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On the Existence of Belgian Craft Breweries: Explorative Research at the Microlevel

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The Geography of Beer

Abstract

Regardless of lacking a craft brewery organization, historical beer country Belgium has a reasonably strong, very vivid and growing craft brewery movement. This paper assesses the Belgian craft brewery “movement” from a bottom-up perspective. More specifically, through interviews, it tries to create an understanding of the Belgian microbreweries . We compare our findings against the framework by Kleban and Nickerson (J Int Acad Case Stud 18(3):59–81, 2012) who analyzed the craft brewery movement in the US. The comparison focuses on business strategies , branding , (social media) marketing , and CSR . Our results differ substantially from those by Kleban and Nickerson. Furthermore, we investigated whether geography played a role in the interviewed breweries day-to-day activities and whether this did or did not lead to different results. Although the interviewed Belgian microbreweries behaved more or less alike, no matter where they were located in Belgium, geography —in the sense of location of establishment or historical and folkloristic events linked to that location—seem to have played a role in the microbreweries ’ branding practices.

Belgium is to beer what France is to wine or the Scottish Highlands to whisky. It is the mother ship of craft brewing.

(Webb and Beaumont 2012, p. 52)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    1 beer barrel =  117.35 L or 1.1735 hL of beer.

  2. 2.

    The American Brewers Association has in the meantime slightly changed their size-wise division into different craft brewery categories. They now consider an American craft brewery to be a “small” (still producing 6 million barrels of beer or less a year) and “independent” brewer. See: https://www.brewersassociation.org/statistics-and-data/craft-beer-industry-market-segments/.

  3. 3.

    Council of the European Union (1992).

  4. 4.

    See: the Law of 7 January 1998 on the structure and the excise duty rates on alcohol and alcoholic beverages (Wet 7 januari 1998 betreffende de structuur en de accijnstarieven op alcohol en alcoholhoudende dranken).

  5. 5.

    Breweries brewing more than 12,500 hL, but less than 200,000 hL also had more beneficial excise duties compared to the larger units, but less beneficial ones than those given to the smallest ones. The new regulations of 2018 no longer state different beneficial excise duties for different subgroups of small breweries, apart from some for breweries producing less than 200,000 hL a year. These breweries are called “small independent breweries”. Federale Overheidsdienst Financiën - Douane en Accijnzen (2018).

  6. 6.

    For his most recent book (2013), entitled ‘Bij de brouwer’ freely translated as ‘At the brewer’, Verdonck traveled all over the country for two years to visit 150 Belgian breweries. As Belgium officially counted 123 breweries in 2010, 150 in 2012 and 160 in 2013, this means he visited nearly all of them. The book tells the story of all those breweries (Verdonck 2013).

  7. 7.

    Mr. Vermeersch, at the time a hobby brewer and full time sales representative for a brewery raw material wholesaler seemed to know the craft brewery segment very well. In the process of conducting this research, Mr. Vermeersch started his own craft brewery.

  8. 8.

    Zythos is the confederation of Belgian objective beer tasters: an umbrella organization, which confederates regional and local beer organizations in the northern Flemish region.

  9. 9.

    A list of the interviewed persons and a link to the website of their respective breweries can be found in the reference list.

  10. 10.

    Unfortunately, we did not find an equal amount of breweries on both sides of the language border that were willing to give us an interview. Moreover, none of the few microbreweries in the Brussels Capital Region was willing to participate.

  11. 11.

    Although most small craft brewers are too small to launch international marketing campaigns, many of them seem to have benefitted from the increased export orientation and strategies of the larger Belgian brewers. While being competitors on the Belgian domestic beer market, internationally they have reinforced each other’s exports (Poelmans and Swinnen 2018; Swinnen and Briski 2017).

  12. 12.

    Kleban and Nickerson did not clearly explain what they meant with this. However, from the context we assume they meant different products of the same type; for instance different stouts, different IPA’s, etc.

  13. 13.

    A mirror anamorphosis is a sort of distorted image that can only be understood/seen with the use of cylindrical mirror. The mirror un-distorts the figure and gives free a “hidden” object.

  14. 14.

    According to Mr. Pinckaers there are ‘microbreweries, artisanal breweries and middle-sized to big breweries’. He considered his brewery to be an ‘artisanal brewery’.

  15. 15.

    Kwibus, a Flemish dialect word for being weird/odd/funny/foolish, close to brat or rascal.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business, Research Centre for Economics (ECON), City of Brussels, Belgium

    Eline Poelmans & Thomas P. G. Ostyn

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  1. Eline Poelmans
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  2. Thomas P. G. Ostyn
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Correspondence to Eline Poelmans .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography and Anthropology, Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA, USA

    Nancy Hoalst-Pullen

  2. Department of Geography and Anthropology, Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA, USA

    Mark W. Patterson

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Poelmans, E., Ostyn, T.P.G. (2020). On the Existence of Belgian Craft Breweries: Explorative Research at the Microlevel. In: Hoalst-Pullen, N., Patterson, M. (eds) The Geography of Beer. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41654-6_15

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