Vignette 36: Alex Lippens, Brouwerij t'Verzet
Left to right: Jens Tack, Alex Lippens, and Koen Van Lancker. Alex and Koen are brewers.
Alex Lippens is one of three principles, along with Koen Van Lancker and Jens Tack, of Verzet. The three young men are on an unlikely and inspiring journey to help re-establish oud bruins in the Flanders region it once dominated. Below is a slightly longer vignette than I normally offer, to give you a flavor of what a compelling project Verzet is. For past vignettes, visit this page.
Alex and Koen met in brewing school in Ghent, and both were inspired to start a brewery together. Methodically, they found jobs at other brewers (De Proef and Omer Vander Ghintse) and in the meantime began founding Verzet (“resistance”) as a side project they fed with production at De Ranke. Eventually they got money together to buy equipment, find a brewery, and quit their brewing jobs. While Verzet makes more conventional Belgian styles, Alex and Koen have always been focused on the goal of not only making traditional, vat-aged oud bruin but—in a country with Rodenbach, Verhaeghe, and Liefmanns: “we want to create the best oud bruin in the world.” If you’d like to hear Alex say some of the words I’ll be quoting, go give this episode of the Beervana Podcast a listen.
Long Boils, Like 19th-Century Brown Ales
“One other part is the boiling. You make melanoidins—sugars and proteins combining together, and they’re unfermentable—so you get a full body. Also they’re good for aging. They will react to the oxygen so you have that more fruity character. That’s why we also make the Super Boil—boiled for 16 hours. We had to wait until we got our own brewery, because De Ranke said, ‘Not on our brewhouse, you don’t!’ Since 2016 we do it once or twice a year. We then divide it into different barrels and use it in our standard oud bruin blends. It’s an extra color in our color palate to blend in. But you also have more red fruits in the barrel aging.”
“We wanted to hit 24 hours, but the first time we did it we had a party to kill the time, but after 16 hours it was morning and we had a hangover and we said, ‘Let’s stop it here.’ So that’s why we do it now 16 hours. In the books we had from Oudenaarde, you had a lot of oud bruin makers 100 years ago, and they boiled 20-24 hours. We wanted to know what was the impact of that long boil. We evaporate 50%, but then we add water again because we don’t want a high-gravity beer, but we want to have caramelized flavors.”
The Yeast Culture
“The first batch we ever did as homebrewers, we put the wort outside. I lived in the home of [Brouwerij] Omer Vander Ghinste—I lived next to the brewery. I was also the [caretaker]. We just put a cooking kettle of 200 liters [53 gallons] outside and let it inoculate for a night. I think November. The day after, we put it into the barrel. We got lucky having a good culture, and since then we harvest the yeast from barrels that we empty.”
“If we empty ten barrels, we take the best four barrels or three, taking the slurry from the bottom of the barrel, cleaning the barrels, putting that yeast in bottles, refilling them, and putting the culture back in the barrels. It’s like a sourdough bread culture that we do. We know our culture is evolving, because we choose by taste, but we don’t want to be on our lab on the microscope, [managing] all the different strains. But we like the mystery, so we don’t want to look into it. We like the magic around it.”
Love of Oud Bruin
“The reason we started [making] oud bruin is because we love Rodenbach. We are a fiery fan 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. The idea was to make it trendy again with young people; not like, ‘Ah, that’s for my grandad.’”
“We are not the seventh generation—we are the first. We don’t have that heritage of the family at our backs. We don’t want to be a cover-band brewery. We want to have our own backbone. If you’re a band, you have your heroes, and you try to play their songs. But the real bands are the ones that are influenced by others but then do their own stuff with it and that’s what we want to do with beer. When we do something, like with oud bruin, we are inspired by it, but we do our own thing with it. That’s why it’s the coolest beer we [work with]. Even if we’re eighty, we’re going to be learning each day. It has more unsolved questions that a standard blond beer. We want to understand everything and understand how it gets there, but we don’t want control.”