Saison 001

With my recent tasting of the Barrel Aged Stateside Saison, I decided to go for making my own saison. I was also curious to see what the recipe kits at Northern Brewer were about, so I decided to order the Petite Saison d'Ete recipe kit. They sent me the Safbrew T-58 yeast with it. According to Kyle, this is a Belgian Ale yeast, and advised me to order a saison yeast. I ordered the Wyeast 3711 French Saison yeast.

Since I'm still figuring out how to get the efficiency up on my mashing, I assumed 60% efficiency, and added 4 lbs of pilsen malt to compensate. Here's the command station.

My new toy includes the Better Bottle Carboy that you see on the left.

I mashed for an hour, and here's the wort coming out of the mash-tun.

Nothing different here. I started the boil....

and the water level seemed a little low to start the boil with. I was wondering why because I started with 8.5 gallons of water. The rest of the brew day went smoothly until I was cooling down the wort. I think I turned on the water too high, and the tubing on the wort chiller came loose again and sprayed water into my beer. NOOOOOO. I got pretty pissed off, but got over it pretty quickly.

Lessons Learned:

• Start with more water. I lost a good amount of water because the grains soaked up a good chunk. 
• I need to shove that tubing further onto the wort chiller, and tighten the shit out of it.
• Mash for longer, maybe it'll improve my efficiency.

There's my saison, in front of the Pale Ale 002. 

Yes, that's foil on the top of the carboy. Northern Brewer messed up my order and sent me a bung that didn't fit. The foil didn't really work so that the airlock would bubble, but oh well.
Next morning, fermentation was going strong. I couldn't tell by the airlock, but could tell by the wort itself.