When you have a powerful lust for fruit beers sometimes its hard to stop thinking about them. For a long time Ive been wanting to make a boysenberry beer and one sunday morning I had a fresh pitch of WY3726-PC Farmhouse yeast ready and enough malts for something new so I decided to throw it all together. In my mind I was looking for a jammy kind of saison, something sweet and not too tart, and definitely not sour. The yeast makes enough fruity esters to compliment the boysenberry but my only concern is that it would leave the beer too dry. Boysenberries are very tart and the concentrate I have from Berry Fruit is very acidic. So Ive thrown in a reasonably big mix of crystal malts to try and balance the beer. Im hoping that with a high mash temp and the added crystal the beer will finish somewhere in the 1.014 range and be just right. The grist is actually a scaled down version of one of my barley wine recipe's. The barley wine showed off some amazing dark fruit notes that would compliment the boysenberry.  Its a little counterintuitive when working with a Saison yeast but what can I say, I had boysenberry jam on the brain!

As my main concern is just how tart this beer may end up, Ill keep the hopping low, just 5 IBU for the boil. The acidity can replace the bitterness to balance this beer. Im going to add the boysenberry at the beginning of fermentation so the yeast can get access to the acids and hopefully create something new. How much to use is anyones guess. I have 1 litre of concentrate which is equivalent to about 7 litres of puree so 500ml of concentrate sounds like a good place to start... We will see.

Boysenberry Saison

O.G. 1.048
ABV 5%

Ingredients

70% Galdfield Ale Malt
9% Gladfield Vienna
4% Weyermann Carabelg
4% Weyermann Caramunich II
2% Briess Special Roast
1% Thomas Fawcett Crystal Dark

5 IBU Northern Brewer at 60 minutes

Yeast Nutrients and Koppafloc at 10 minutes

Chill and add 500ml boysenberry concentrate along with 6ppm of O2

Ferment with Wy-3726-PC (1.5L starter from smack pack)