This brewery opened in December 1992, and is still largely unknown. A friend of one of our Belgium hosts had just visited the brewery the month before our we arrived in Belgium, and reported that they were brewing with unusual grains. So when a visit was suggested, we jumped on it.
It turns out that the government of Belgium had the notion of developing brewing processes using non-traditional grains, primarily as a way to stimulate agricultural production and open markets for local agricultural products. Early research and small scale brewing experiments were performed in Canada and at the university of Louvain-la-Neuve. Successful beers were produced using buckwheat and spelt (a wheat relative) as principal ingredients. These experiments were underwritten by subsidies from the Belgian agriculture ministry, starting with 3-liter lab batches and working up to 6 hl batches using the brewing studies facilities at Louvain-la-Neuve.
Monetary assistance may also have been provided to the organizers of the brewery, who have built a truly beautiful modern facility in the south of Belgium near Chimay and a vacation lake/camping area. The brewery consists of three dedicated production vessels; a mash tun, a special lauter tun, and the kettle. The mash tun and kettle are normal enough stainless steel vessels while the lauter tun (if one can call it a that--a separator might be more accurate) consists of a large SS vessel containing a removable circular basket, or strainer, and the strainer/basket is attached to a crane attached to overhead support structures. The strainer has slots in the bottom and up the sides about 1/2 a meter from the bottom. The entire saccrified mash is pumped from the mash tun into the basket, which is then slowly raised via the crane out of the lauter tun. In effect, the basket is used like a giant tea bag, with the liquid runoff flowing through the slots into the vessel, leaving the grains in the basket. The liquid is then pumped over to the kettle. There is no sparging performed. The brewers admitted to less than ideal extraction of sugars and a generally difficult separation stage.
Three SS unitank fermenters are used as primary vessels while a fourth is used only for mixing the priming sugar prior to the hand filling of champagne-type bottles. A typical Belgium top fermenting "abbey" strain of yeast is used, most likely quite similar to that employed in numerous Belgium strong ale breweries, including La Chouffe, La Binchoise and possibly La Caracole. Kegs are also used, and are sanitized using forced steam; a steam hose is just pushed into the kegs and allowed to vent, resulting in about 120 decibels of noise pollution. Definitely not my idea of a nice working environment. The brewers were a bit frustrated in terms of keg sales since it is near impossible to break the stranglehold that the giant Belgium brewing consortium, Interbrew, has on tap handles in the country.
One of the nice things about the design of this brewery is that there is a steel catwalk running the entire length of the brewing vessels, including the unitanks. This allows the brewer to do most of his work up top and close to the action. The brewery is generally well designed and constructed, although the brewers noted the difficulty involved in packaging the products. While the rest of the brewery is quite modern, there is no bottling line. A set of manual bottle fillers are used for the champagne bottles, and labels were applied to the bottles we bought the old-fashioned homebrew way--with milk.
The brewhaus is separated from the tasting room by large plate glass windows. The ceiling of the tasting room is brick!
We were able to sample the brewery's two products, Joseph and Sara. Joseph is a blonde beer of 6% ABV. It consists of 55-60% spelt and the balance pale malt. The bottle describes the product as "Bier d'Epeautre" (epautre=spelt). It is blond with a big creamy head, typical "abbey" aroma and some citrus notes. Despite being produced from a large percentage of cereal grains, the beer retains a high degree of malt/hop/yeast balance. It is a broad cross between abbey beers and the ever popular Wits. The beer is named after the person in the agriculture ministry who lobbied for the revival of spelt as a brewing and food grain and who, not coincidentally, provided the subsidies for the early brewing experiments.
Sara is a brune (brown beer), called "Biere de Sarrasin" (sarrasin=buckwheat). It is produced from equal parts of buckwheat and malt and features a caramel aroma intermixed with the abbey esters with a fairly light caramel finish. This is a good beer, but did not approach the quality of the Joseph. It is also 6% ABV.
Last Updated: 16 August, 1995
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