Making of a Classic: Saison Dupont
On a warm autumn afternoon in 2019, Yvan De Baets and I sipped cloudy, golden ale from elegant, vase-like glasses. Yvan has been making beer at Brasserie de la Senne for twenty years and, more than that, he has one of the most extensive libraries on Belgian brewing I know. If anyone can answer a question about Belgian brewing, it’s Yvan. Yet when I asked him about saison, he frowned. “Honestly, it’s very difficult to explain. We [brewers] always have our own definition, our own feeling.”
Saisons are at once elusive yet unmistakable. They might be boozy or weak, dark or pale, hoppy or sweet. Meet one in the glass, though, and you know it instantly. After a brewer-led renaissance that started to peak about a decade ago, breweries have discovered that drinkers tend to favor something more familiar. Still, saisons have enough support for breweries to make examples fairly often, and they’ve been moved firmly off the endangered styles list. Saisons may not hit the best-sellers list, but they’re not going anywhere, either. Rare is the case where a single beer accounts for the survival of a style, but it’s mostly true in the case of saison. Well, a single beer, an English writer, and an American importer.
Brasserie Dupont is one of those increasingly rare family-owned Belgian breweries making beer the same way they have for decades. Located in Tourpes, a tiny farming village nine miles from France in Hainaut province, it sits in rural pocket of Belgium that looks like a crazy quilt of farm fields. Dupont, itself a farm, is twenty years older than the United States, but the owners “only” took up brewing in 1844. In 1920, Louis Dupont bought the farm and it has remained in the family since. The family line expanded over the generations, and Dupont now has many family owners, but Olivier Dedeycker is the current brewer and operations manager, a position he’s held for twenty years. He inherited it from his uncle, Marc Rosier, whose tenure dates back to 1964. His wife a Ph.D. microbiologist, manages the brewery’s famous yeast, making it fully a family affair, and one that has seen just two brewers in 58 years.
“My parents lived 500 meters from here and my grandfather lived here, so we were always in the brewery,” he said. “All of my holidays were spent here at the brewery.” Nevertheless, when he went off to college, he wasn’t interested in being a brewer. Until, at least, he’d been gone a few years. Then the old brewery started to call him back home. For years he worked alongside Rosier before taking over in 2002.
The brewery may have enjoyed remarkable continuity—until the 1980s, Dupont malted its own barley and used 19th century equipment—but the rest of the country didn’t. Following the world wars, pilsner finally came to Belgium and began the same colonization there it had in other countries. To survive, Rosier’s father, Sylva, added Rédor Pils in 1950. (It is one of the unsung gems of Belgian brewing; cloudy, rustic, more like a Franconian lager than anything.) The brewery’s saison fell out of favor, and Dupont leaned into a strong blonde, Moinette, released in 1955. Yet very little inside the brewery has changed. When the old equipment finally wears out, they replace it, and they’ve even added a highly-sophisticated robot to the bottling line. In all the key ways, the beer is hardly changed from the way it was made when Rosier took over—and even decades earlier.
Defining Rustic
When De Baets did finally get around to offering a provisional definition of saison, he reached for that word “rustic,” and added “an absence of cleanliness.” I think what he was trying to point to was a lack of industrial precision. Saisons, more than any other style, taste like a wholesome craft, like a loaf of whole-grain bread, something handmade. They don’t taste factory-made.
Dedeycker put it this way. “It was drunk by the people who worked in the fields. We speak of a beer with a low alcohol content, high bitterness, no residual sugar, so a refreshing beer. It was what we call in Belgium bière de saison, saison beer, brewed in the winter and drunk in the summer.”
Dupont makes a fairly large range of beers for a Belgian brewery, but they rely on the same equipment and process—and critically, the yeast. That means there’s not really one saison in the line (the famous flagship, Saison Dupont), but many beers that broadly share a family resemblance. What makes Dupont such a landmark brewery is that makes “process beers,” more defined by the way they’re made than what they’re made of—and thus the family resemblance.
Saison Dupont is a simple beer—just pilsner malt and European hops (unidentified because Dedeycker sometimes needs to switch them to preserve the same flavors and bitterness). Dupont still uses hard water straight from the brewery’s well and the minerality contributes a stiffness to the beer’s profile. Deydecker is also a big believer in the direct-fired kettle, and during my visit ten years ago, he flipped the switch so I could see and hear it roar to life. Once the wort leaves the kettle after a 90-minute boil, it has taken on a honey hue. The mash is simple if unusual, starting at 45 degrees Celsius (113F) and heated slowly until it reaches 72C (162F).
No cylindro-conicals here!
Above all, Dupont’s beers are yeast-driven. To the extent we can find the effable within this mysterious style, it starts with yeast—and Dupont’s is a doozy. (In fact, it’s almost certainly because Dupont’s yeast is so weird and expressive that we now consider it this un-style’s key element.) It’s a blend of strains, and one the brewery itself has maintained onsite for decades.
Before fermentation, the brewery cools the wort to 25C (77F), and then lets it run. The strain is tolerant of blood-warm temperatures, and Dedeycker only intercedes if it hits a febrile 39C (102F). Equally important are the squat, square fermenters the brewery uses, which allow that yeast to really express itself. Like most Belgian breweries, a single fermentation isn’t enough. Dupont bottle conditions the beer, but only in special circumstances: laying down.
“It’s mostly important for us to initiate secondary fermentation in this way,” he explained. It’s a totally different beer if they condition the bottles upright. Olivier continued: “The yeast multiplies very differently. Not the same. We don’t pitch the beer with massive quantities of yeast—we pitch, but just a little bit. It seems to be only a small thing, but the impact on the taste is really big. We made different trials, and the conclusion was that we need to continue like this.” A decade ago, the brewery bought that robot to take the bottles off the line and place them on their sides before the beer goes to the warm room to finish. Formerly, they had to hire people to stand at the end of the line and place them in crates.
Saving Saison
Saisons had dwindled to near nonexistence by the 1970s. Aside from Dupont, the only other example came from Brasserie de Silly, and they were niche products in both breweries’ lines. (Moinette and Redor sold far better). Fortunately, Michael Jackson began poking around Belgium in the 1970s looking for lost treasures, he discovered saisons. He was besotted and, for the first time, an English-speaking audience learned of their existence. That created enough interest that an American importer became interested in importing Saison Dupont in 1986.
“When I did get to [Dupont], they told me that they wanted us to import Moinette,” Don Feinberg, of Vanberg and Dewulf, recalled. “I told them that ‘that’s a great beer, but the beer that I really am interested in is Saison Dupont.’ They proceeded to tell me that they were actually thinking of discontinuing Saison Dupont, which at that point was down to 2 percent of their sales. There were already a number of Belgian strong golden ales and triples being imported to the U.S. by then. So, I wanted something different.” Feinberg encouraged Dupont to change the packaging to make it easier to sell in the US.
Export to the United States saved Dupont’s version of saison, and quite likely the style. It created a strange situation in which Saison Dupont became the flagship, sort of, but sales of that beer rely almost entirely on foreign export.
The rest of the story is familiar. American breweries started making saisons, followed by breweries in other parts of the world. Other Belgian breweries, some that retained the memory of brewing saison, began making their own versions. By the turn of the new century, saisons were safe.
In the years since saisons have become popular outside Belgium, their character has shifted. Americans tend to prefer esters to phenolics, so the intense, hop-enhanced herbal spiciness modeled by Dupont has given way to fruitier examples. This isn’t entirely unusual: breweries often drift away from standard-bearing classic styles. Schneider Weisse is the ur-weizenbier, and it’s also more phenolic and a good deal darker than later examples. Pilsner Urquell, with its low attenuation, stiff hopping, and kiss of diacetyl, has no real peers.
Americans have tended toward mixed-fermentation saisons, and their “clean” versions tend to accentuate fruity esters and rustic grains. Many prefer added spice to the spiciness of the phenols. More and more, I see saisons that are somewhat lower in alcohol, crisp, but largely clean—with just a nice layer of fruitiness. In short, an evolution much like the one that happened in Belgium, as the incredible, process-driven flavors of rustic ales gave way to smooth drinkability of modern brewing. Then, as now, Saison Dupont has always been a beer too characterful for the masses. For those of us who like a beer of complexity, unusual flavor, and incredible sophistication, though, few beers in the world satisfy like Dupont.