A week or so ago I brewed up a batch of light beer for an experiment. I’m trying to recreate the taste and smell of a Cornish Saffron Bun in a beer. Why? I’m not sure.
The beer grain bill itself is just Maris Otter with a little Vienna to enhance the flavour and colour, and then I’ve bittered and flavoured it with Spalt hops, adding a bit of Saaz at flameout to pick up a bit of spice with any luck.
Mmm delicious? Looks horrible there, but that’s 40 pints of beer boiling away
It sat in the fermenter for a week and dropped from 1.053 to 1.010, which was a little further than I’d anticipated, but no matter. On Sunday I racked it to secondary with a couple of choice additions. First up was 150gm of raisins, soaked overnight in boiling water in order to kill off any nasties and get them to swell up. These were drained and roughly chopped before putting them in a muslin bag in the bottle of the secondary FV. Next was the colourful bit.
Saffron infusion, ready for secondary
I infused 2 grams of saffron in recently-boiled water overnight, and it took on a wonderful rich, amber colour. I poured it stamens-and-all into the bag with the raisins in and tied the top.
I siphoned the beer off on top of the muslin bag of yumminess, leaving a sludgy mess in the primary. I was expecting to lose a lot more to be honest, after a mistake I won’t be making again (note to self: if you’re going to try batch sparging, vorlauf every time, not just on the first runnings…), but all the trub dropped out really well.
All I’ve got to do now is wait until the weekend before bottling and sampling it. I honestly have no idea how it’s going to turn out, but as long as it’s not disgusting I don’t really mind. The sample I took on the weekend before the infusion was very tasty!