INSTALLATION OF SMALL BREW HOUSE
Shortly before Wold War II, Egidius started brewing lambic himself, in a small and primitive installation, which he had assembled himself from second-hand parts. Because it was forbidden during the war to use wheat, an indispensable raw material for lambic, grinded and kilned sugar beets were used as a substitute. Together with, as usual, hops and secretly a little wheat, this gave a lower alcoholic beer that, according to son Henri, was still quite drinkable.
FIRST BREWERY TO PRODUCE KRIEK WITH CROWN CAPS
Egidius Vandervelden was the first to use small bottles with crown caps, so-called capsulekes. In the period 1930 – 1940, he already filled kriek on capsule bottles, which he sweetened with sugar (saccharin was prohibited at the time) and pasteurized with the heat of the steam boiler.
OPENING OF THE BIERHUIS
Egidius had two daughters and one son, Henri (° 1926). Because daughters offered good prospects for the café, renovations were carried out in 1934: the farm and cart house made way for the Bierhuis and a Mortier organ was placed in it, a phenomenal investment of 40,000 belgian francs at the time, about the value of the house. The Bierhuis was run by one of the daughters, Marie-Thérèse Vandervelden, until 1988 and afterwards by her son, Danny Draps, till the end of 2002.
BIRTH OF HENRI VANDERVELDEN II
In 1926, Henri Vandervelden II is born, named after his grandfather. Henri will later be the third generation brewmaster of Oud Beersel.
EGIDIUS SET UP HIS OWN BREWERY
The founder had five sons; the eldest, Egidius, married the daughter of Jeromius Hofman, a small farmer and cheese farmer, who also ran a village shop and estaminet. Egidius renovated the farm in 1922 and set up his brewery where he first worked as a brewer.
HOW IT STARTED
The story of Oud Beersel begins around 1880. At that time Henri Vandervelden was employed as a seasonal worker in the “De Kroon” brewery in Uccle. After all, the brewing of Lambic takes place, depending on the weather conditions, from October to April. This brewing was interspersed with summer and autumn labor in the form of buying and picking fruit from rented orchards and preparing that fruit for sale. This gave him the idea to combine his two professions and to process beer himself.
He bought a piece of land on the Kasteelstraat in Beersel that was particularly suitable for baking carel and had brickmakers from Flanders bake the bricks that would be used to build his brewery. The house, the brewery and the cart house were completed around 1882, so that this can be regarded as the foundation year of the Vandervelden brewery, later renamed into Oud Beersel.
INNOVATION WITH BEER BOX
The elder generation of Oud Beersel customers came to the brewery to purchase lambic straight from the wooden barrels. In the past, bars served the still lambic from their own wooden barrels but that tradition was disappearing. After 10 years of looking for the right solution, Oud Beersel launched the exclusive BEER BOX, a pressure resistant bag-in-box solution that allowed Oud Beersel to ship unpasteurized lambic through distributors and importers.
At the same time, Oud Beersel started innovating with Infused Lambic. Since then, many versions of lambic infused with spices, flowers and tea have been launched.