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Photos by Cliff Lucas
This editorially independent podcast has been supported by VISITFLANDERS as part of the “Common Place” series of podcasts.
Today I’m talking to Edward Vandermeersch, the owner-brewer of Rolling Hills in Oudenaarde.
The brewery is located in the rolling hills of the Flemish Ardennes, on the outskirts of the city of Oudenaarde. As a nod to the brewery’s provenance, the beers Vandermeersch brews here are branded with illustrations of the indigenous animals of the Flemish Ardennes: the naughty badger; the triple chase hare; the hill billy toad; the wildebeest; and Filip the hedgehog.
I’m most interested in talking about his Oud Bruin, the base beer for which started out as an interpretation of an historical beer from an iconic Oudenaarde brewery, Petre Devos.
Vandermeersch is a physically fit, bald, medium-build, thirty-nine year-old with a tidy ginger beard, intense curiosity, and chaotic energy.
He shows me around his hardware: eight 20 HL CCTs; two 50 HL flat bottom fermenters; two souring tanks and one blending tank, each of 110HL; and around 60 French oak barrels.
For years, Edward Vandermeersch didn’t touch the things that were numbing him. On green energy projects in France as a biomass engineer, he wasn’t permitted to climb rigs or mount equipment, and it killed him inside. When his father died in 2012, he didn’t touch that either, pushing down inside himself any emotion he might feel about grieving the death of a father with whom he had a complicated relationship.
Today, he’s the owner of his own brewery in the town in which he grew up. In the process of building the brewery, he learned to let it all in, and to feel things with his hands and his heart again, even if they’re difficult or painful. Some things deaden you. But some things can bring you back to life.
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