No small beer: Inside Belgium's thriving brewing industry

Beer is a global industry. Belgian beer is a global industry. The largest brewer in the world is now AB InBev, a company that started off in Leuven and is now, with the acquisition of SABMiller, crossing international boundaries even further. Even small Belgian brewers have their eyes on the global horizon. The beer brewed by the monks of St Sixtus abbey in West Vleteren have seen their exclusive, small-scale beer rated best in the world yet again by the website Ratebeer.com.

Another elite Trappist beer, Orval, is becoming scarce as the number of brewer monks dwindles and only one beer is produced for the general public. Meanwhile, there’s not a Top Ten compiled anywhere that doesn’t have at least one Belgian beer on it, most often something by a small, artisanal brewery like Struise, Millevertus, Hof Ten Dormaal or Dochter Van de Korenaar.

According to the federal planning bureau, in a report published in January, the Belgian beer industry was worth €1.88 billion in 2013, the last year for which figures are available. Production value is rising at 3.8% a year, but exports are growing more than twice as fast, at a rate of 7.9% a year to €861 million in 2013 and €911 million in 2014. According to the Belgian Brewers Federation, the industry employs 45,000 people and invested €180 million in fixed assets in 2014. And after long years of decline, the industry is seeing a resurgence.

“Six or seven years ago, we’d gone down to 120 breweries, but now we’re back up to 168,” says federation president Jean-Louis Van de Perre. The figure is a fraction of how many there used to be: at the end of the 19th century the country had more than 3,000 breweries, with most villages and all towns having at least one. Then came World War One, when many smaller breweries didn’t survive having their copper brewing vessels confiscated by the Germans and shipped off to make munitions. Some rebuilt, only to find the same thing happening in World War Two. And for those that survived that second test, the post-war years saw a wave of consolidations, takeovers and mergers, reducing the number of brewers even further and leading to the creation of mega-brewers like AB InBev, AlkenMaes and Haacht, the top three.

Founded in 1898, the Haacht brewery bet on the newly fashionable pilsner beer and was the leading brewer in Belgium in 1937. After the war Haacht took over other smaller breweries in Brussels, Liège, Tournai, Kortrijk, Aarschot, Ghent, Ypres and Bruges, as well as half a dozen or so in northern France. The brewery is now the third-largest in the country, and the largest to remain wholly Belgian. AB InBev is the result of a takeover of the Belgian Interbrew by the Brazilian AmBev and successive mergers of three international brewing groups, while Alken-Maes is owned by the Dutch giant Heineken.

New brewers on the block

One of the newest of the small craft breweries is En Stoemelings, created by two school friends, Samuel Languy and Denys Van Elewyck, who decided to turn a hobby into a profession. It’s only two years since the idea was born, but the brewery, in a shop front premises in the Marolles area of Brussels, was up and running within six or seven months. En Stoemelings (the
name means “under the table” or “in secret” in Brussels dialect) is a story of everything going right.

“I’d be astonished if it were possible for anyone else to set up a business in less time than we did,” says Languy. “We made the first Curieuse Neus in May 2014, then tested it in the summer. The last tasting we did was in October. Then we decided to put the brewery together, and within six months we had organised financing and permits and we were brewing.”

Setting up a brewery in the city requires four permits, he explains: an excise licence from the federal government, an environmental permit from the Brussels Capital Region, a fire safety licence from the Brussels City fire brigade and a town planning permit, also from Brussels City.

“We did it all by ourselves,” he says. “We had one advisor from Impulse Brussels, the enterprise agency. I agree that we had a lot of luck, but we did a lot of hard work as well, pushing things when they seemed to be becoming blocked, and making things happen. You need luck, but sometimes you need some nerve as well.”

Financing came partly from crowdfunding, for about 26% of their requirements. Talks with the banks didn’t get far. “Banks don’t lend to young entrepreneurs. Luckily the region has structures that exist to alleviate the problem, like Brusoc. We borrowed €25,000 at 4% from the region. We also have a subsidy of €20,000, which we had to fight hard to get.”

Beer bureaucracy

Cantillon is Brussels' oldest brewery. Brasserie de la Senne, established in Molenbeek in 2010, is now a well-established brand with a huge, devoted following. Once the business of setting up and becoming established are done, what challenges does a more mature brewery face?

“For me there isn’t any problem that’s particular to the brewing industry,” explains Yvan De Baets, one of the two founders. “The problem is one that affects all kinds of businesses in Belgium, and it’s mainly related to the administration we’re obliged to take care of, all of which is much too onerous. We really need some simplification of what’s required. We’re losing tens of hours every month just filling out forms. Once your business is up and running, that’s the thing that weighs the most.”

One issue that affects the drinks industry especially is excise duty. “I have nothing against taxation, because as a citizen I want there to be roads and schools and hospitals, that’s not the point,” he says. “But there is one tax that is I think more damaging than the rest, and that’s excise duty. The problem is that it’s a tax levied on an amount of money which already contains a tax (VAT). It’s a tax on a tax, and with that we attain the summit of surrealism.”

The other problematic issue is one brewing shares with other parts of the food and drinks industry: hygiene rules. “I’d be the first to agree with the need for strict hygiene controls,” he says. “Our own hygiene standards are stricter than the official standards applied by law. But we are regularly obliged to undergo inspections, sometimes including demands that bypass all common sense. We’ve had to invest serious sums of money that we didn’t have at the time to make arrangements that in my opinion were completely useless. That money could have been used elsewhere on investments that were far more important.”

This article was first published in ING Expat Time