NOTE: This is still a work in progress.
This Saison has no spices or flavor additives. Instead I prefer the yeast and hops to come through with the character of the malts.
As a matter of practice, I like to ask myself why I am adding something. The Pilsner malt is the primary character here and the classic Saison malt. With the Munich malt, I deviated from the classic Vienna malt as I wanted a bit more color and a bit more malt character to balance the dryness. To further help with the malt character, I do not add the Munich malt until the 152F mash step so that it is entirely mashdd at the highrr temperature. The Rye gives some character while helping with mouth feel (again due to dryness), foam retention and adds a bit of haze. The cane sugar is there to help with attenuation and drying this out.
NOTE: I crush my malt after grain conditioning to leave a better hull structure. If you are dry crushing, then you may want 0.5-1.0 lbs rice hulls in the mash to aid lautering. Generally I do not recirculate the mash until after the Munich malt addition.
For water, I use RO with Calcium Chloride to add calcium and help with a smoother mouthfeel.
I do a recirculating mash on a BrewHA BIAC. I do a protein rest at 131F to help with the rye not sticking up the mash, followed by a two step infusion at 146F to get high fermentabilty and then 152F with addedMunich malt to balance some dryness with malt. Once mash is complete, I mash out at 170F to help thin the mash for better sparging, then sparge until I have 6 gal in my boil kettle. The 90 min boil (with a higher percentage of Pilsen I like a longer boil to make sure the Dimethyl Sulfides, DMS, is removed) will reduce by about 0.5 gal on my equipment to get to my 5.5 gal batch size.
Hops are pretty non-traditional with Galena (FWH) and Sterling for a nice citfus and spice character.
You will need a good yeast starter, plenty of O2 and a warm fermentation to dry this out properly. I typically will go down to 1.002 - 1.000 (or less) with WY3711, but not as much with WY3726. As the flocculation is so low, I still use Whirlfloc in the boil and still get a nice haze.
I pitch at 65F and slowly ramp to mid 70's. If it goes too high I start detecting fusels, which I do not care for. You can push it higher if it needs to attenuate more. After generally 10 days I cold crash the primary (I use a jacketed conical) for a day and then rack to a corny keg and condition for a month or more at ambient 68F before chilling and carbonating rather high at 3.6 vols of CO2.
