BIS023 - Saison Koelschip Yard

An up-to-11 flavourful, funky farmhouse Saison bursting with tart fruit aroma. The custom blend of Saccharomyces and Brettanomyces strains pairs with a heavy dose of Sorachi Ace to provide sharp, tangy, tropical and citrus fruit alongside farmyard funk. Mango, overripe pineapple, lemon, orange and creamy coconut are all in the mix, creating a sweet and sour cocktail that’s complex and refreshing. Tangfastics in a glass. Brewed in collaboration with the lovely folk at Glasgow’s Koelschip Yard in celebration of their 4th birthday.

What The Hell Were We Thinking?

This was not a beer that required a huge amount of thinking about, to be honest. Dom from Koelschip Yard was giving us a hand with some bottling while on furlough during lockdown and floated the idea of brewing a beer for the bar’s 4th birthday. What would it be, we pondered? A Saison, obviously. How about a Saison with loads of Sorachi? Aye, that’d be lovely. Grand. 

Obviously, it was never going to be no boring Saison and something a bit funky yeast-wise would be a good match for the Sorachi, with its legendary citrus-dill-lemongrass-coriander characteristics. We selected a couple of strains that looked likely to give us the sort of fruity funk blend we were after and brewed a pilot batch without the dry hop. The results were promising, though maybe a bit closer to a straight Saison than we’d been imagining. We were happy enough though and used the yeast cake from this to ferment the main brew. Straight away the profile was more interesting on the yeast’s second outing, with everything amplified and accompanied by a pleasing sharp sourness. After a couple of months Alex from the bar stopped by to drop a big ol’ bag of Sorachi into the tank, and shortly afterwards the beer was tasting absolutely delicious so we bottled it, and filled a couple of kegs for the big KY birthday bash.

The whole thing went so smoothly and the results are so damned delicious that we brewed a similar wort and the same yeast is now steadily munching its way through that, and tasting just as good. We haven’t decided yet whether to dry hop with Sorachi again or try something else, but it should be ready in plenty of time for the 5th birthday.

Naturally carbonated, vegan friendly