Saison du Monk

This recipe is based on Saison Du Mont from Zymurgy magazine. It was the 2009 Big Brew recipe adapted to increase attenuation/gravity and use spices on hand. It took 2nd place at the 2009 Dixie Cup.

Grain Bill:
7.25# 2-row
2# Vienna
.5# Flaked Wheat
.5# Honey
.5# Flaked Oats

Mashed 149*F for 75 minutes.

Hop Bill:
1oz Goldings 90
.5oz Hallertau 15
.5oz Hallertau 0

Spices (optional):
1/2oz Indian Coriander, coarsely crushed, flameout
6oz Orange Marmalade, flameout

Notes:
Chilled wort to 72*F and pitched 2L starter from stir plate. Allowed to ferment in my garage which was between 80*F and 90*F until the primary yeast attenuated to 1.014, which took about 7 days. Then I racked to a secondary carboy, added 1tsp of amylase enzyme powder (DO NOT USE BEANO, IT IS NOT THE SAME THING!!!!) along with a sachet of rehydrated Montrachet wine yeast. Allowed to sit in secondary for two months at 72*F until final gravity was reached (1.006) and the beer was crystal clear. Siphoned to a bottling bucket where I added a sachet of rehydrated Montrachet wine yeast for bottle conditioning. Primed competition bottles to 3 volumes, primed the rest of the batch to 4 volumes and bottled with Belgian bottles and corks. Bottles were fully carbonated within three days, and bottling yeast is highly flocculant leaving the beer crystal clear in the glass.

Adjusted my water profile for a moderately hard water and balanced hop/maltiness using gypsum and CaCl2.

Next time I brew this I will try it without the spices at all.

When you switched to secondary, did you move it to a cooler temperature?

72*F. Updated the OP to make that more clear.

This looks like an excellent recipe. I'm thinking about giving it a try once I figure out how I will hold a temp at 85+ degrees for a week. I'm not a fan of coriander in beer very often, so I'll likely leave that out but include the orange marmalade.

JMSetzler said:

This looks like an excellent recipe. I'm thinking about giving it a try once I figure out how I will hold a temp at 85+ degrees for a week. I'm not a fan of coriander in beer very often, so I'll likely leave that out but include the orange marmalade.

Click to expand...

Agreed I will be leaving out the coriander next time but I like the orange in it!

As for the temp I bought one of these, which is what I will be employing using my ghetto fermentation chamber (aka the 32 gallon plastic trash can):

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0006JLPG8/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20

This one can go from 65 to 86.

I'm thinking of brewing a saison similar to this, and I happen to have a apfelwein brewing right now with montrachets wine yeast. Do you think using that yeast cake for secondary of our saison would work well? We'll be bottling the apfelwein in a few weeks - but I've never done the yeast cake thing, and dunno if there is some reason it wouldn't be a good idea for wine yeast?
Any advice?

Hmm never thought about trying that but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work.