Foeders

The Barrel's Big Brother

- Jim Dykstra

Last time, we looked at what it takes to be a cooper – years of training, an intense attention to detail and a well-trained sensory toolkit amongst many other skills. But becoming a cooper is just the first step if you want to build a foeder. Though it is more commonly found in the winemaking world, foeders have a celebrated beer making tradition, championed by legendary European brewers such as Rodenbach, Brouwerij Boon and Liefmans, to name a few.

What is a foeder?

A foeder (prounounced food-er), in its simplest form, is a large barrel. When exactly it becomes a foeder rather than just an oversized barrel is somewhat discretionary, but the line is often drawn at 600 liters, which is around 160 gallons, or roughly three times the size of the average oak barrel.

Foeders are also distinguished by the lengths required to construct them. As we mentioned in Part I, foeders require a specially trained team of foudriers, which works together to complete the construction over a period of weeks, or even months, depending on the size of the vessel. The world’s largest foeder belongs to the brewers of the aperitif Byrrh, in France. Though no longer operative, it once held up to 1 million liters, and required 200 trees over the course of 18 years to complete.

The time such a process takes leads to a special relationship between foudrieres (Editor’s Note: In France, foeder is written as “foudre”) and the vessels they birth, and the amount of detail required demands more than what is asked of a standard cooper. As described in Dick Cantwell and Peter Bouckaert’s luminous tome, Wood & Beer, the process is “more akin to artisanal construction than manufacture.”