After brewing our last Saison with kinmokusei (osmanthus), which we made with our friends at Miyama162, we have been looking for a way to get some more into another beer. After some thought, we decided this was where our updated saison for our Rediscovery Series had to go, giving us an excuse to brew it every year!
This being our second round with Kinmokusei, we were excited to play with the flavours some more and, while last time we really wanted to enhance it to make Kinmokusei the standout flavour, this time we wanted it to be a still significant feature but in a broader image featuring citrus as well. Being a saison, we decided to take a mixed grain approach, balancing a clean barley character by adding mouthfeel with wheat and a touch of spice with rye malt. The hops were split into 2 main flavour profiles with apricot-like stone fruit and bright citrus flavours, and we added a little more bitterness this time to balance the sweet peach/apricot flavours of the kinmokusei.
The flowers were steeped in the whirlpool as if we were brewing a big batch of tea, before sending the wort over to fermentation. For citrus flavours, we steeped this beer with fresh iyokan peel for just over 2 days. This beer also got a light dry hop of Luminosa hops, overlapping with both the citrus peel and apricot flavours so well. We finished it off with a farmhouse yeast, adding a slight peppery character. Lastly, this beer was can-conditioned to give it more of a bright and spritzy carbonation, just as we do with other beers in this Rediscovery Series.
I (James) Have been looking forward to this beer for months - no exaggeration! Kinmokusei has been a favorite new ingredient of mine since I started brewing in Japan because of its unexpectedly strong but pleasant flavour, so if you missed out on the first one, come give this a try before we drink it all ourselves!