fermentation. It definitely 'developed'.

ronzonie7 said:

Also, that quality was not there when we tasted a sample before fermentation. It definitely 'developed'.

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I'd bet that the off flavor will dissipate, your brew is actually still fermenting a little. I would expect any number of foul flavours coming from an unfinished saison. We once brewed a banana porter that smelled like cooked venison and tasted like satan's hemmorhoids in secondary. It turned out to be a favorite.
Brew on my friend:rockin:
However, We've never brewed a saison, so, ignore me.

That's what we're hoping...we've had it in the secondary for a while now. Probably getting close to time to bottle it up.

Ah, it developed... then let the yeast do their thing... all is well IMO. Just make sure you carbonate it like a Saison

nealf said:

Ah, it developed... then let the yeast do their thing... all is well IMO. Just make sure you carbonate it like a Saison

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What do you mean, 'carbonate it like a Saison'? I don't recall the recipe being much different from standard priming...

Saisons are generally very highly carbonated... almost like a champagne.

Yeah, I guess you are right...how do we ramp up carbonation and avoid blowing up all over my fridge?

I carbed my saison at 1oz/gallon and it came out nice and sparkly.

If you are kegging just up the PSI. If you are bottling, you would just need to add more priming sugar.

For a saison you want 3-3.5 volumes of CO2. I would go with about 5.5 oz of corn sugar just to be on the safe side. Don't go too high or, like you say, you will get bottle bombs.

What yeast did you use for a Saison? My favorite yeast right now is the French Saison limited edition

You can drink that very early and I never had any meaty flavor on mine. Mine always come out citrusy, more grapefruit than orange as with Belgian Wit.

COLObrewer said:

I'd bet that the off flavor will dissipate, your brew is actually still fermenting a little. I would expect any number of foul flavours coming from an unfinished saison. We once brewed a banana porter that smelled like cooked venison and tasted like satan's hemmorhoids in secondary. It turned out to be a favorite.
Brew on my friend:rockin:
However, We've never brewed a saison, so, ignore me.

Click to expand...

I was gonna comment, but just doing a repost will suffice this one I believe.