On Sunday 4/12/2015 I brewed a recipe that I found in an add by Briess Malts for Biere De Wallonia Saison. I used the grains that I had, so there are some minor differences in the brands. It was a last minute decision to brew and I used the yeast that I harvested from a previous Saison brewed with Wyeast 3711 French Saison yeast. Everything worked out after having an extra gallon of wort at the start of the boil. I ended up boiling for an extra 15 minutes and everything worked out in the end.

This was the first time that I used hop plugs. They are essentially .5 ounce compressed discs of whole hops that swell up and break up into mostly hole hops. They had them on sale for 75 cents per ounce for Saaz and a couple other types of hops.I liked using them and will try to get more in the future. I use a stainless steel hop spider made from stainless brewing that works well with whole hops.

I placed the beer in my Stainless Steel Brewing Technologies 7.5 gallon Chronical fermenter in the garage and pitched a quart of yeast. It may of been too warm in the garage during the last two days and I moved the fermenter to the chest freezer for temperature control. I wouldn’t of worried if I were using WLP565 Saison yeast, but I’m not sure how this yeast handles the heat. It seemed to die down after the first day.