Bruz Beer Sour captures European Gold Medal
There are many steps on a student’s path to mastering an art.
A successful student may match the master’s skills and eventually surpass them. In Germany last fall, Denver’s Bruz Beers demonstrated that progression to mastery at the 20th anniversary European Beer Star competition, medaling with a Colorado-brewed, Flandersstyle ale. Taking gold for a style considered historically inseparable from western Belgium is a bold example of the brewery’s mastery with barrel-aged sour ales.
The European Beer Star is the largest beer competition in Europe and a major worldwide event. Many beer professionals consider it the most prestigious competition of its kind, which in 2023 hosted 2,356 entries from 550 breweries — two-thirds of which came from brewers in 45 countries other than Germany. The top three beers in each category are selected by 150 international beer experts.
Bruz won the 2023 Beer Star Wood & Barrel-aged Sour Beer category with its Oak Marionette on Peaches — a Belgian-style Flanders ale aged on copious amounts of Palisade peaches. In doing so, Bruz beat every Belgian “home” brewery competitor, some of whom have made the style since the Middle Ages.
Oak Marionette on Peaches is the brainchild of Bruz head brewer Dave Olson. “What made Oak Marionette special is the base beer — a Flanders ale aged in one of our oak fouders (large, vertical oak fermenters). For this special beer, we [also] insisted on using Colorado’s famous Palisade peaches, which we brought in fresh and added to the fermenter with minimal processing. The sour ale and the flavorful Colorado peaches are a match made in heaven!” said Olson.
Flanders ale is a true connoisseurs’ style, found in two turbid spontaneously fermented varieties: red and brown. The style dates to the time when Belgium split in two along the river Scheldt: the eastern Flemish and French speaking duchies of Hainaut— Brabant under the Holy Roman Empire, and the French-held West, where the County of Flanders lies.
Brewers in Flanders at the time had yet to adopt the use of hops to extend beer shelf life, instead, they purchased Gruut (a mix of spices) from the Count of Flanders for production. According to Nicolas Degryse of Brouwerij Omer Vander Ghinste in Flanders, “to preserve the beer, brewers would let some of it mature on oak casks for a period so the beer got [mildly] sour and it could preserve longer. Afterward, they would mix it with young beer to get a balance between fruitiness of the young beer and sourness of the beer matured on oak casks.”
Modern Flanders ales exude the same flavor complexity, combining malt, yeast, microorganisms, acidity and low astringency. The result is a balanced lactic sourness and acetic acids that dominate underlying Brettanomyces produced flavors. Cherry nuances, malty sweetness and bitterness, and hints of cocoa are also frequently present.
Flanders red is the more assertive and complex of the two varieties, in part due to its primary acid bacteria— Acetobacter —and that it has a generally more complete fermentation that leads to acetic acid and a bright acidity in the presence of oxygen. Flanders brown leans on Lactobacillus, leading to softer acidity in the absence of oxygen.
The red grain bill also contains less caramelized malt than brown, rendering the wort more overall fermentable. Behind its leading sourness, the red offers a reserved malt background and gets its color from Vienna and Munich malts, similar to Vienna and märzen beers. Dark caramel malts in Flanders brown not only create more upfront malt character, but also give it the deeper color that distinguishes it from Flanders red.
In the glass, a Flanders red is intensely sour, expressing wine-like characters, while Flanders brown is a dark noticeably tart ale. Red is occasionally referred to as West Flanders red, and brown as either East Flanders brown or Oud Bruin (“old brown”). Despite the name, brown is considered a more “modern” interpretation though, as it employs a period of aging in stainless steel tanks.
Traditionalists may argue that a beer made outside its traditional home region cannot be “true to style.” Others may argue the history of a beer is a tale of style drift and innovation, not matter where actually brewed. For judges at the 2023 European Beer Star though, their palates did not lie, and they found Bruz’s art identifiable when they tasted it. With the Beer Star medal, Bruz brewers joined a rare club of master artists and showed how carefully they have studied their craft.
Een biertje, alstublieft!