Southern Tier Cherry Saison

Has anyone brewed a clone of Southern Tier Cherry Saison before? Google didn't yield anything worthwhile that I could see.

Is that one of theirs that lists the ingredients on the bottle?

Didn't brew a clone, but a half pound of dried tart cherries in secondary yielded a subtle cherry tartness to my 10.8% "saison."

Oldsock said:

Is that one of theirs that lists the ingredients on the bottle?

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Dude, I love your blog! I read it all the time.

maskednegator said:

Dude, I love your blog! I read it all the time.

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Glad to hear my quasi-internet-beer-celebrity-ness has reached you (coincidently my last post was a saison, although it is not close at all to the Southern Tier).

Sour cherries might be a good idea for this one, since compared to most of the over-the-top flavored beers from ST I thought this one was subtle. That said the yeast character, and sweetness were not really saison-ish.

I was able to find this on a bottle of it. 8.0% ABV 4.5L 2 row pale malt, malted white wheat, Belgian candy sugar, cherries, magnum bittering hops and sterling flavor hops.

I’ll take a crack at it for you:

80% 2 row
10% malted wheat
10% sugar (I would just use table)
Enough to get you close to 1.075
Mash at 148 for 60 minutes

20 IBUs Magnum @ 60 min
.25 oz of Sterling @ 10 minutes

I normally like to add fruit to the secondary, but pretty much all the fruit beers I brew are sours (this preserves more fruit subtlety). In this case you would probably be fine adding a can of Oregon Puree or a couple pounds of frozen cherries to the wort as it is cooling.

For yeast I would go with the Belgian strain of your choice, not sure what the original used, but it didn’t strike me as a saison strain.

Hope that helps.

Thanks for all the input. I will give this a try in the spring.