A time lapse video of New Belgium building its foeder forest

The craft brewing word of the day is “foeder.” It’s a Dutch word (according to this video, roughly translated as “giant oak barrel” and pronounced “fooder”). The folks at New Belgium Brewing use foeder to describe their giant wooden aging vessels. New Belgium has been picking up these massive foeders for more than a decade, ranging in size from 60 to more than 250 hectoliters. They get these big barrels from wineries; so the wood imparts a real wine-like character to the beer (often a nice sour taste). Also, because the wood is porous and difficult to fully clean, foeders can be successfully used to inoculate successive batches of beer with souring organisms still present from the previous batch. New Belgium’s La Folie Wood-Aged Biere is a good example of an original wood-conditioned beer, resting in French Oak barrels between one and three years before being bottled. In the video above, watch a time lapse video of New Belgium making part of its foeder forest.