The Making of a Classic: Rodenbach Grand Cru
Listen to this article:
Rodenbach makes one of the world’s most unusual and accomplished beers and routinely finds itself on best-of lists. More than that, it’s a cultural institution. The standard-bearer of the kinds of dark ales made in Belgium’s Flanders region for two centuries, it is home to the largest collection of oaken tuns, some dating to well back into the 19th century, in the country—and perhaps the world. The character of this type of beer, acidic yet fruity, robust, and endlessly complex, is due in large part to the brewing process and those vats, in which beer ripens for years. The small group of traditional breweries making this style are so revered proponents (including the writer Michael Jackson, their greatest fan) immodestly call them the “Burgundies of Belgium.” Rodenbach is the style’s ambassador to the world, and the old brewery feels like its spiritual home.
Rodenbach was founded in the industrial West Flanders city of Roeselare exactly 200 years ago, so let’s mark its bicentennial with a proper celebration of what makes it so important.
History
Rodenbach was born into a Belgium that loved brown ales. This was true nationwide, but especially in the northern Flanders region, and within Flanders, of the western half, from Mechelen to the French border. To 19th century Belgians, a chestnut hue was the mark of quality. They may not have understood the brewing process, but they knew well enough that darker beers took longer to make. In the 1840s, brewer and engineer Georges Lacambre conducted a countrywide survey of Belgium, and catalogued the quirky, impossible-to-categorize beers found in Flanders. There he found brown ales and how brewers made them so.
Modern brewers would use dark malts. Whether that never occurred to them (impossible to believe), or because they considered such malts a cheat, the brewers of Flanders achieved color in the kettle. They used boils of fantastical, comical lengths. The average boil length was nine hours. In the entire country, he found only four beers made with boils of three hours or shorter, while five were over ten hours, and the longest was twenty hours. Twenty! That was, of course, a Flanders brewery.
Rodenbach made dark ales, too, though it was decades before they considered vat-aging. The brewery doesn’t focus much on this period, but rather the one started in 1872. That’s when a third-generation Rodenbach, Eugène, returned to Roeselare from England, where he had been brewing porter. The UK was the center of brewing in that era, with technologies and practices that were decades ahead of Belgium. Yet the knowledge he returned with wasn’t technological or even modern, it was the practice of vat-aging beer to let it ripen like the best of the refined, wine-like London porters—then considered the best beers in the world.
Eugène collected the first huge vats or “foeders” from French winemakers and began to age Rodenbach to achieve the kind of vinous acidity for which porters were renowned. In the 149 years since, the brewery has created an ever-growing warren of cellars. They now number ten, each holding up to 33 of these wooden giants. The smallest are 120 hectoliters (roughly 100 barrels) and the largest are a whopping 650 hectoliters (550 barrels). Many of them are very old—the brewery often says “older than 150 years” but they’ve been saying that for a while. The three oldest date back to the 1830s. There are now 294 of them.
The brewery has continued to evolve, and the beer has as well. Through the 1970s, Rodenbach used a coolship and fermented some of their beer spontaneously, making what brewer Rudi Ghequire likened to a gueuze. Rodenbach installed a state-of-the-art brewery in the late aughts that floats in a glass enclosure amid grounds unchanged since Eugène‘s time. Sleek and stainless, it even has a cereal cooker, which in Belgium counts as “traditional.” Old foeders make good beer, but not old brewhouses.
Brewing Process
Rodenbach is one of those rare beers—most of them made or inspired by Belgians—in which the brewhouse is almost an afterthought. One passes by the mash tun and kettle on tours, but briskly. The wort made here isn’t especially interesting, and has been engineered for transformation. Rodenbach no longer employs long boils, and the wort is much like other Belgian grists. It starts with pale malt and uses corn grits instead of sugar (that’s why they have the cereal cooker), along with roast malt for the characteristic color.
Things get interesting once the wort leaves the kettle. Unlike lambic, where brewers conduct a fully natural (or wild) fermentation, Rodenbach pitches yeast to this wort. This part of the brewery looks like any other, with stainless tanks and conical fermenters. It’s not an entirely normal step, though. Rudi described it to me.
“In our [process] we work with a yeast culture with eight different yeast strains and also a little bit of lactic bacterias. During the first week, we have an alcoholic fermentation from the yeast cells, and after one week the lactic bacteria took it over during the lagering time. During the lagering time we reduce the yeast cells in the beer by precipitation, and then we go with a nearly bright, young beer to the wood.”
This microbial cocktail is noteworthy for a couple reasons. First, it’s important to know that Rodenbach sends beer rather than wort to the vats. When Americans first tried emulating oud bruins, they fermented wort with wild yeasts and bacteria, and ended up with beers that might have been good (but often weren’t), but didn’t taste like the ales of Flanders. Equally important, the use of a lactic fermentation doesn’t just lower the pH; it creates acids that wild yeast will later convert to fruity esters—a key element of the flavor profile, and similar to the transformation in Berliner weisse.
From the stainless it goes into one of those 294 foeders, and that’s where the real magic happens. Wild yeast resident in the wood (in most foeders probably originally introduced from the coolship) then slowly chew on the complex sugars and acids, fed by a constant, slow dribble of oxygen into the beer. Yeasts need oxygen to function, so the wood plays a pivotal role. As it grew, Rodenbach did what any brewery does, adding bigger and bigger vats to hold more and more beer. But brewers noticed a problem. “Between the two world wars they bought the biggest vats they could find on the market: vats of 650 hectoliters,” Rudi explained. “They discovered that the beer maturation was not going so fast as in vats of 180 hectoliters. The reason is very simple: the maturation speed depends on the average of the inner side surface and [volume].” In other words, the bigger the tank, the less surface area exposed to the beer, and the slower the maturation. They also discovered that the biochemistry of slow and fast fermentation produced different flavor profiles. Eventually they concluded that the vats of 180 hectoliters were ideal for producing beer with the most rounded profile.
Brewers continually taste the beer as it ages, and make a blend from different foeders, selecting lots to produce a recognizable blend from year to year. During my visit in 2011, Rudi took me around to different vats to sample how varied the beer in them was, and how age transformed the beer. The vats they blend will range from 18 months to two years and the beer they produce is remarkable. It is sharply acidic, with acetic acid (the type in vinegar) playing a noticeable role. The beer will become almost completely dry—some lots reach 98 percent attenuation. Rodenbach has the unmistakable flavor of balsamic vinegar that comes from the interplay of acetic and lactic acids and the esters produced during conditioning.
Rudi decanting aged beer.
“The big difference between spontaneous fermentation and mixed fermentation is with spontaneous you go with wort on wood and we go with young beer. The beer has an alcoholic protection, so it is less risky. After two years, you have a very acid beer. And then you blend that acid beer together with young beer to reduce the acidity in your blend. That is the philosophy of this brewery: it’s conservation by acidity.”
Grand Cru
Rodenbach does sell wholly aged beer in special, irregular releases. For some purists, this is the brewery’s finest product—and it is well worth sampling. Yet Grand Cru is actually the more finished, balanced product. To create it the brewery borrows a page from the lambic playbook, blending the old, aged stock with younger beer—in this case, fresh beer. It’s a practice I’ve seen few Americans adopt, but is a brilliant way to add liveliness, fullness, and sweetness. In the case of regular Rodenbach, the beer is mostly young stocks with 25% aged. But in Grand Cru, two-thirds is aged and a third fresh.
The flavor of Rodenbach is one of the most distinctive in the world. It’s impossible to mistake for other beers, even in the tradition. (Verhaeghe’s Duchesse De Bourgogne, the closest, has the balsamic note, but is winier, sweeter, and fuller. It’s also exceptional.) Despite the sharp elbows the various acids throw, Grand Cru has an intense cherry fruitiness—so much that you may wonder if cherries are a secret ingredient. The fresh beer softens the acids and harmonizes them with the esters. Even though it is the most famous of the range of oud bruins, Flemish reds, and unnamed brown Flanders beers (which all seem to be settling on the designation “roodbruin”—red-brown), Rodenbach Grand Cru is the most assertive and complex of the bunch.
It has inspired generations of fans, and I was delighted to learn that three young men were so smitten they decided to found their own brewery, Verzet. Natives of Flanders, they want to bring more people back to the classic ales of the region. “The reason we started [making this style] is because we love Rodenbach,” one of the founders, Alex Lippens said. “We are fiery fans of it, huge fans. The stories of our fathers and uncles in the ‘80s and ‘90s, [where] next to each pilsner tap you had a Rodenbach tap. We said, wow—we can’t believe those stories almost, and we want that beer style popular again.”
They’re right to revere it. Rodenbach, with its mixed fermentation and vat-aging and blending, is fussed over like no other beer in the world. With its groves of foeders amid acres of cellars, it’s one of the most remarkable sights in the brewing world as well. And, after 200 years of refinement, it’s flat-out one of the most accomplished beers made on earth. Here’s a happy anniversary to our friends in Flanders, along with the wish that it survives another couple centuries.