Peter Bouckaert, the former brewmaster of Colorado’s New Belgium Brewing Company, was an avid collector of foeders. Inspired by the ranks of foeders at Belgium’s Brouwerij Rodenbach, where he’d brewed for a decade before moving stateside, he’d travel across the U.S. hunting for the gargantuan oak tanks, which range in size from roughly five U.S. barrels up to 250, and are most commonly used to ferment and age wine.
“He loved going to California and finding somebody telling him [...] Oh, I heard you're crazy about foeders. Oh, I heard there's four of them that are going to be here; three of them are going to be here,’” says Lauren Woods Limbach, New Belgium’s wood cellar director and blender. “So he just became this foeder gatherer—he'd go out in the world, and find them and bring them back.”
As a result, New Belgium has had its own so-called Foeder Forest, modeled after the one in Roeselare, West Flanders, for decades. It’s an uncanny experience, standing in the thicket of oak, surrounded by over 750,000 liters of beer and bacteria spread across 65 foeders. As I paused next to a vessel twice my height, imagining I could hear the whirring and the chomping of so many bugs noshing on sugars and proteins within, I looked down at the pin on my denim jacket, one which New Belgium’s specialty brand manager Andrew Emerton had given me. The words “WTF is a Foeder?” looked back up at me, and gave me pause for thought. I could certainly recognize a foeder—I was standing next to one, after all. But what the fuck was it? And why do foeders suddenly seem to be everywhere?
Aging beer in wood is nothing new. Before there were steel casks, wooden vessels from pins (5.4 gallons) through kilderkins (roughly 22 gallons) and all the way up to tuns (303 gallons) held and matured beer. Written references to beer being stored in barrels date back to the 7th century, but beer was likely kept in wood long before that.
Some say the English “invented” the acidification of beer in wood (though, given the high likelihood of the beer becoming infected with bacteria due to a lack of brewing understanding and sanitation, the phenomenon likely existed far and wide) as early as the 17th century, while others claim that the West Flanders tradition of dark acidic beer dates back to the 16th. Oral historians have it that Eugene Rodenbach traveled to England in the 1870s to study brewing techniques, “and it’s thought he may have visited Greene King to see how stale or stock ale was matured in wooden vats,” writes British beer writer Roger Protz.
Perhaps it seems unlikely that wooden vessels would continue to flourish today, in an era of stainless steel and painstaking lab testing. But foeders are an increasingly common feature in breweries across the world. In the U.S., that’s largely down to Bouckaert’s influence, and it’s likely that breweries in other countries have also followed suit. Even the proliferation and popularity of a certain style of foeder among modern brewers—the tall, upright, slightly conical vessel seen in New Belgium’s Foeder Forest—can be traced via Bouckaert to Rodenbach. “You go to friends' places in the U.S. and they have all these foeders and I just asked them: ‘How come you decided to buy that shape?’ And they're like, ‘What are you talking about? That's what you guys had,’” says Limbach. “And you think, that's funny, because that's what Rodenbach had. You know, you just emulate the thing that you see; sometimes you don't even ask yourself why you're doing it.”
As with their stainless steel counterparts, foeders don’t follow a one-size-fits-all rule—their varying shapes and dimensions suit different types of beer. An upright foeder with a wide, flat top (as seen at New Belgium and Rodenbach) lends itself to sharp, acetic styles, such as Flanders Red and Oud Bruin. A horizontal oval or cylindrical foeder is suited to fermenting and maturing Lambics.
“Most of the clients say, ‘Oh, we’re only gonna buy one or two foeders,’ but every year they buy another one. They’re like tattoos: they last forever, but they just keep lining them up.”
“You have that one very hot, dry spell—that they don't really have in Belgium as much, but we do have here,” Limbach tells me, “and you know, you just have a little bit of evaporation, and your whole top loses a little bit of liquid and now that whole top is exposed to the air.” In an upright with a large surface area, even half an inch of evaporation can have drastic consequences on the beer: the acetic acid-producing bacteria Acetobacter thrives in oxygenated conditions, so even a miniscule reduction in volume could significantly alter the final product. With an oval or horizontal foeder, that risk is greatly reduced.
“When you have one little tiny bit of evaporation, it just kind of touches the crest of the oval,” Limbach continues. “So you have this very little amount of exposure to oxygen and therefore you're definitely making a more Brettanomyces-forward and lightly lactic beer.” What this means, unfortunately, is that until very recently, every single one of New Belgium’s foeders had a propensity for producing acetic beer—which is an ongoing problem when that’s not the desired result. Limbach describes it as an “absolute war, every day.”
“If I could do it all over again, I would take half of the uprights out and move these large ovals in, or stacked horizontals,” she says, “or any of these things where you can try to just play around with all the different shapes and sizes.”
Matt Walters and Becca Senn, founder and president of Foeder Crafters of America, respectively, were in the midst of a 2 a.m. bowling game (and sessioning Oskar Blues Brewery’s Ten Fidy Imperial Stout) with some of the New Belgium team when Walters made wood cellar brewer Ted Peterson a bet. “We said, ‘If you throw a strike on this next one, you get a free 60-barrel foeder,’” says Walters. “He rolled a ball, turned around facing us and put his hand to his ear, and all the pins went ‘Kaboom!’—and he threw a strike.” The next morning, Limbach made it clear that, though the gesture was appreciated, no one was giving any foeders away. A couple weeks later, Peterson got a call from Foeder Crafters, telling him his foeder was halfway done—would he like to finish it with them? “So Ted flew out there,” says Limbach, “finished the foeder with them, and a couple of weeks later it was sitting on the back dock of our brewery.”
That 60-BBL upright (and later the 15-BBL oval, which Foeder Crafters gifted New Belgium), was Walter’s way of saying thank you to the brewery that “basically started the sour beer industry in the United States and cultivated it,” he says. The oval, affectionately known as The Egg for its, well, egg shape, was also the first horizontal foeder in the Foeder Forest.
“Well, I wanted to be a brewer,” says Walters, of Foeder Crafters’ origins. “A friend of mine and I, we bought 10% of a little company called the Heavy Riff Brewing Company—we just wanted to see how they opened, and to try to help them out, and also learn from their mistakes so that we could open our own. And then, people just started asking me if I could build a foeder. I said yes.” With years of wood- and metalworking experience as a luthier and a housebuilder, and an interest in brewing, Walters discovered that foeder construction combined his three loves. Not long after Walters started the business, Cory King, founder of St. Louis’ Side Project Brewing, ordered Foeder Crafters’ first foeder—and then its first 30-BBL, its first horizontals, its first double stack, and its first coolship.
Now a company of nine employees, Foeder Crafters is the only specialist foeder producer in North America that focuses on supplying breweries. Seguin Moreau, a cooperage in Napa Valley, California, has supplied ex-wine foeders to numerous breweries—New Belgium, Deschutes Brewery, Cascade Brewing, pFriem Family Brewers, New Holland Brewing, and Almanac Beer Company, to name a few—for about five years, though interest is slowing down, general manager Chris Hansen says. “When we sell wineries new units to replace their old ones, we buy the used foeders back, refurbish them with new valves, new varnish, new hoops, and then resell them,” he says. “The breweries want the aging vessel, but not the new oak flavors like the wineries want.” Other cooperages do the same, and although there are other foeder crafters outside of the U.S., such as Tonnellerie Allary in France’s Cognac region, there’s only one Foeder Crafters.
Every foeder built in the suburban St. Louis shop is made from Missouri oak. “The best wood in terms of the ability to hold water comes within about 60 miles of our shop,” says Walters. “It’s basically a 60-mile radius of the best oak in the world.” Before the logs have been brought in, the team taste them, putting the wood to their lips and sucking to check for bacterial infections, as well as burning a small piece to smell the smoke. Once bought, the chosen logs are cut and dried for around two years in an open warehouse. When fully dried, the wood is shaped with an interior and exterior radius, and finger joints are cut into the sides.
“The amount of pre-used barrels I’ve had to toss, or resign to tabletops, because they were full of acetic or butyric acids, or a myriad of other shit; I just can’t afford to do that with something that is 10 times the volume and price.”
“Our foeders are kind of Americanized: I wanted to build a foeder that was finger-jointed; I thought it would be structurally far more sound,” says Walters. “What ended up happening was our foeders started making excellent beer over, and over, and over again, with really high repeatability. The reason is that our tops hold air better, ’cause our tops are finger-joint. And so with no air ingress, you end up not making vinegar. And once the brewer started realizing, ‘Yes, I can make consistent beer with a Foeder Crafters foeder,’ our business just kept growing so well. Most of the clients say, ‘Oh, we're only gonna buy one or two foeders,’ but every year they buy another one. They're like tattoos: they last forever, but they just keep lining them up.”
It’s this control over air ingress that makes brewers collect foeders the way punks do stick ‘n’ pokes. Unlike ex-wine and -spirit barrels, which are often not fully airtight, a foeder gives a brewer greater control over fermentation.
“You can put a wort directly in there and ferment in the foeder, or you can ferment in something else and then put that fermented beer into the foeder,” explains Walters. “Or let's say you put it in there with a couple of tons of apricots, and your bacteria and yeast combination have a symbiotic relationship, and you try to leave them alone in the dark, cut off the air supply, and let them do their anaerobic thing. You have a tasting valve on there so you can kind of taste it, and see how it progresses.”
The decline in interest from brewers in Seguin Moreau’s ex-wine foeders isn’t wholly surprising, given that Foeder Crafters’ website states that it continues to “get busier every day.” Brewers appear to be turning away from repurposed vessels across the board as they grow, and can afford more specialist equipment—not that Foeder Crafters’ foeders (try saying that three times after sessioning Ten Fidy) are particularly expensive: they’re cheaper than Chinese-made stainless steel fermenters of the same size.
“One thing that's financially interesting is that a used French foeder was of a very high value when I started the business,” says Walters. “A used French foeder from a winery was selling for almost the brand-new price. I mean, they were selling for like $14,000, $17,000, some serious money. And now you can get them all day long for a couple grand.”
Paul Gibson, founder and brewer at Edinburgh’s Campervan Brewery, recently bought three new foeders from Tonnellerie Allary for his new fermentaria, Lost in Leith. He says he prefers to buy new as opposed to repurposed foeders because it’s “hard to source, transport and verify the quality of second-hand [foeders], and you would likely need a cooper to rebuild [them],” as well as issues with “excessive waiting lists at European cooperages that repurpose old wine foeders.”
“High demand is a big issue,” he continues. “Lots of ex-wine foeders are too big, too old, or too hard to find.” For the brewer looking to exert maximum control over that which occurs inside the wood—including clean, delicate maturation, such as lagering—a foeder with a lifetime of wine-aging behind it isn’t necessarily ideal. Though an argument could be made that certain mixed-fermentation beers might work well in an older wine foeder, as Gibson believes, the consensus seems to be that brewers are increasingly opting for their tanks to be a tabula rasa.
“At least for me, it’s more that the brewery perhaps wants to be the ones dictating what the foeder does and can do, and in inheriting an already-established flora or culture you don’t really get to do that,” says Derek Bates, co-founder and head brewer of the U.K.’s Duration Brewing (and whose foeders I saw in construction when visiting Foeder Crafters). “And, to be honest, the amount of pre-used barrels I’ve had to toss, or resign to tabletops, because they were full of acetic or butyric acids, or a myriad of other shit; I just can’t afford to do that with something that is 10 times the volume and price.”
While aging a batch in a number of barrels as opposed to one foeder can have benefits in terms of flavor and the ability to blend different characteristics together, a foeder makes a brewer’s life significantly easier.
“One great thing about the foeder is that they go slower,” says Limbach. “It seems like, ‘Oh, this thing is going too slow at first,’ but you need for the barrel to be able to say, ‘Hey, I'm almost ready. I'm ready. I'm almost too ready. Oh, you missed it.’ And sometimes in a small barrel, that could just be a couple of days. As foeders are much more massive, they go slower. The warning shot is sometimes a month.”
“Arguably foeders is craft beer growing up, and looking back to the time when beer was matured in large wooden vats (which allows more focus on yeast and bacteria vs spirits or wine as an added flavoring).”
Foeder Crafters’ increasing overseas exports, and the greater and greater number of breweries investing in oak—Missouri or otherwise—could be an indication of the vinification of craft beer: an increase in the influence of the wine world on the brewing industry, which is becoming particularly apparent within the realm of mixed fermentation. It could also be an indication of the maturing of the industry. “Arguably foeders is craft beer growing up, and looking back to the time when beer was matured in large wooden vats which allows more focus on yeast and bacteria vs spirits or wine as an added flavoring,” says Gibson. Regardless of the whys, makers such as Walters will keep sucking on oak for the foreseeable future.
“Anybody that wants a foeder, we want them to have the opportunity to have a foeder,” says Senn. “These foeders become like passion projects for the brewery, for the brewers. We just want those people to be able to have the opportunity to have a foeder in their place, whether it be one seven-BBL, nine 30-BBLs, or whatever it ends up being for them, what fits their space and what they want. Ultimately it's just kind of geeking out and wanting everybody to have what they want to have.”
Words by Lily WaiteIllustrations by Charlotte Hudson Language
