Friday night's beer review #4: St. Feuillein Saison (and steempub tag plug)

Tonight I will be reviewing a Belgian speciality: a Saison.

The Saison St. Feuillein is a beer coming in at 6,5%ABV. it is brewed by Brewery St. Feuillein, who owns the right to brew the abbey beers of the Abbey of La Roeulx. (This is the difference between abbey beers and trappists, abbey beers can be brewed by commercial companies, but there are some rules)

The name of the brewery, and the associated beers, comes from the Irish Saint St. Folian, he was a missionary who lived here. After his assasssination the site of his killing became a site for pilgrimages, later an abbey was founded on that site.

In The Glass

This beer is amber in colour, and is opaque. It has a nice head of white foam, but it is rather coarse foam, which collapses relatively quickly, it does however leave a film on top of the beer for quite some time (A thin layer of foam on your beer creates a boundary for the CO2, making it more difficult to escape your beer, thus keeping it agreeably carbonated for longer.

The Aroma

This beer presented it's aroma as soon as I opened the bottle: It smells hoppy. This is innate in the style, below I explain what the style is all about. There is also a distinct sweetness in the scent.

This saison has been dry hopped, which causes the scent. It is not necessary , but some saisons are. In this technique, once the wort has been cooled down and yeast has been added, you will put hopflowers in a permeable cloth bag, and hang it in the wort for a couple of hours to a couple of days.

The Taste

The hopiness continues in the taste, and it is a dry-hopped hopiness. Because the hops are not exposed to boiling temperatures, a lot of volatile compounds which are normally lost during the brewing remain in the beer, making the beer taste like hopflowers smell when you hold them in your hands.

Despite this hopiness, this beer is not very bitter. There is quite a sweetish touch to it. I suspect that it has been deliberately been kept on the sweeter side in order to make it palatable to a larger public, but that's not an issue, since it tastes good, and remains a fresh thirst quenching beer.

Aftertaste

There is not much aftertaste in this beer, but there's not really meant to be, as I explain below, this was a beer meant for drinking against thirst while in the hot sun, not for sipping over a cold winters night. The hop flavour remains somewhat in your mouth, and a slightly malty side presents itself aswell.

About the beer style

This is a historical beer style, and first I have to explain about brewing itself. A long time ago, In a galaxy far away (or just on this planet, before the invention of cooling technologies), beer could only be brewed in winter. In winter there are less micro-organisms abounding to infect your freshly brewed beer, and the colder ambient temperature cools your wort (the endproduct of brewing, before it's fermented) much quicker than it would cool in summer. It's mostly the phase between 70°C to 30°C which is an infection hazard.

Only, even with those techniques, most beers only had a very limited shelf life, breweries where local, and beer was distributed daily to the neighbouring taverns , which sold it.

But if you can only brew in winter, and it has no shelf life, that means that at the end of summer, when that back breaking time of the year known as the harvest-season comes in, you will be left without beer...

In order to deal with this problem, brewers, especially the farmers themselves (many farms had on site breweries for themselves and their personnel) made a beer which was specifically designed "Pour la saison" (French for "For the season").

Hence the name.

This style is made by brewing a beer which is rather heavy in alcohol (6.5% is on the heavy side, it would more likely have been around 5% whereas most other beers at that time would have been around 3%.)
The reason for this is that alsohol works antibacterially. The higher the alcohol content, the less quickly a product will spoil. (This is why from a certain percentage of alcohol onward, products will keep indefinitely).

The hops in the beer again product this same antibacterial effect, and they also produce a bitterness, which will mask any slightloff-flavour produced by exceeidng it's shelf life.

And due to this bit of brewing ingenuity, there was beer at the end of summer, and the farmers could offer their labourers a refreshing beer during the harvest periods.

Sometimes in English this style is referred to as Belgian Farmhouse Ale.

Steempub plug

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