Beer: Le Crécerelle (Saison)

Le Crécerelle (The Kestrel)

Since this is my first post about beer “styles”, let me just say right here that style guidelines exist for one purpose only: beer competitions. There are all sorts of arguments about how these things help consumers differentiate one type of beer from another, but outside of the rarified air of the beer geek world, I doubt sincerely that the average consumer could tell a stout from a quad from a porter from a dunkel. In fact, I’d venture to guess that most people don’t even know that dunkel exists.

Styles become exceptionally challenging when applied to Belgian beers because Belgian brewers are known for throwing up a middle finger at convention and doing whatever they want, which is ironic given that many of the best Belgian breweries are part of the Catholic church which is not known for it’s disdain for rules or tradition.

Saison is possibly the best example of the challenge of applying a “style”. The word saison means season. Traditionally, Saisons were beer brewed at farms to be given to the field workers with their midday meal. They couldn’t drink water because we hadn’t invented water treatment plants yet and water was liable to make you sick whereas beer, which had to be boiled, was germ free. Saisons were traditionally brewed in the late winter/early spring before planting began. Because these beers weren’t for sale, they generally used whatever grains the farmer had in abundance from the last year’s harvest. Contrast with the Germans who instituted the Reinheitsgebot in the 1400’s, when they were still citizens of the Holy Roman Empire, that dictated that beer could only be made with barley, hops, and water (unless you were the Royal family who made the law and just happened to own a brewery that produced wheat based beers and were exempted from the “purity” law … such a coincidence …). Yeast wouldn’t even be discovered until 1876, at the time, it was taken as a matter of fact that beer became beer (much like wine) because God loved us and wanted us to be happy. In addition to pretty much being the leftover grain beer, saisons couldn’t be very strong because the farmer would then have useless workers stumbling around or sleeping in his fields instead of planting and harvesting. They had to be refreshing so that workers would be ready to get back to work after lunch.

Because these were home brewed beers, and not the primary output of the farms, nobody kept any records of what went into them. Eventually, some of the better farms got reputations and actually did begin to sell their beer but only locally. At the time, all beers were created using ambient (spontaneous) fermentation which meant that all of the yeasts involved in the process were wild. This meant that every batch would be different and that every farm would have its own prevailing flavor as a result of the local microflora. Trying to define this as a style becomes kind of insane. The guidelines are incredibly broad. Color can range from pale gold to dark brown, it can be clear or hazy, any grains can be used, it should be hoppy or have low hoppiness, The ABV can range from 3.5% to 9.5%. It can have adjuncts or not. Etc.

For Le Crécerelle, we’ve started with a malt bill that contains three grains, complimented the traditional Saaz with a combination of hops from Alsace, and kept the ABV in the 4.5% range. The aim was to create a beer that met the historical purpose of being refreshing, lighter, and lower ABV. This is a beer that’s expected to be consumed fresh and which doesn’t gain anything cellaring. It is meant to be a social beer which is to say that the average person should be able to have two or three over the course of an evening and still be pleasant company when they get into their Lyft to be driven home. It is hard to identify food that doesn’t pair well with this beer, it shines when paired with lighter or mildly acidic fare like a caesar salad but it’s works to balance a nice deep carbonnade, and the peppery notes work well with a spicy slider.