Whose Brewery Is It Anyway?

A brewery brews beer. Simple enough.

Except, as so often with Belgian beer, look a little closer and things become more interesting.

The name on a glass or bottle does not necessarily identify the place where the beer was brewed. Sometimes another brewery makes it under contract. Sometimes the name represents a beer brand rather than a brewery in the conventional sense. And sometimes the people behind the beer really are the brewers. They simply use somebody else’s brewing equipment.

Brouwerij Verstraete, creator of Papegaei, is a good example. Adam Verstraete is a guest brewer at Brouwerij Deca in Woesten, where he brews and bottles Papegaei himself using Deca’s installations.

BelgaBrew has a similar arrangement. It develops its own recipes and brews them at Deca, explicitly describing itself as a guest brewer. In both cases, the brewer and the owner of the physical brewery are simply different people.

But other arrangements work differently.

Tout Bien is a Belgian beer brand created by Robert Van Impe, better known as the YouTuber and television personality Average Rob. Its beer is physically produced by Brouwerij Martens. Corsendonk has a much longer brewing heritage, but its modern beers have for decades been produced at Brasserie du Bocq. Both have distinctive beer identities, but neither follows the Verstraete or BelgaBrew model.

Then there are breweries such as Anders!, where making beer for other people is an important part of the business. A customer might arrive with a finished recipe, work with the brewery to refine one, or ask its professional brewers to help develop something new. The people commissioning the beer and those physically brewing it can therefore contribute to the finished product in quite different ways.

And inevitably there are examples that refuse to fit comfortably into any simple category.

The familiar St Idesbald abbey beers are produced by Brouwerij Huyghe in Melle, yet there really is a small Brouwerij Sint-Idesbald at the historic Ten Bogaerde estate near Koksijde. Its brewing installation is used to develop seasonal beers in collaboration with Huyghe.

So what makes a brewery a brewery, or a brewer a brewer?

There isn’t always a neat answer. Perhaps there doesn’t need to be.

A successful beer might involve the skill of the people who devise and brew it, the expertise and equipment of a contract brewery, the creativity of those who develop its identity, or some combination of all three. These are different ways of making and bringing beer to market, not measures of authenticity.

What matters is understanding who is involved and what they actually do. With Belgian beer, the story behind what is in the glass can be rather more complicated than the name printed on it.

We rather like it that way.