In 1957, eighty-four-year-old Louis Tomsin turned on his kettle for the last time. The final barrel of the typical old Hoegaarden white beer rolled out of his gate that year, and his artisanal brewing equipment went to the Bokrijk open-air museum. With that, the beer disappeared from the village that had lived off it for centuries. For nine years, no white beer was brewed in Hoegaarden. In March 1966, a milkman from that same village started again: Pierre Celis, who had visited neighbor Tomsin as a child and only knew the recipe by heart.

This episode tells the entire story of that village, not that of a brand. First, the rise. Why so much was brewed here: the heavy loam on which wheat, barley, and oats all grow, the calcium-rich spring water, and above all, Hoegaarden's position as a Liège enclave in the middle of the Duchy of Brabant, ever since Emperor Otto III granted the county to the Bishop of Liège in 987. In the period from 1700 to 1725, an average of eight hundred brews were produced here annually, in a municipality with barely a thousand inhabitants. In 1754, four million seven hundred and forty-two thousand liters left this single village, and in that same year, the construction of the Saint Gorgonius Church, the largest Rococo church in Belgium, began using brewers' funds.

Then came the decline, and that is technical. Cooling, filtration, the railway, and cheap glass made clear bottom-fermented lager the norm, and cloudy beer something old-fashioned. In 1873 there were still fifteen breweries, in 1914 six, at the start of the Second World War three still making wheat beer, and in 1957 not a single one.

Then the improbable part. A man without a brewing diploma and without capital begins to revive a vanished beer style in the stable next to his house, outgrows his space, moves to a converted lemonade factory in 1979, and sees his business partially burn down on October 7, 1985. He was insured for forty million francs and needed two hundred and eighty. Stella Artois invested in exchange for forty-five percent of the shares; in 1990 he sold the rest and left for Texas. The beer remained, the owner did not.

Finally: what is left of a village when its oldest craft first disappears completely and then returns as a global brand that is no longer its own. For what exactly returned, the craft or just the name of the village on a label? What you will learn
• Why Hoegaarden, of all places, became a brewing village: the loam soil and the three grains, the calcium-rich spring water, the malt houses with their kilns and drying attics, and what it meant that this village fell under the fiscal jurisdiction of Liège rather than Brabant
• What made witbier technically different: wheat alongside barley malt, oats in the filter bed, coriander and dried Curaçao peel, where the famous cloudiness really came from, and why the style went out of fashion in the nineteenth century
• How a village industry disappears step by step: the figures of 1754, 1775, 1873, 1914, and 1940, the takeover of the last major brewery by Artois in 1960, and the closure of Tomsin in 1957, which turned the last kettle cold
• How Pierre Celis brought the beer back and then lost it: his apprenticeship at Tomsin, the first brew of March 1966, the fire from 1985, the forty-five percent, his second brewery in Texas, and where the beer bearing the name of this village is brewed today

Educational and historical material.

Main sources
— Hoegaards Erfgoed vzw, local history society of Hoegaarden: Hoegaarden and its breweries, and Resurrection of Hoegaarden white beer
— De Gazet van Hoegaarden: dossiers on the brewery, the announced closure of 2005, and the family grave of the Tomsin brewers
— Centre for Agricultural History, Old Hoegaarden beer back in the barrel
— Chuck Cook, Pierre Celis: A Conversation in Hoegaarden, interview from 2003
— Roger Protz, Pierre Celis, Maestro of White Beer, 2005
— and other sources

#history #Flanders #Hoegaarden #FlemishBrabant #beer

ℹ️ About this video
Educational and historical material. The script, research, and editing are original work, based on the sources in the description. The visual reconstructions and the narrator's voice—a fictional character—were created using AI; for illustrative purposes, these are not real recordings or authentic archival footage. The story has been simplified for a broad audience and may contain minor approximations. Goal: to inform and to remember.