Smoked Saison

Hi guys,

This my latest brew – a smoked saison using some home smoked malt. I thought I’d do a bit of a write up on the process in case anyone else might be interested in trying to do something similar. I’m a massive fan of smoked beers and recently picked up a bottle of “Hrungnir’s Heart” from the ever excellent masters of smoke; Torrside Brewing. This utilises Birch smoked malt from Gotland in Sweden and was an amazing beer, so I decided to try and brew something similar. I contacted the brewery who were really helpful in giving me a rough idea of how much smoked malt went into the recipe so I could scale it down to homebrew level. I then had a look at getting my hands on some of the Swedish Birch smoked malt but, while the cost of the malt itself was pretty reasonable, the shipping to the UK was horrendous. As a result I thought I may as well have a go at smoking some malt myself.

I’ve got a reasonable amount of experience in hot smoking meat but I’ve never really done anything in the way of cold smoking. After doing a bit of reading online I picked up a smoke maze and some chipped Silver Birch to use for the smoke. I built a tray to go into my offset smoker from a couple of offcuts of wood and some fine plastic fly screen material, which allows the smoke to pass through while stopping the malt from falling out. Going forward I plan to make a few more of these so I can stack them, enabling me to smoke more malt in a single batch. I calculated I’d need around 1KG for the recipe I was using and used some Golden Promise, as this is my go to base malt currently. I spritzed this with some deionised water as this helps the smoke to better stick to it. From what I have read online using tap water for this is a no-no as the chlorine within it in combination with the smoke can produce some unpleasant flavours.

Lighting the maze was a real nightmare at first, as it seemed to smoke for a while before going out, but after using a blowlamp for stripping paint I managed to get it going. I placed the maze in the smoker’s main chamber, directly under the malt tray, and left this, returning every hour or so to spritz the malt and give it a stir. I ended up letting the entire maze burn out to get maximum smoke flavour which was quite a few hours in the end. I found the malt became quite warm, but this appeared to have no effect on efficiency or conversion as I was able to hit my predicted gravity. After finishing smoking I transferred the malt over to a paper bag to let it rest, as I’ve heard using it straight after smoking can lead to beer that tastes a lot like an ash tray. I ended up leaving it for around three weeks and interestingly I found that whenever I checked and smelt it the malt didn’t seem hugely smoky; which at this stage I was a little disappointed with. Nevertheless I proceeded with the brew, using my standard Saison recipe but swapping some of the Golden Promise out for the smoked malt. 

This was the recipe:

Brew day went well and I left the beer in my brew fridge for a week before eventually kegging it. I found that the samples I took in the week prior were a lot less smoky than I anticipated, which again was a bit of a disappointment.

Luckily this improved during the days the beer spent carbonating in my keezer and upon pulling the first pint I was pleasantly surprised at how smoky the beer was. The initial hit on the nose is massive but seems to subside the further you get into the pint. It balances really well with the fruity esters from the Saison yeast as well. I’m not really sure why the smokiness seemed to take some time to develop but it does seem to be something others have encountered. 

Overall a beer I’m really pleased with and one I’ll certainly rebrew (potentially with more smoked malt next time!)