I honestly love that saison yeasts are so much more available than they used to be 15 years ago. I love saison yeasts as a base for mixed fermentation beers, I love them for cider, I have not tried them in a mead but I’m sure I’d love that too.

But I had have a brick left from the last one, and I was struggling with ideas for what I would use it in. Then I remembered a beer from many years ago, when I was homebrewing while working a corporate beer job and hating pushing thousands of litres of homebrand lager though the system every day.

One of my first “weird” beers, a black rice grisette. I also have a deep love for the nuttiness of black rice, and it pairs very well with a saison yeast. At the time I thought saisons needed a healthy dose of wheat, so I wrote it that way and only discovered a while after that what I had made was a grisette.

The etymology of the name is interesting too - while the saison was for the farm workers, grisette was for the coal miners. It means “little grey one”, a reference to the grey dresses the women and young girls wore as they would give these beers out to the workers. I’ve heard that the dresses were grey because it was the cheapest fabric, and a competing story that the dresses would always end up grey from exposure to the coal dust, but I really don't think it matters.

Grisette was also a term for a woman in the bohemian world, an independent, working class and sexually liberal woman who would hang out with the artists and such.

One of my favourite aspects of beer history is how deeply soaked it was into the stories of working people.

Anyway, this beer has black rice and hibiscus, both of which contain anthocyanins. If you wanna play around, dose it with a drop of something acidic like lemon juice or vinegar, and see what it does.

Enjoy.