It takes a village to raise a glass

“The challenge for a brewer is to always make the same beer,” he says. “For example, Delirium must be the same in Belgium, in South America, all over the world, and that’s very difficult. I think most of the Belgian family brewers have brands because they have invested generations in learning to make stable beer. Craft breweries tend not to have brands, and use the name of their brewery as the brand, because they’re still learning to do that. You can enjoy a craft beer and go looking for the same one in five months, and it’s gone, or different.”

In a way, the importance of tradition is closely related to one of several characteristics that Benedikt says is common to all family breweries; their family values. “Take sustainability for example, you can invest in sustainability because you want to cut your cost, or you can do it because you want your son or daughter to inherit a sustainable brewery,” says Benedikt. “When, say, the fourth generation of a family is running a brewery, it’s always front of mind that they’re passing their work onto the fifth generation, which is getting ready to take over the brewery for 20 to 30 years.

“Another thing is that we’re not so big. Brewery Huyghe is one of the biggest family breweries, but if you look at Heineken or AB InBev, we are very small. I think if you are small, you are more flexible, which makes it easier to be innovative. We’re now available in more than 100 countries, but in each country, there are different import and licensing rules. For example, the labels must be different, and sometimes we have to adjust the ABV a little bit to be compliant with regulations. We have the flexibility to do this because we are not a multinational. We can brew five pallets of something special, or put Nocturnum in 330ml cans for the first time ever, for Beer52, because we are smaller.”

Funnily enough, small pack, special orders played a part in Huyghe’s history that definitely “wasn’t in the business plan”. In 1988, brewery Huyghe wasn’t in such great shape, financially speaking. Benedikt assures me that the current owner and his father invested in modernising the brewery such that it’s now in great working order. However, times were tough for his boss’s father who, in addition to maintaining Huyghe’s brands, had to take on private label work to make ends meet. In the instance of Delirium Tremens — now possibly the world’s best known tripel — this beer was first brewed for an Italian client who wanted several pallets of high ABV Belgian beer. 

“Now breweries do their taxes online, but in 1988 the tax man would have to visit the brewery and manually work out the ABV of each beer on-site,” Benedikt begins. “In the case of the beer we now know as Delirium, the tax man who visited the brewery got chatting to the brewteam, tried a beer, then had another, until eventually he said ‘I really like this beer, but if I have another one, I’m going to be delirious. I know it’s for an Italian client but it would do well in Belgium’. From then on, the name ‘Delirium’ began floating around in the head of my boss’s father, who figured that the next step of turning this beer into a brand would be to design a label.”

Benedikt says that the boss asked a student who was working at the brewery at the time to design the label in exchange for two crates of beer. Everything from the winning design’s font, to its iconic pink elephant remains a part of the Delirium brand today. Once the beer had a label, it was just a matter of packaging it into white bottles, abandoned by a German client who ordered bottles resembling Cologne pottery, but which they never collected. The whole thing was one delicious, boozy fluke that only earned international acclaim when it was rated the best beer in the world at the World Cup Beer Award in 1998. 

Patrick de Waele, age 64, who designed the recipe for Delirium, still works at the brewery today, though he has since handed the title of head brewer to Joris Dheedene, and now mans one of Huyghe’s brewpubs in Ghent’s city centre. “There are six of us running the brewery, plus a much bigger team of operators,” says Joris. “That number includes one person, Roland, who's officially retired. He's so fond of the brewery, and he can't let go of the quality, so he comes back and organises tasting. That’s a lot of experience that’s not leaving the brewery, and he keeps on training the younger guys. Everyone who works here treats the brewery like they would their own, except maybe on a bigger scale. It's not a job, but a passion, being a brewer.”

Managing Huyghe has to be a passion, as it strikes me as too big a job to be considered work. The team juggles 35 different recipes and 12 different yeast strains — with the Delirium beers requiring three different yeast strains each — across 74 fermentors. That core team of five managers consists of Joris, Jolan, Karl, Filip and Gauthier, with Joris overseeing wort production and yeast management, Jolan managing fermentation maturation, filtration and fruit beer production, Karl on plant management and packing, and father and son, Filip and Gauthier being high level generalists in charge of quality control, R&D, waste water treatment and energy management. 

“When I was younger, there were guys who held onto information, so to speak, and didn’t want to share it because they were so proud of it,” says Joris. “I'm the exact opposite. I want to be open. All my recipes are on the central service system, so anyone can look into them if they want. I want to support the younger guys to become even better than me, so they can bring the brewery to an even higher level in the future. That has to be the aim.”

Aside from the skill and experience needed to manage the brewery, Huyghe’s next head brewer will inherit the Delirium yeast, which Joris keeps on ice in two different yeast labs, just in case one should go up in smoke. The Delirium yeast is so distinctive that it can’t be used in any of Huyghe’s other beers, and so old that no living member of the brew team knows where it came from. Joris says that Delirium is brewed with a mixture of three house yeast strains. 

“People claim that the main yeast in Westmalle’s Tripel is the same as the bottle yeast,” says Joris with a playful smirk. “So, supposedly you can do the trick where you use what yeast is left in the bottom of the bottle to brew a new beer. We filter out our main yeasts, so we have beer without yeast, and then we add a third, different kind of yeast for bottle conditioning. So you can keep the yeast and you can try to brew with it, but it will not develop the same flavour profile as the Tremens. We’re way ahead of you.”

Huyghe is way ahead of us, but it’s also pulling up behind them. Belgian beer will always have its mythology, and traditions you have to be born into to fully understand, but the quality it’s synonymous with has the work of a broad, future-focused church to thank for its reputation.