Young hearts run free
For Amsterdam-based Forever Young Brewery, dipping a toe in international markets means braving linguistic and cultural divides
Robyn Gilmour
Saturday 11 January 2025
This article is from
The Netherlands
issue 113
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I get the impression, speaking to Thomas Oostdijk, that being ‘forever young’ has nothing to do with age, and everything to do with feeling free. The founder of Brouwerij De Eeuwige Jeugd — or Forever Young Brewery to British audiences — doesn’t take himself too seriously. To him, beer should be playful, easy drinking, and well made but never the main event. Freedom, of course, means different things to different people, and for Forever Young the best place to be free is peripheral, underground spaces, in a club, or on a dancefloor.
Forever Young found its forever home in an old prison, on the industrial outskirts of Amsterdam in 2018. The space it needed to brew came with an expansive warehouse which, at first, Thomas wasn’t sure what to do with. Casual footfall was non-existent so far out of the city, so a taproom seemed unlikely to draw crowds. A ticketed club-night, on the other hand? That worked just fine.
Hosting DJs in the warehouse next door was quite a change of pace for Thomas, who had come to craft beer through his work with InBev, then Duvel Brewery. He worked in sales, mostly helping international brands break into the Dutch market. It was all crucial experience and insight for setting up his own brewery, which was motivated by the sudden arrival of craft beer in Holland.
Pretty quickly, Forever Young found its flow, settling into a rhythm that combines characteristics of traditional styles, with those of modern IPAs. That looked like dry hopping blondes and tripels, always using as neutral a yeast as possible to keep drinking smooth and easy. More important than the identity of the beer, however, is the identity of the brand, the idea behind which is that drinking Forever Young beer should feel a certain way.
“We actually tend not to talk about the quality and ingredients of the beer, because we think good beer is the starting point. We’re much more focused on creating an experience. The feeling of being free and alive is what we try to communicate with the different characters on our labels,” says Thomas. “They all have different characteristics all of which are related to the idea of eternal youth.”
These characters are all marginal, transgressive figures, who tend to be moralised — rightly or wrongly — by mainstream society. While there’s something cheeky about Slick Rick, The Nitwit, and The Bully, there’s also a lot that doesn’t translate between Dutch and English, not just linguistically, but culturally.
“The character of Slick Rick is based on the Greek god, Hercules, who was known to be a bit of a Slick Rick himself,” Thomas begins, his face as deadpan and serious as ever. “In Holland, Slick Rick just has a leaf covering his … you know … but in the UK that’s inappropriate, so we had to cover him up.”
Similarly, Lellebel’s label in Holland currently depicts “a woman who is usually from the Red Light District. She’s blond and sweet, just like the beer is also blonde and sweet, and being free is her main characteristic”. Would such freedom translate in a country where sex workers don’t have as many rights and protections as they do in Holland? Would other markets demand more solidarity, and less light-heartedness, when it comes to representation of people still marginalised and criminalised in many parts of the world?
The culture-specific interpretation of freedom that made Forever Young popular in the Netherlands — where Thomas estimates the brand has sold over a million litres — is now proving a challenge that Thomas is keen to play and engage with, for the purposes of export.
Perhaps, he says, people have to visit the brewery, or cafe in central Amsterdam, to fully understand Forever Young’s energy. “The space next to our brewery is like a playground,” he says. “We organise food events, club nights, and once a year we put a party on for all the bars who stock our beer in Amsterdam.” Photos and footage of these events look playful and fun, treading the line between camp, boutique, and bohemian. Thomas is right to call them places to be free.
There’s a sensuality to the decor, which makes the brewery’s city-centre cafe, Café de Jeugd, in particular, feel like a great place for a daytime date or evening to get dressed up with friends. Levenslang, the club space next to the brewery which occasionally hosts supper clubs, possesses all the steel, tiles, and industrial grit that makes me miss clubbing.
Through this lens, Forever Young’s brand makes perfect sense, and perhaps the searing memory it revives for me — strobe lights, DJ booths, the ringing silence of the street outside as the sun comes up and the club’s door closes — means it’s done its job.
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