BeerObituary

Pierre Celis obituary

Master brewer behind a revival in the white beer of Hoegaarden

Pierre Celis, who has died aged 86, put the small Belgian town of Hoegaarden on the beer map in the 1960s when he revived cloudy wheat or "white" beer made with the addition of spices and fruit. White beer for centuries had been a style brewed in the Belgian region of East Brabant, where the rich, dark soil is ideal for growing barley, oats and wheat. Brewing in the area has been traced back to the 14th century. By the 1500s, Hoegaarden had a brewers' guild and in the 19th century there were some 30 breweries crowded into the town.

The special character of the white beers of Brabant was created not only by the use of wheat and oats alongside barley malt, but also exotic spices and fruits brought to the Low Countries by Dutch traders. Hoegaarden became the centre for brewing the style, but in the 20th century the white beer breweries started to close, unable to compete with mass-marketed lagers, in particular those produced in Leuven by Stella Artois. The last brewery in Hoegaarden, Tomsin, pulled down the shutters in the late 1950s. It was mourned by many in the town, including Celis, a milkman who had done some part-time work in the brewery when he was a schoolboy.

He was drinking in a bar with some friends one evening and they started to reminisce about the much-missed local beers. Celis decided to make a batch in his wife Juliette's copper. He remembered the ingredients from his time in the brewery. Grain and hops were easily available, and he added milled coriander seeds and Curaçao orange peel.

His beer was so well received that he decided to make it commercially. In 1966, he bought a small brewing plant and installed it in the stables next to his house, but demand for the beer forced Celis to move into larger premises – a derelict lemonade factory.

The cloudy, unfiltered beer had taken Leuven by storm, where university students considered it to be a more natural beer than lager. Celis broke into the important Antwerp market and then into the Netherlands, France and Britain. The beer's fortunes were aided by the six-sided glass it was served in: by chance, Celis had found the Italian prototype in a shop in Hoegaarden.

Production grew rapidly to 300,000 hectolitres a year by 1985. Celis had just started to export to the US when a fire devastated the brewery and he found he was seriously under-insured. He turned to Stella Artois for help and the giant brewer offered to invest in return for 45% of the shares. In 1988, Stella merged with another lager brewer, Piedboeuf of Jupille, near Liège. Interbrew was born and, according to Celis, "the bankers took over". They wanted him to produce white beer and other beers he had introduced by the process of "high gravity brewing" – making one liquid and then watering it down into different beers. Celis refused but the pressure grew and he decided, at the age of 65, to sell the company to Interbrew.

The interest in Hoegaarden White in the US encouraged Celis to move to Austin, Texas, where he launched a brewery with the support of his daughter, Christine. Celis White was successful but Celis found his American backers wanted a quick return on their investment. In order to buy them out, he signed another Faustian pact with a corporate giant, Miller, America's second-biggest brewer.

Miller, Celis said, cheapened the beer and sales plummeted. He sold up and returned home to Hoegaarden, only to discover that Interbrew planned to close his old brewery in 2006 and transfer production to Jupille. The move caused outrage throughout Dutch-speaking Belgium, for Jupille is in the French region. In 2004 there was a mass rally in the town while most shops and houses carried a poster with the simple slogan "Hoegaarden brews Hoegaarden". The beer brewed at Jupille was poorly received and InBev, as it had become, following yet another merger, scuttled back to Hoegaarden and reopened the mothballed plant in 2007.

Celis, in his 80s, started to brew small batches of beer at the St Bernardus brewery in the village of Watou. In North America he joined forces with the Real Ale Brewery in Blanco, Texas, to launch a new wheat beer.

He is survived by Juliette, whom he married in 1953, and Christine.

Pierre Celis, brewer, born 21 March 1925; died 9 April 2011

This article was amended on 22 April 2011. The original stated that Hoegaarden's fortunes were aided by the eight-sided glass it was served in. This has been corrected.

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