Release: Cancíon de Sirena Saison

As part of our San Diego Homebrew Summer program, a dozen local breweries are producing recipes from local homebrewers at their breweries during the sunny season. The third of those domestically devised creations to debut will be a saison from father-and-son duo Kevin and Brandon Holt. That beer was originally called Siren’s Song, but in keeping with the Latina culture driving the brewery that opted to bring that beer to life on a commercial scale, Mujeres Brew House, it was changed to Cancíon de Sirena. You can check out this Belgian-inspired beer at Mujeres Brew House’s brewery and tasting room in Barrio Logan beginning today, but take a moment to read on and get to know about not only the beer but the homebrewing duo known as “The Incredible Holts”.

Cancíon de Sirena | Saison

Commentary from Mujeres Brew House Co-founder Esthela Davila

The recipe for this beer was changed a bit with the blessing of the Holts during a meeting that we had at Mujeres. We stayed as close to the recipe as possible while also ramping it up for our system, and even got to use their unique yeast strain that they have banked at White Labs!

Q&A with homebrewers Kevin & Brandon Holt

When did you develop this recipe and what led you to submit it for consideration?

We came up with a version of this recipe back in 2016. We loved Belgians already but Boulevard Brewing‘s Tank 7 just came to San Diego then and we loved it. It isn’t quit as dry as traditional Belgian saisons and uses mostly American versus European hops, which is a great twist. We modeled this recipe on Tank 7 and it’s one of our favorite recipes, both for competition and for enjoying ourselves.

What are you most excited about with this collaboration?

We are very excited about this collaboration. The Mujeres crew had some great ideas they wanted to try as far as hop-addition timing and we are excited to see how that affects the beer. We are especially excited that they agreed to pitch our proprietary yeast, “Wild Thing”, which we cultured from an apple and pear orchard in Julian. Several years ago, a good brewer friend of ours went to that orchard and had some of their fruit crushed, then put the juice in a carboy to ferment with only the wild yeast from the skins and surrounding area to ferment it. It was an awesome cider, so we took the yeast dregs from the carboy and washed the yeast and used it in a saison recipe of ours to emulate a “farmhouse ale” and it was fantastic, as well. We have entered the beer in the wild-ale category in many competitions and it has always done very well, with judges constantly noting the “pear and apple” notes that obviously carried through from the yeast. We continued to wash the yeast ourselves, but a couple of years ago we went to White Labs and had them bank it for us. They even let us pick a name for it. This will truly be a local, wild “farmhouse ale” saison and we are really excited about it.