Today we visited another brewery on our bucket list for Belgium. Rodenbach Brewery is famous for its barrel aged Red beers. After our best nights sleep so far we headed out on the 45 minute drive to the brewery.
We arrived at the brewery and signed up for the tour. They have a unique way of deciding what language the tour will be in, the tour guide speaks French, English, and Flemish/Dutch, which ever of those languages is spoken by the most people on the tour, is the language for the tour. Today there were 9 Dutch/Flemish speakers and 2 English speakers so the tour was in Flemish. They asked us if it was ok and we said sure. She did fill us in on key points in English as we walked on the tour.
The pub and gift shop were beautiful but empty. We were the only guests for lunch, but the food was outstanding, and our first taste of the beer convinced us we had made the right decision to drive over.
The brewery has been in business for 200 years and produces a rare type of beer. Most beers are bottled very quickly after they are brewed usually within a few days. But in the case of Rodenbach a lot of the beer goes into giant wooden barrels called foeders and is aged for 18 to 24 months. There are 296 of these barrels and the larger ones hold 17000 gallons of beer.
After the beer finishes aging it is mixed with newly made beer to create different classes of beer. The most expensive is pure aged beer, and the least expensive is 1/4 aged beer and 3/4 new beer. The type of fermentation they use gives the beer an interesting fruity and sour taste. I am not usually not a fan of these sour beers, but these were exceptional and I enjoyed them.
The barrels are made of French oak and require constant maintenance. The brewery employs a full time cooper (barrel maker)which must be tough to recruit for when there is turnover.
After the tour was over we enjoyed our sample beer and purchased some more excellent beer for the trip. I am really going to be looking forward to our evening beers as we head south.
