I just don't care for brewing beer.

It's too much work to get something that's maybe half as good as all the professionally brewed beer you can buy cheaply on every street corner. Brewing mead and even some cider makes more sense to me: The professional options are nowhere near as ubiquitous, affordable, varied, nor often really to my taste. So I realized I hadn't made a beer since the ill-fated chamomile wit in batch 087 a whopping 3.5 years ago. A large chunk of the reason is our PITA apartment setup, which features an inefficient immersion chiller that doesn't connect properly to our crappy faucet. I plan to take a break from beer until I have a permanent home where we can set up the nice plate chiller we already own.

I wanted a low-ABV, fuss-free summer beer, and saisons are my weapon of choice in that category. I'm using the standard recipe from Brewing Classic Styles, a book whose instructions I officially find completely unusable for a casual brewer. I clearly don't brew beer frequently enough to have all the steps in my head already, and I need one complete set of instructions at a time, not vague napkin notes for three methods at once.

Now that I've voiced my frustrations, this beer is, of course, named after Springsteen's No Surrender.

Ingredients in this batch

  • 10.5 lbs continental Pilsner malt
  • 0.75 lbs wheat malt
  • 0.75 lbs Munich malt
  • 8 oz rice hulls
  • 1.7 oz Hallertau pellets at 60 minutes
  • 0.9 oz Hallertau pellets at flameout
  • 1 pack WLP565 Belgian Saison 1 ale yeast
  • 1 oz Hallertau pellets, added to 2 gallons for 1 week of dry-hopping (see Batch 220B below)

Process

Mashed 6.5 gallons at 147 F for 90 minutes, then sparged to get volume back to 6.5 gallons. Boiled for 60 minutes, chilled wort to around 92, and pitched yeast straight in. SG was 1.047 (target: 1.048-1.065). Fermentation took off in a few hours, slowed noticeably after just a day, and seemed basically over after 2-3 days.

On 6/13, I split the batch into two sub-batches:

  • Batch 220A contained 3 gallons of the plain saison. I primed it with 2.25 oz table sugar dissolved in 1 cup of hot water that was cooled before adding. I bottled this sub-batch on 6/13.
  • For Batch 220B, I dry-hopped the remaining 2 gallons with 1 oz Hallertau hops in a hop sock. I removed the hops on 6/21 and bottled on 6/22, after priming with 1.5 oz sugar dissolved in 2/3 cup hot water. The hops were initially prominent (and not great) but dropped out almost completely in a month or so. And now I understand why nearly nobody dry-hops with Old World hops.

FG was 1.002 for a 5.9% ABV. The batch came out clear and with lovely saison esters It's the drinkable, fuss-free summer beer I hoped for.