The most recent beer I’ve bottled has been a Belgian Saison. For those of you familiar with Belgian beers this one certainly has some earthy, and unusual flavours. Surprisingly this beer likes to ferment in warm weather – the warmer the better actually. anything from 27 to 35 degrees which makes Rocky in summer the perfect place to brew this type fo beer. I obtained the recipe from Jamil Zainasheff’s Brewing Classic Styles. This beer took 7 weeks to ferment and has a kick to it coming out at about 6.4% alcohol per volume. If you’re interested in the tasting notes you can check out the 2008 BJCP Style Guidelines.
Belgian Saison
I obtained most of my ingredients with the exception of the liquid malt and hops from Craftbrewer.com.au. I used Tetnanger hops which I obtained, in addition to the liquid malt, from a local brew store. The secret with many of these brews though is the yeast. Fortunately places like Craftbrewer.com.au keep speciality yeasts, grains and the like to enable us more adventurous brewers to brew more exotic beers. Otherwise we’d be just churing out the standard homebrew fare, which in the m ajority of cases is beter than the mega-swill one normally pays through the nose for.
The current beer I have down at the moment is a Californian Common Ale. Again I obtained the recipe from Brewing Classic Styles and got most of my ingredients from Craftbrewer.com.au. I got the liquid malt from a local brew store. With both the Saison and the Californian Common Ale I mini-mashed the specialty grains as I’ve yet to master the full mash. One of the frustrating things with home brewing in this part of the world is that its quite difficult, (I won’t say impossible) to obtain different strengths/densities of liquid and dried malt.
This current brew requires fermentation to occur at 17 degrees Celsius. How does one achieve this I Rockhampton I hear you ask? Easy peasy really if you’ve got a fridge controller. I got quite a simple set up from Dave’s Homebrew in North Sydney. Once you’ve got your fridge controller all you need to do is to plug the fridge into the controller and dial in your temperature accordingly. The controller has a probe which you need to keep in a bottle of water to ensure the temperature of the wort is consistent with the dialed in temperature. Other types of controllers, including digital ones, are available but you need to wire them into your fridge. Although I come from a long line of electricians I afraid that’s not my thing. Easier the better for me.
I think my next beer will be a nice a simple light lager which I’ll be able to easily brew now that I have the magic controller. I’ll talk more about lagering in my next beer missive
Posted by Graham Black 
