My next brew, and probably my first 99% low oxygen (last time had problems with mashing in the Braumeister) will be another shot at a fictitious Rochefort 4 clone. My question: do Belgian breweries, and Rochefort in particular brew lodo? My assumption is no. http://www.bloggen.be/belgische_brouwerijen/archief.php?ID=808813 is a list of pictures of Belgian breweries. It’s a long page, look for “Rochefort”. Is it correct to assume just by looking at the photos that Rochefort is non-lodo? And, of course, the question becomes: will lodo brewing improve a Rochefort clone?
BTW, it is of course very well possible the the monks at Rochefort preboil their water, which, straight from the well (I first wrote hell) has 245 ppm bicarbonate. That would make at least the first step lodo.
They could use slaked lime, or acid (no RHG)to neutralize the bicarbonate, or RO to remove the minerals. Hard to say from the pictures, no water treatment was evident.
Yeah, it’s difficult to say with such yeast driven beer. There is a lot of copper in their system though, that’s for sure.
I would say that it is safe to assume that in organizations where prior approval is required for lay Brewers to even alter the components of a recipe, that major overhauls to brewing systems are not common. With that said, even the Trappists have updated various components of their systems but as was stated above, with such a yeast forward beer, the nuance may be lost.
It might be interesting to know the factors that make a beer more or less oxygen sensitive. You mention “yeast forward”. Would that be the yeasts with either extreme ester (trappist) or phenol (saison) production? How about alcohol tolerance? How about dark malt complexity?
I just meant to say that Trappist beers in general are a yeast showcase. Much of the Low O2 character may be overshadowed by the yeast.
Although I’d like to experiment in the near future with some out of the ordinary Trappist style recipes and play with fermentation temps (i.e. Lower).
Fascinating blog. I really enjoyed looking at those pics. Thanks.
Really cool. Still wondering about what was the deal with the wooden beam-looking pieces suspended above the cool ship in the one brewery?
I noticed that too and had the same question.
Raw wood to harbor the bugs and critters? You will see raw wood beams in some of the other breweries.
Also, sometime if they open a new brewery at a new location they bring in some of the old beams from the old place for the reason mentioned above. don’t you guys ever pick up a book? 
Huh? slobbers Why read when there’s TV?
Chimay uses the Meura mash filter system. I can’t think of a more oxygen rich mash system. Grist hammers to pulverize the grain to a powder, which then gets loaded into the filters. We all know what excellent beer Chimay produces. It’s just not used in big Belgian beers with Belgian yeast. Even Coors Light is made with a Meura mash filter system. Not sure this low oxygen mash is real issue.
I would say that ultimately it’s less about who’s doing what and more about what the process can do for you. I’m going to be starting a Belgian run (Trappist ales) very soon and trying to replicate these ales with less reliance on syrups.
Still haven’t found any sign of low oxygen brewing in Belgium. Maybe our friends in Leuven do it to brew pils, but otherwise? People laugh at you when you explain the concept.
One of the most missed points is that LARGENESS of the brewery(batch sizes) basically automatically makes it Low oxygen. The larger the brewery, the lower oxygen it is(naturally by doing nothing).
At what size do you consider a brewery to be large? I know it would be a curve decreasing with size, but where would the knee in the curve be?
Something like a 100hl brewery will have like 10X better protection, and 1000hl will have 20x better. Or something like that
On a strictly surface area to volume argument, you’d see a 1/r trend. r being the radius of a sphere and since a cow can be approximated as a sphere, so too should beer. 