Hoegaarden Brewery
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| Brewery | |
| Industry | Alcoholic beverage |
| Founded | 1445 |
| Headquarters | Hoegaarden, Belgium |
| Products | Beer |
| Owner | Anheuser-Busch InBev |
| Website | hoegaarden.com |
Hoegaarden Brewery (/ˈhoʊɡɑːrdən/; Dutch pronunciation: [ɦuˈɣaːrdə(n)]) is a brewery in Hoegaarden, Belgium, and the producer of a well-known wheat beer.
A village called Hoegaarden, near Tienen in Flanders, is the modern birthplace of Belgian white beer. Records of brewing in the village date back to 1445, when the local monks were enthusiastic brewers, but the tradition died out in the 1950s.
The village of Hoegaarden had been known for its witbieren (white beers) since the Middle Ages. In the nineteenth century, the village had thirteen breweries and 9 distilleries; however, in 1957, the last local witbier brewery, Tomsin, closed its doors. Pierre Celis, a milkman who had grown up next to the brewery and sometimes helped with brewing, decided some ten years later to try to revive the style. He started a new brewery, called de Kluis, in his hay loft. Celis used the traditional ingredients of water, yeast, wheat, hops, coriander, and dried Curaçao orange peel known as Laraha. In the 1980s, with demand for the product continuing to grow, Celis bought Hougardia, a former lemonade factory, to expand his brewing operations.
After a fire in 1985, several brewers offered their help — as is traditional in Belgium. One of these was the largest brewer in the country, called Interbrew (after a merger with AmBev, renamed InBev). Interbrew lent money for the purchase of other buildings to rebuild the brewery. Over time, Celis felt very strongly that the company used the loan to pressure him to change the recipe to make the beer more "mass market".
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Wikipedia