There is a brewing tradition that we associate with 19th-century Wallonian farmers, brewing infrequently on possibly borrowed equipment to slake the thirst of seasonal field-workers. And, today, there is a family of mixed-culture beers made by professional, artisanal brewers for people willing to pay the price of a good bottle of wine.
Both are or have been called “saisons.” But do they really have anything in common?
We’re talking about those complex beers made with blends of yeast and bacteria, often barrel-aged, occasionally fruited, and sometimes blended before packaging. The modern versions don’t have a widely accepted name, but many breweries call them “saisons” or even “farmhouse ales” because they’re inspired by the idea of those farmers making rustic beers in the Wallonian countryside.
Yet in fundamental ways, the two versions are not just unrelated—they’re almost polar opposites. Those old Belgian beers likely would have been rough, while the better modern versions are elegant and refined. The farmers had less control over what they were making, while modern breweries have microscopes and sensitive equipment. The old saisons bore the mark of traditional Belgian brewing, while there are myriad bespoke methods involved in the making of modern ones.
Historians might struggle to connect the two kinds of beers—especially if they’ve tasted the classic “clean” saisons that would later emerge from the Wallonian tradition.
On the other hand, the brewers who make these modern, funky, mixed-culture beers have a genuine interest in connecting them to the land-based, humble beers of the farm. It’s a spiritual legacy more than one linked by process or tradition. When you talk to these brewers, they sound like they’re describing a calling, not a job.
Likewise, the drinkers who truly get these mixed-culture saisons find a similar communion. These are beers that connect place and time with the maker’s hand, while their complexity and refinement make them truly distinctive.
They’re special beers, and they echo something from the past.
Rustic and Functional
When Michael Frith uses the word “saison” to describe Funky Fauna’s mixed-culture beers, he specifically wants to evoke 19th-century Belgium.
“With a word like ‘saison,’ there’s such a history,” he says. “Our intent was to go back to that historical saison, knowing that they were made for the farmhands by the farmers.” Yet the central Oregon brewer isn’t blind to what many of those beers must have been like. When I mention how much variation amateur brewers working on provisional equipment must have produced, he laughs and says, “No doubt.”
“Rustic” points to the countryside, but it can also mean rough or unpolished—and surely a great many of the historic saisons would have been. Only larger farms would have had a brewery on-site; smaller operations used communal equipment or borrowed from the neighbors. Farmers malted their own barley, imperfectly, before subjecting it to those rough-and-ready brewhouses. They brewed sparingly, after the harvest—usually in November, once the weather had cooled, and maybe once or twice before March, when it started to warm up again. They made generous use of local hops to retard runaway infection because microbial interventions were a given. They didn’t brew to specific recipes and may have added wheat, oats, buckwheat, or spelt, depending on what was available.
Both in describing that tradition and informing the funky, mixed-culture approach of modern brewers, it’s hard to overstate the influence of the research done by Yvan De Baets—especially his chapter in Phil Markowski’s Farmhouse Ales book, first published in 2004.
According to De Baets, cofounder and brewmaster at the Brasserie de la Senne in Brussels, Wallonian saisons were quite light before the 20th century—often with starting gravities around 6–9°P (1.024–1.036). Those brewers generally would have conducted infusion mashes and what we’d consider today to be crazy-long boils of five hours or longer. Brewers kept their own yeast or borrowed from neighboring farms, but these weren’t pure cultures. (Carlsberg’s Emil Christian Hansen wouldn’t isolate the first pure strain until 1883.) These beers would go into casks, where they’d rest for months; their high hopping levels would diminish while acidity emerged, achieving a kind of balance as bacteria and wild yeast worked their biochemistry.
While some modern brewers use spices or dry hops to enhance the flavor of their saisons, the Wallonian farmers might have used them to soften the edges. In some cases, dry hops would “rejuvenate” old beer. The finished beers often would have been acidic, hoppy, weak, and—until brewers started bottling them in the 20th century—flat.
Saison was a functional beverage—an honest drink and one very much belonging to and consumed upon the land where it was produced.
Diverse Methods
Modern brewers don’t make beer that way. In fact, when it comes to these funky, mixed-culture creations inspired by that Wallonian tradition, there is no single way—there are many.
They may start with a normal Saccharomyces fermentation and finish with a Brettanomyces strain. Or they might combine lactic bacteria and Saccharomyces fermentation before conditioning on Brett—or they may have a house mixed culture that includes all that and more. They might do all this in stainless steel or, more commonly, in repurposed wine barrels inoculated by previous mixed-culture batches. Fruit additions are common; spices are not.
Modern brewers rarely conduct spontaneous fermentation—these beers are more like “managed wildness.” At Funky Fauna, Frith ferments his ales with what he calls “the slurry.” Aiming to capture the terroir of central Oregon, he turned the brewery’s kettle into a makeshift coolship to collect the initial culture.
“We just opened up the window one night and let it sit,” he says. “The next morning, I took a little Mason jar and skimmed off the top. We propagated that up, and we’ve been using it ever since. It’s just a kind of solera method. It’s been living in two three-gallon carboys for four years now that we just pitch and keep feeding.” Though it was initially a wild capture, the slurry is now a stable blend that the brewery can trust.
Anne Grybko, who heads Oxbow’s mixed-fermentation program in Portland, Maine, uses a similar approach—if slightly more controlled. The brewery’s clean saison strain gets first crack at fermentation, then the house mixed culture will have its say.
“Our mixed culture is ever-changing,” Grybko says. “It could be certain components of Lacto, certain components of Brett, certain components of other things. We haven’t gotten it tested in years.” Once the beer is in tanks or foeders, Grybko monitors its development. She knows what its general character should be, and she can adjust if it starts wandering too far off track.
“We have that culture spread throughout the different tanks and beers aging at different rates,” she says. “It definitely gives us the ability to adjust. Once the tank has gone too far, we can completely reset that tank and pull a culture from one of the younger tanks.”
This is wild brewing—up to a point. The world didn’t fully understand the mechanism of yeast until the mid-19th century, to say nothing of all these different microbes and their effects. Brewers know much more today—they understand how these microorganisms behave, what they need to survive, and the flavors, esters, and acids they produce.
And, unlike the old farmer-brewers, they can adjust.
Thinking of these beers as “wild ales” or “saisons” also frees breweries from some of the more rigid techniques of other traditional styles, including lambic. While that opens the door to creativity, it also opens the door to innovation and refinement.
For example: Lambics develop slowly, Frith says, because spontaneous inoculations don’t provide the level of microbes that come from pitching a mixed culture. Funky Fauna’s beers are typically ready in two to four months, plus a few more weeks if they’re adding fruit.
“You think it needs two or three years, but then it just oxidizes and goes acetic,” Frith says. In that shorter window, he says, they get brighter beers with restrained acidity and better balance.
Saison, Wild Ale, Modern Funk?
We are big on taxonomy in the world of craft brewing—last year’s Great American Beer Festival competition included 108 different style categories—but we have yet to settle on what we should call these modern, funky beers.
People in the industry tend to use the language of production—mixed fermentation, for example—but that may not help regular consumers. I reached out to Mirella Amato, the Toronto-based beer sommelier and expert in sensory analysis, to ask how she deals with this issue.
“Historically, we’ve tended to describe it from the perspective of brewers,” says Amato. “I stray toward not overly describing ingredients or processes. When I’m talking about acidity, I’ll talk about the level, and whether you are getting more yogurt or fruit instead of talking about lactic or acetic.”
Maybe this is one of those rare types of beer where the needs of regular consumers shouldn’t be our guide—these beers may never be for the mainstream. These are beers that come from a subculture of brewers who make them despite their commercial and technical challenges. (“I spend so much time doing these beers,” says Grybko at Oxbow. “I literally lose sleep thinking about this one tank.”)
And those brewers are defying good business sense not only for themselves, but also for the sake of a few drinkers who love their strange, exotic, decidedly non-mainstream flavors. They’re the ultimate “secret handshake” beers.
So, maybe “saison” still works after all—none of the normies understand what that means, either.
