Vlaams roodbruin bier

Appearance & taste

Kilned or lightly roasted barley malt gives the beer its red-brown colour, and the mixed fermentation its slightly sour taste. It is often both sweet and sour and has a complex aroma. On the nose there is the fruitiness of malic acid, red fruit, vinous tones, caramel to slightly burnt notes and hints of oak.

The taste is mildly to sharply sour, balanced by sweetness, vinous, with little to no hop bitterness and a slight dryness. In the mouth the beer feels slightly astringent to slightly drying and is only lightly carbonated; the aftertaste is refreshing, medium to long. The alcohol content is at least 3 % vol., the bitterness below 15 EBU.

Production

It is brewed with barley malt, yeast, unmalted or other malted cereals or fermentable sugars, brewing water, hops and natural sugars. Barley malt makes up at least 60 % of the starch- and sugar-containing raw materials. Herbs, for example liquorice, bog myrtle, sage or coriander, and red fruit such as cherries or raspberries may be added at the brewer’s discretion. Hops are used only sparingly, because their bitterness does not show well in slightly sour beers.

Brewing and primary fermentation proceed as for top-fermented beers. The base beer then ripens wholly or partly in upright oak casks of 50 to 700 hectolitres, the “foeders”. In them, Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Lactobacillus and Brettanomyces species form a symbiosis that shapes fermentation, ripening and flavour. The oak lets through just enough air for organic acids to be converted into fruity esters. Ripening takes between four and a half months and more than two years, depending on the size of the casks and the cellar temperature; the cellar master checks the casks regularly and selects the most fully ripened ones.

Finally, the ripened beer from different casks may be blended with young beer. At most 75 % of the blend may be young lager beer, and the beer must have ripened in the cask for 4.5 months on average (four months for casks under 100 hectolitres). Brewing, ripening and blending take place in the area.

Origin & history

In the Belgian province of West Flanders, the area covers the administrative districts of Roeselare, Tielt and Kortrijk and the municipalities of Kortemark and Ichtegem.

According to the specification, the oldest known description of this red ale is in a book by Georges Lacambre from 1851, but the tradition goes back to the Middle Ages. In the County of Flanders, beer was flavoured with “gruut”, a mixture of herbs and spices, at first without and later with a little hops. Until the end of the 19th century the beers in East and West Flanders west of the Scheldt were made by mixed fermentation. According to the specification, apart from the lambic breweries, the breweries of this beer are the only ones that still ripen their beers in wooden casks.

At first the beer was popular with the farmers of the area because it quenched thirst and kept well; it was also exported to French Flanders and Hainaut. From the 1950s it was available in many places in West Flanders in bars and beer shops. In 2005 the Flemish Centre for Agricultural and Fisheries Marketing (VLAM) recognised it as an authentic traditional regional product.