As a Dutchie, I’m always especially interested in breweries in the Netherlands that make wild beer. After my visits to Vandenbroek, and Nevel, this time I went to Brouwerij Halve Tamme in the town of Zevenbergen in the Southwest of the Netherlands. The brewery is located in a small warehouse in an industrial area at the edge of the town. Initially, I came just to pick up an order of some bottles of their Solera Sour Project, but upon picking it up I got the chance to look around the brewery, take some pictures, and ask some questions to Thom, one of the brewers and owners. There’s no one-to-one translation for the Dutch words ‘halve tamme’, let’s just say that it’s a slightly pejorative term for a not-so-smart person.
Halve Tamme was founded in 2015 by two friends, Thom and Hans. Since then, their little hobby got out of hand, currently brewing around 12,000 liters of beer per year. Every two weeks a 500L batch is brewed. Halve Tamme brews mainly (imperial) stouts and other dark beers, but also beers brewed with wild yeasts. This is done within what’s called the Solera Sour Project. The current size of the brewery is the maximum as both Thom and Hans do all of the work besides their regular day job. Expanding the business would mean investing in equipment, renting a new bigger location, and brewing full-time, something they don’t want to do.
Solera Sour Project
The base beer for all Solera beers is brewed with barley and wheat, rye, or spelt. The first fermentation is done with a regular brewer’s yeast, Saccharomyces, strain in a stainless-steel tank. After around two weeks when the fermentation is over, a mixture of commercially available wild yeasts (Brettanomyces, Pediococcus, and Lactobacillus) is added and the beer is transferred to a wooden barrel. The wooden barrels that are used are red wine barrels. Halve Tamme has nineteen barrels in total for their Solera Sour Project. Seventeen 200 Liter barrels, and two 500 Liter barrels. After at least one year of fermentation and aging on the barrel, the beer is transferred to a plastic tank, and the fruit is added. For this, fruit puree is used and not whole fruits. As the name suggests, they work using the solera principle. Meaning that the barrels are never fully emptied, but a fraction of old beer remains in the barrel to which then new beer is added. To avoid cross-contaminating their regular beers, separate barrels, and a separate bottling line are used for the Solera beers.
The bottles I brought home from the Solera Sour Project are: Rye, Braam & Vanille (Blackberry & Vanilla), Framboos (Raspberry), Rabarber (Rhubarb), and Perzik (Peach). Rye is one of the base beers without the addition of fruit. The others are all fermented with fruit after aging on wooden barrels. All these beers have spent at least 1 to 2 years on wooden barrels and some additional years on the bottle. The bottle of Perzik is the oldest I bought and was bottled in 2020. Furthermore, I bought one bottle of Derailed Fruit Train. This beer is a collaboration with LOC Brewery from Tilburg, it’s a barley and spelt based beer with apricots and peaches that’s fermented with Philly Sour yeast and Brettanomyces.
Thanks, Thom, for showing me around the brewery and answering my questions! Stay tuned for an upcoming post after tasting all of the Solera beers. Interested in their beers? You can order them online for pick up at the brewery, or find them in craft beer stores in the Netherlands. Recently they started working together with a distributor so their beers will be available more broadly throughout the Netherlands too.