Liefmans Brewery

Historic brewery producing Oudenaarde's distinctive brown ale and cherry beer

Liefmans Brewery is one of the oldest breweries in Belgium, with origins in Oudenaarde dating to 1679. It is the home of oud bruin — old brown ale — a regional style native to the Oudenaarde area, darker and sourer than the pale ales of the Brabant and quite different from the abbey ales of the rest of Belgium. The brewery also produces Cuvée Brut and the celebrated Fruitesse, a fruit beer built on an oud bruin base.

The brewery building sits just east of the town centre on the Dendermondsestraat. Guided tours are available and take in the brew house, the maturation cellars, and a tasting. Even for visitors with only moderate interest in beer, Liefmans is worth a stop: the Goudenband in particular is one of Belgium's genuinely distinctive regional styles, and the tissue-wrapped bottles make good souvenirs.

things to do sight brewing
A story
Liefmans' oud bruin (old brown) is brewed through a warm fermentation process that produces a lactic sourness quite different from the spontaneous fermentation of lambic beers to the west. The brewery wraps its most celebrated bottles in tissue paper by hand — a tradition dating from the early 20th century when the paper protected the labels during warm cellar ageing. The Goudenband, their flagship, improves in the bottle for years.