A visit to Het Anker brewery

An evening tour of Het Anker was the last brewery on the second day of the IBD study tour of Belgium. We had an impressively long list of places to visit to early starts and late finishes were the order of the day. After all we were here for study, not to enjoy ourselves.

Our formidable tour guide, who shows no mercy to people parked in the wrong place, started by telling us about the history of the area. Beguines were once prominent there, which gave me another strange religious group to read up on, an unexpected bonus of the tour.

The brewhouse was one of the oddest I've seen, a combination of copper vessels and a mash filter. The brewlength is 110hl.

Though the mash filter looked old:

 But then again they have been around a long time. They'd also kept some of their old kit at the brewery, including a Baudelot cooler:

Note the tray at the bottom for collecting the cooled wort Tim

 And a coolship:

 Their old maltings is now used as a whisky maturation warehouse. Belgian angels get more than the Scottish ones as the evaporation rate is 5% p.a.

  

Thanks to Richard Rees and Tim O'Rourke for the pictures.