Green Tea Saison Seeking Critique

Hey Folks,

I'm getting ready to brew my 5th batch, and this is the first one which I don't think has been exhaustively discussed on the web: A Saison with Green Tea in it. In my mind, I want a mashup of a good bottle of unsweetened iced green tea with a session saison.

I started with Jamil's Raison Saison recipe from Brewing Classic Styles, but scaled the ingredients from a 7%-er down to session saison around 5% using BeerSmith. I also replaced the table sugar with honey.

(Original) Recipe (see what will actually be brewed later in thread):

Boil Time: 60 min
Batch Size: 5 gallons (fermenter volume)
Boil Size: 6 gallons
ABV: 5.1%
(estimated) OG: 1.046
(estimated) FG: 1.007
IBU: 25

Steeping Grains (30 min @ 152):
0.4LB Munich Malt
0.1LB Caramunich Malt

Grains:
5.7LB Pilsener LME
0.5LB Wheat DME
0.7LB Clover Honey (or whatever good stuff I can get @ farmer's market, added after flameout.)


1.7oz Hallertau 60 min 4% AA 25.2 ibu
1 tab Irish Moss 15 min
0.75oz Hallertau 0 min 4% AA 0 ibu
2oz loose leaf Gunpowder Green Tea, steeped for 3 minutes after wort is chilled to 180.

Yeast: WLP566 - Saison II

I'm very interested in general thoughts, but I also have questions:

1) Is 0.1LB of CaraMunich even worth bothering with? It seems so insignificant.
2) I'd definitely consider replacing my flameout hops with something that gives flavors typically mixed with Green tea. Maybe Sorachi Ace for some lemon?
3) Thoughts on the honey? Do you think any of its flavor will survive fermentation? I guess I like the sound of a green tea saison brewed with honey, and I'm willing to stick with the honey for the story alone.

Thanks!

I agree that the 0.1 lb of CaraMunich is insignificant. I like the idea of Sorachi Ace hops in this, or something tropical like Nelson Sauvin. The honey will ferment out, likely, but depending on the honey, you might still get some flavor from it. I make a honey ale (an english pale ale with honey added) and using some locally raised honey, you can definitely taste the honey, even though its not sweet.

Good luck, this sounds like an interesting beer! Let us know how it turns out.

Green tea and sorachi ace is a great combo.

Cool. My LHBS has scoop-your-own grain bins, and everything besides 2-row costs the same per pound, so I might as well round out my steeping grains to a half pound and include the dash of caramunich.

I think I'll ditch the Hallertau entirely and use Sorachi Ace for both bittering and aroma.

Also I put Irish Moss in there out of habit, I guess it's not true to style for a Saison.

Has anyone here used both of the WLP saison yeasts before? Any opinions on which to use? I read the flavor profiles and "more fruity ester production than with WLP565" sounded like what I was going for so I picked WLP566, but I haven't brewed with a saison yeast before.

I would take out all the steeping grains for a saison. DME already has some proportion of crytsal in it. Plus, saisons typically have little to no crystal malts to begin with. They are super dry and refreshing so aim for as low an FG as you can.

As for the tea, I'd recommend adding it on the cold side. I tried to make a Hoji-cha toasted wheat tea beer and the tea flavors seemed to get stronger with time and it didnt fare too well. I also made a cucumber-mint saison where I added whole mint and chopped cukes into the fermentor. This one turned out great, like drinking a yoga class. If you make a tincture and add it to the fermentor, you cna control how much green tea flavor you get. As for the tea itself, Gunpowder may not be the best choice. For me its much more harsh tasting than say a dragonwell. If I was doing a tea saison, i'd probably pick something mellower like a nice rounded aged green Pu-Erh. But then again, maybe Gunpowder's bitterness will go well with hops and saison yeast pepperyness...

As for the yeasts, I;ve used just about every saison yeast available. WLP565 is the classic dupont strain and will give you the peppery funkiness that we all love. Be sure to keep an eye on the temps though. It will need some help to finish properly and make sure it never drops in temp. WLP566 is definitely more fruity, I forget where is reportedly comes from. Its a bit less finicky than WLP565, but WY3711 is the real workhorse. Or do what I did and make your own blend. My favorite saison so far was made with WLP565, WY3726, and WY3711. I'll probably be using that blend for my next several ones after I try out this RVA-263( Fantome strain)

The honey flavor wont really carry through if you add it at flameout. Honey is mostly fermentable so its flavors get lost, plus its aromatics are very delicate. When I want to try and preserve a tiny bit of honey character, I add it 2-3 days into fermentation. Plus, doing this will help the yeast out (especially important if you use WLP565)

I hear you regarding the crystal, but truthfully I don't want this saison to ferment out bone dry. I'd like it to have a small amount of residual sweetness akin to a lightly sweetened green tea.

Gunpowder is my favorite green tea, probably because it's got so much flavor. I'm going to use it this time just because it's my favorite and we'll see how it goes. In my experience bitter tea usually comes with steeping too much or too long or too hot for the style.

As for adding fermentables directly to the fermentor...doesn't it bother you that it prevents you from taking a proper OG reading? Because it bothers me haha.

I am curious if the 2oz of green tea will be sufficient. Rough numbers: 2oz = 57 grams and 1t = 3 grams, so 2oz would normally be used to make about 95oz of tea. I have only made beer with tea once and it wasn't green tea, but I used 50 tea bags and a kolsch yeast; the flavor was there, but on the light side.

thespiff said:

I hear you regarding the crystal, but truthfully I don't want this saison to ferment out bone dry. I'd like it to have a small amount of residual sweetness akin to a lightly sweetened green tea.

Gunpowder is my favorite green tea, probably because it's got so much flavor. I'm going to use it this time just because it's my favorite and we'll see how it goes. In my experience bitter tea usually comes with steeping too much or too long or too hot for the style.

As for adding fermentables directly to the fermentor...doesn't it bother you that it prevents you from taking a proper OG reading? Because it bothers me haha.

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You can still get readings. Just look at the numbers for the recipe with/without adding the honey and you'll know. When you add it 100% of the honey you add will contribute to the OG. Its not like mashing where you only get like ~70% conversion. So I just have my pre-honey OG target, and then when measuring my FG, I take into account that I added the honey. Same with adding sugars and stuff during fermentation, its pretty common with Belgians

Yeah 2oz is probably too little. I see websites advising 1oz per gallon for brewing tea. I should probably double it.

OK so I've made some modifications and bought ingredients so I think this is the final version of what I will brew.

Boil Time: 60 min
Batch Size: 5 gallons (fermenter volume)
Boil Size: 6 gallons
ABV: 5.4%
(estimated) OG: 1.048
(measured) OG: 1.046 + 0.004 from honey fermentor addition = 1.050

(estimated) FG: 1.007
IBU: 24

Steeping Grains (45 min in 3 cups water @ 153, spargeed with 3 cups water):
0.5LB Munich Malt

Grains:
3LB Pilsner LME
2.25LB Pilsner DME
0.75LB Wheat DME
0.7LB Wildflower Honey


0.55oz Sorachi Ace 60 min 11.9% AA 23.7 ibu
1oz Sorachi Ace 0 min 11.9% AA 0 ibu
2oz loose leaf Gunpowder Green Tea, steeped for 3 minutes after wort is chilled to 180.

Yeast: WLP566 - Saison II

I swapped some Pilsner LME out for DME because I had a 3LB bag of that on hand, and adjusted the weight down appropriately. I also decided I wanted more like 10% wheat so I added a quarter pound there. Swapped out the Hallertau for Sorachi Ace. Doubled the tea amount because I want to taste it. I'll probably also chuck the remaining 0.45oz of my Sorachi Ace packets into the fermenter for a 7-day dry hop, because otherwise it will go to waste. I might brew it this Sunday, or wait another week.

that looks really good. Just be sure to keep the yeast warm and happy. Extract batches seem to sometimes have trouble hitting a low FG but hopefully the attenuation of the saison yeast can help out.

thespiff said:

As for adding fermentables directly to the fermentor...doesn't it bother you that it prevents you from taking a proper OG reading? Because it bothers me haha.

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If you wanted to you could buy an extra pound of honey, dissolve it a gallon of water and take a reading. Then you'd have a baseline to figure out how much gravity the honey will add to your wort.

BrotherBock said:

If you wanted to you could buy an extra pound of honey, dissolve it a gallon of water and take a reading. Then you'd have a baseline to figure out how much gravity the honey will add to your wort.

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you dont need to know how much it will add. With stuff like honey and simple sugars, you already know how much it will add since online calculators know the sugar content of sugar, or honey. With malts, the contribution is an estimation based on your efficiency. But when you dump sugar into the wort, 100% of that sugar gets turned into sugar for the yeast

For instance, in a 5 gal batch:
1.0 lb honey adds +0.007 / +0.002
1.0 lb cane sugar +0.009 / +0.002

there will be some variance in the sugar content of honey, but there's pretty standard numbers out there

m00ps said:

you dont need to know how much it will add. With stuff like honey and simple sugars, you already know how much it will add since online calculators know the sugar content of sugar, or honey. With malts, the contribution is an estimation based on your efficiency. But when you dump sugar into the wort, 100% of that sugar gets turned into sugar for the yeast

For instance, in a 5 gal batch:
1.0 lb honey adds +0.007 / +0.002
1.0 lb cane sugar +0.009 / +0.002

there will be some variance in the sugar content of honey, but there's pretty standard numbers out there

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Yes, but not all honey is created equal

EDIT: Just realized you said there is variance with honey.....

Yeah I know, Beersmith will tell me the gravity impact of my honey addition. I just draw an irrational comfort from the actual empirical measurements

I will follow advice and add the honey 2-3 days into fermentation. I already spent 10 freaking dollars on a pound of local wildflower honey that will likely be indistinguishable from what I'd get with $1 worth of table sugar so I might as well try my best to bring the flavor through.

I actually did a green tea session saison a bit ago too and will do another version too. Also added Cannonball, used Sorachi, but went with French Saison yeast and also added a good amount of lemon peel. Turned out great for a first shot at the recipe.

I did however go differently about the tea addition. I only did a total of 1.8oz of tea. First .9 were brewed seperately at 144f in 34oz of water. That is the lowest range used for green tea and minimizes tannin extraction while leaving volatile stuff in there. 3 min on that.
Second .9 went into secondary for 4 days and were sanatized and soaked in 4cl of Vodka the day before.

The main complaint I got about this brew was that the tea was just a tad too much. Next time I will use a milder, more flowery one as cannonball is pretty bold.

I brewed this tonight. No problems, and my quickest batch so far. I didn't do a great job maintaining 153 for 45 min on my mini-mash, but I think I did well enough. I mashed 0.5lb Munich with 3 cups of water then sparged with another 3 cups. My oven doesn't go below 170, which stymied my plan to just toss the pot I used as a mashtun in there to maintain temp. So it was a more active mash process than I would have liked . My OG finished 2 pts higher than estimated (1.046 without the honey, which should add 4 pts), presumably due to the extra mashing work. Fine by me.

Kiichi talked me down from a 4oz. green tea addition. I went with my originally planned 2oz. and sampled the wort afterwards. I felt like I could taste plenty of tea so I left it at that. I'd never tasted my pre-fermented wort before, boy was it bitter and unpleasant. I guess it's all that trub in suspension? I'll take a sample once fermentation slows and if it's lost a lot of tea flavor I will probably add more along with the leftover 0.4oz sorachi ace.

I also must say I was quite pleased to be able to sample the first bottle of my last batch and also enjoy a pint of my second-to-last batch while I brewed. My pipeline is almost full for the first time

I'm curious to see how this turns out. I did a Green Tea Blonde a month ago using 6oz of loose leaf when I was chilling my wort for 2 min. Today the beer has more nose of green tea than taste. It's extremely subtle and you need to actually know it's there to even notice it. When I tasted the wort it had a deep green tea flavor, but as it fermented a lot of it dropped out.

yeah I never bother tasting my post-chilling wort sample I take for gravity. First thing I'll taste is the actual beer sample from the primary weeks later.

congrats on getting the pipeline going. Its a great feeling. As a rule I always mash in drinking on of my own. Just wait till the pipeline gets so full you've got 7 different weighed out grain bills lying around, 4 kegs carbed and ready, and 4 more fermenting taking up hallway space

Well, looks like I finished at 1.006. With an OG 1.050 after the honey addition we're looking at 5.8% ABV which is a little higher than my target but I'll get over it. It smells and tastes great (though a bit green). I'm very excited to get this one on tap. The local weather cooperated, so I got the fermentation temp up to ~80 for the second half of active fermentation.

I don't really detect any green tea flavor at this point, which is consistent with what people predicted.

I tossed in my extra half oz of Sorachi as a dry hop, and will rack it to a corny in 5-7 days to age for a bit. I suspect it will benefit a lot from resting a month. My belgian golden certainly did. I think when I keg I'll rack onto an ounce more green tea and take a sample every day or so until I get some green tea flavor back, then yank the big tea bag.

I did notice something about the green tea flavor in my beer. When it's cold the green tea is masked and you don't get it, but when it reached room temperature the green tea dominated the beer to the point you couldn't identify the base style. Something to keep in mind.

Thanks for that thought. I took this sample at room temp and will steep and taste at cellar temp so I should be able to avoid adding too much flavor. I'm going to use a light hand, if any. I think the beer is going to be great as-is, so I don't want to ruin it.

Well, I never did add any more green tea. After several weeks cellar conditioning in the keg, the bothersome bitter taste is gone, and I think this is a pretty tasty first saison. In retrospect, I don't really know why I wanted green tea in a saison anyways. I think it's flavor would be better suited to a Witbeer. Maybe I'll try that sometime. It's on tap now.

Next time I think I'll restore the OG up towards the 7% ABV specced in Jamil's recipe. I'll still use honey but I won't splurge on fancy farmers market stuff. I also kinda question the use of Munich malt.

Yeah Munich malt may be good in a roasted Oolong tea beer, but it seems it would kind of clash with the green tea aromatics. I think certain hops would pair well with it. Probbaly why stone makes a green tea ipa

m00ps said:

Yeah Munich malt may be good in a roasted Oolong tea beer, but it seems it would kind of clash with the green tea aromatics. I think certain hops would pair well with it. Probbaly why stone makes a green tea ipa

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If only that green tea ipa from stone didn't taste like muddy matcha.

One thing I should point out is that I replaced Jamil's Munich LME with an equal amount of Munich malt which I mashed for 45 minutes. Since Munich LME is 50% Munich and 50% base, it turned out that I unintentionally doubled the amount of munich that the recipe called for, and I think that explains why it is so dominant in the flavor profile of my final beer.

I bottled a gallon of this to share with a friend (his daughter was born while I was brewing it) and after drinking the obligatory test bottle I reserved for myself...some final takeaways:
1) Honey = fair game, but don't overspend on it.
2) Use an even lighter hand with the malts that aren't a base malt in a saison.
3) fermentation forces a lot of flavor out of the airlock. Next time I'll brew strong tea and add it at bottling or kegging time.

You're #3 is what I did with my spiced tea blonde ale. I brewed 4 gallons and added a gallon of tea at bottling.