Site Manager Brouerij Rodenbach, Roeselare, Belgium
How did you get started in brewing?
I entered the brewery in ’82 as the purchaser. In ’93 the position of technical production director became free. From being the purchaser, I knew the raw materials very well. Also, we had lived for twelve years in the brewery—so when there were problems in the brewery, they called me.
Literally in the brewery?
Yes, yes. Above the entry, above the offices, there is an apartment. Our two children were born at the brewery, so that was a very nice life.
And your background?
I had a great background about beer brewing, certainly what happens in our brewery, Rodenbach, but not enough background for the whole beer story. So, for one year I studied brewing technology. In ’96, Prof. Delvaux [Center for Malting and Brewing Studies, Catholic University of Leuven] became the advisor in our brewery and realized very important things to optimize production and control quality.
Rodenbach’s beers are so unusual. What are the particular challenges in brewing them?
First of all, you have to know the spirit about our type of brewing. It’s a late Middle Ages conservation method.
In the Middle Ages, brewers didn’t use hops; they only used herb mixtures named gruit. The brewers had to buy gruit—it earned taxes for the counts of Flanders—and it was costly. They didn’t know hops very well in our area, and they only thing they had to make beer was stone, metal and wood. The maturation occurred in wood: they couldn’t clean it, and the beer was bad in one or two weeks, infected by acetic acid and lactic acid. The beer must be consumed very fresh.
In England, in the neighborhood of London, there was a method that part of the beer stayed longer in wood vats, so that you have complete acidification.
[Here is the basic concept.] You start with water at pH 7. When you make a brew, after filtration you have 5.6-5.8 pH. Then you cook the brew and you have between 5.1 and 5.4. Then you add yeast—it was always mixed yeast culture—and after fermentation you have pH between 4 and 4.2.
You have to know that 3.5 is a very important pH in beer production, because under 3.5 the beer is less vulnerable to bacterial infection and has a longer shelf life.
They take a part of the beer and let it mature in wooden vats; the pH goes down to 3.1 or 3.2. That is the case in our great wooden vats. Then you blend some of it—a quarter, fifty percent, thirty-three percent—with younger beer and you bring the pH down in the neighborhood of 3.5. That is the method of conservation.
The longer you let the beer mature in the vats, the more acetyl acetate you have. In our vats we have acetic acid at the top of the vats, because there’s a little bit of air space. After one year of maturation, acetic acid becomes ethyl acetate, which is the green apple taste you have in Grand Cru.
When the air space is too great, then you have too much acetic acid, and the beer is too strong. When there is too little, then maybe the beer is not strong enough. So therefore, after two years, we have to blend several vats together to have a good blend of mature beer.
The second thing that is very important is the ratio of surface to volume. We have vats of 180 hectoliters, and 350 and 650. The beer of the 650-hectoliter vats is completely different from that of the 180-hectoliter vats. We say the 180 hectoliter vats give you the best beer.
With the 650-hectoliter vats, the beer must stay much longer, and you have more lactic acid. Lactic acid gives you ethyl lactate; acetic acid gives you ethyl acetate.
You can’t smell ethyl lactate, you can only taste it; but ethyl acetate you can smell it because it is very volatile.
These are very old methods, but now we can explain the biochemistry. Long ago, you could find this type of product in the neighborhood of London, the method used for porters. That was entire butt. {At first}, it was blended in the pub; then after that the brewery blended it because they weren’t so honest in the pub.
Porter comes from Latin portare: it means you can drink, the beer is drinkable. Potable.
So, at Rodenbach, the main technical problems are controlling the fermentation process, and blending?
Controlling isn’t so easy, because it’s a natural process. We can control the quality of the vats, the quality of the cleaning of the vats, but when there is one wrong bacteria, then you have the wrong taste.
The most important thing is to have enough vats to blend the beer. Some with less ethyl acetate and some with more ethyl acetate, then you can blend very good beer.
Rodenbach has modernized recently, hasn’t it?
After the First World War, there was a brewing engineer, Mr. Leon Lambert, and he expanded the brewery. After him came his son, Jaques Lambert—he left the brewery in ‘82. I was enlisted by Jacques Lambert. The whole rebuilding of the brewery, the restoring of the brewery was made by the son of Jacques Lambert, Bernard Lambert. So, three generations of Lamberts.
Rodenbach was taken over in ‘98 by Brewery Palm. I think that was a good evolution. The brewhouse of Rodenbach dates from 1864; we used it for 140 years. Our bottling room we also had to renew at that time. Palm was looking at bottle capacity and we were looking to economize. So Palm took over and they do the bottling for us now. We have a new brewhouse and the whole restoration of the brewery. That was very important for the future of the brewery.
You are so involved in the brewery. What do you do to relax? Do you relax?
My opinion is that beer is more about people than about beer. Why? Because beer is a communications product. You come in and drink a beer, and ten minutes later you are talking with persons that you didn’t know before. So it’s a very social product. Because of that, I find a great part of my relaxing is in my job.
Now we live in a house three miles from the brewery, so in five minutes I can be there. We have a garden, we have some goats, and for me it’s very important to have something else. Food interests me very much—we’ve been making our own bread now for twelve years.
Then, I have a food question for you. Why is Rodenbach such a wonderful food beer?
Because there is no bitterness in it. You know, bitterness isn’t in our genes. We only can appreciate bitterness after the adolescent state, because we are protected against bitterness. Bitterness in nature is normally poisonous. You have to pick up some knowledge to know which bitter herbs are good for your health.
Our beer is made sour-sweet, not bitter. First you have a sour taste, then a little sweet aftertaste to compensate the acidity: that’s just the same as white wine. So we have in Rodenbach the same pH as white wine, and white wine goes better with food than red wine. Red wine has more tannins, and when you have too much tannins you need a very heavy meal to compensate.
But what you are seeing now in the wine industry, is that the wines that have less tannins. They are more drinkable: like the Syrah, it has more acid. Taste the Syrah blind, in a black glass, and someone will say, “Is this a white wine?” It’s very fruity, with less bitterness, less tannins. So bitterness and tannins are on the same level as taste.
The important thing in Rodenbach is that you have the triangle of taste just as you have in wine. In wine, you have the acidity, and the sweetness and then you have the tannins.
In Rodenbach, you have acidity very similar to white wine—3.5; the sweetness to compensate the acidity, you need that; and the tannins [instead of] dryness. So we have a little dryness in the product, and it is a triangle of taste.
You need a little bit of dryness, because that gives you the possibility to have another drink. That’s what I’ve heard from Rumanian brewers, Czech brewers, German brewers—the beer is in balance. There is no flavor that is dominant.
What are your favorite combinations of food with Rodenbach?
Because Rodenbach is close to white wine, it goes well with seafood and fish but also with white meats: chicken and turkey and pork. Steak is better in combination with Grand Cru, which is a much heavier beer.
What other beers do you enjoy drinking?
I’ve been drinking Rodenbach since I was 12. I was in a youth organization and was two days on the road. It was so warm, and we were so thirsty. I went inside a pub, and I asked the pub owner “We are so thirsty, can we have some water?” She said, “Boys, I’ll give you something that takes the thirst away,” and she gives us Rodenbach in little glasses, and also a bit of water. I took a taste and thought, this is refreshing; my thirst is gone.
Now I am 47, so I’ve been drinking Rodenbach for 35 years. That’s why people have to take it up during their adolescent phase or before, when they want the sweet-sour taste. After that phase, they want the sweet-bitter taste, so it is very important to Rodenbach, and it is the reason why Rodenbach is a student beer.
That’s also the reason why girls and women like Rodenbach more than boys and men, because of the macho culture. You see it very much at festivals: the bitterer it is, the more they like it. That isn’t normal. After two hours, you have only bitterness in your mouth.
In the past, brewers used to have a lot of hops in beer because there was no metal for pasteurization, and for conserving beer. The only way of conserving beer was using hops, and that gives you a lot of bitterness. And if the beer was infected, you had a sour, bitter beer, and sourness and bitterness do not go together. It’s a taste that people don’t want.
So sweet-sour goes together and bitter-sweet goes together, but you have to be careful of sour and bitterness. That’s the reason we use hops in our beer, but under the taste threshold. So you know there is something there, but you don’t know what it is.
Now, they have the methods to conserve the beer by pasteurization, so it isn’t necessary to have so much hops in it. So the great brewers, they have brought the taste level of bitterness lower.
Stella Artois was the best-selling pils beer in Belgium in the sixties and the beginning of the seventies. In the seventies, Jupiler was the best-selling pils beer. Now they have the greatest brand in Belgium, with lower bitterness, and the others have followed.
What is also important to know is that bitterness is more appreciated by northern people. The northern people, also the Germans, appreciate more bitterness than the French people. The more south you go in Europe, the more they like sour-sweet. The more north you go, the more they like bitter-sweet.
I wonder why?
Because of their origin. You see the same thing here in America, because America has mixed culture: people from northern Europe, southern Europe, the Italians, etc.
I think we have to go back 500-600 years ago, the climate was much warmer than it was now in the north and in Denmark—I think we have to go 1,000 years ago. The hops came from northern Europe, from Denmark and Sweden to our areas, German and Belgium in the 1000 and 1100. So it must be in their genes to like much more bitterness than sweet.
When you care about food, it’s important to know why the French people use more sugar in their yogurt than the Dutch people. And they use more sugar for the French-speaking part of Belgium than the Dutch -speaking part of Belgium, so that is not new. You have to think why they have done it. There is always a reason.
To have the spirit to make it better every time, that’s the good spirit. I see the same spirit here with the [American] microbrewers, not just making beer like something from another brewery, but doing the experiments to do it better every time. They have the possibility here to experiment with so many things: with aging, with different kinds of hops, with dry-hopping—it’s amazing.
In Belgium, there is a very dominant beer and everyone wants mainstream, mainstream, mainstream.
Well, things aren’t so different here in the States.
But most of the special beers you can find more easily here than in our region. Therefore, it s very interesting to come over and see how you’re doing it