Facing the future

“The beer business is going through some tougher times at the moment, but we can't complain,” Bruno says. “We're doing good in France, which is our biggest market right now, and that's where we still grow. In Belgium, we used to have a lot of bars, but nowadays they're diminishing. 15 to 20 years ago, there were seven to eight bars and local pubs in our little village here, now we have two. That's a typical trend that we see, and in smaller villages where previously there was one, two or three bars, there are now none anywhere.”

Much like in the UK, Bruno says Belgians are drinking less now than ever before. People are drinking at home more than they’re drinking in pubs, and over the last four years there’s been a monumental shift to lower-ABV beers. “Alcohol-free beers are booming in Belgium,” says Bruno, pointing out that while Leroy doesn’t produce any alcohol-free beer, it has several beers in its range, and archive, that perfectly meet the demands of the day. 

“We still focus on our Sas pils, which is our biggest volume, and on our table beer, which we do in big volume as well,” says Bruno. “Next to that, we are starting to promote our 2.5% pilsner a little bit more, because we now have an audience for it. This isn’t a new recipe, the beer has existed for a long time, but because it wasn’t part of a range it was kind of floating somewhere in between brands. So, we gave it a new label and put it in a range. This tends to be how we rotate our beers. In the last 10 years, we cut four or five beers that sold well in the past but people don’t really drink as much anymore, and rotated in other beers we still believe in but which maybe weren’t doing so well because of their look and feel anymore. So yeah, we give them a whole rebranding to bring them back into the spotlight.”

Similar modernising has been needed for beers that have stood the test of time, and remain fan favourites among an ageing population. “We still have the same audience,” says Bruno, “but for example, with hommelbier, our most famous beer, we rebranded it about six years ago because we noticed that the people who drank hommelbier tended to be 50 years and older. We weren’t getting to interact with 30 year olds, so we rebranded to make it feel a bit younger. We now have branded beach chairs, we have socks, we have playing cards, and since introducing these we noticed that the demographic for hommelbier has shifted to include people who are 25 to 30 as well.” 

Bruno himself is young — at least he appears to be in his late 20s, early 30s — and so he and his brother were primed to recontextualise hommelbier in the way that would be most impactful. “We now also connect with a lot of people through social media, we do promo campaigns in bars, and in shops, we sponsor local events, and even a couple of festivals. We want people to have a certain feeling when drinking a beer, we want them to be with friends, listening to good music and enjoying the atmosphere of the festival.”

If there’s a beer in Leroy’s range that’s worth rallying behind, it’s Hommelbier. Not just a relic of the Leroy’s family history, hommelbier was designed by and for the village of Poperinge to celebrate hop growing in the area. Bruno says that Poperinge is the biggest hop growing region of Belgium but recently, after a long period of slow decline, there’s been a resurgence in hop growing in other parts of the country too. To celebrate the industry, and its close connections with the village, Poperinge has a big festival every three years in September to celebrate the hops and everything around them.

“In 1981 the festival organisers asked my grandfather if he could make a beer for the occasion,” says Bruno. “So then my grandfather, the brewer at that time, and someone from the village of Poperinge wrote that recipe for hommelbier together, and decided to include four hops from Poperinge. They launched it as a one time beer, with the idea being that it would only be brewed once. Anyway, people liked the beer so much that we just kept brewing it, and still do today. The four hops we use have changed over the years, depending on what’s growing, but we always use local hops grown in Popering. We brew this beer all year round with dried hops and pellets, but every year in September we brew a batch with fresh hops that were just picked about four hours before they’re used.”

For all of the ways that Leroy Breweries are inextricably linked to Belgium, Bruno says he doesn’t foresee an awful lot of domestic growth. “Belgium is the toughest market that we face. We’ve about 400 breweries for 10 million people, so you have to fight for every piece that you want in Belgium. We’ll always fight for it, because it's our home turf, but next to that, France is the most important market for us, and will remain that way for the future. We do a lot of volume there, but we still can do more.” Leroy is also currently on the hunt for a UK importer, so with a bit of luck, we might be Bruno’s next target market.