Our Timeline History
When Henri reached retirement age in 1991, he left the brewery to his cousin Danny Draps, son of his sister who ran the “Bierhuis” until 1988. His own son Hubert was not interested. Danny grew up in the brewery and in the café that he ran with his wife and was assisted by Uncle Henri during his brewing.
Due to the defects of the aluminum brewhouse, Danny decided to outsource half of the lambic production according to the Oud Beersel lambic recipe.
Until 1988, the Oude Geuze and Oude Kriek from Oud Beersel were bottled manually. Investing in a new filling installation was not possible for a small company like Oud Beersel. That is why bottling was outsourced from then on.
Henri was the first to transform his brewery, in 1973, into a “living museum” due to the declining demand for lambic beers: the brewery housed several antique machines, some of which were still in use. After all, he has continued to work in a traditional manner. However, thanks to his studies, he had more insight into the brewing problem, which, he said, made his beers better.
Business flourished, because in 1959 Henri bought himself an Opel Blitz truck to export beer in the region: this old timer has covered 29,000 kilometers and is now used as a publicity car, loaded with empty wooden barrels.
Henri expanded the brewing capacity to 50 hl per brew and, inspired by the traditional, he gave the brewery the name “Oud Beersel”, to oppose what he called “New Brussels”.
Son Henri studied at the I.N.I.F. (Institut National des Industries de Fermentation) and became a brewing engineer. He did an internship in the breweries “La Chasse Royale”, “Impériale” and “La Marine”, all of which are defunct now, and graduated in 1948. Because the parental company was too small for two men, he went to work in a laboratory. However, when his father died early in 1953, Henri gave up lab work and took over the brewery – blendery.
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.
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.
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.
In 1926, Henri Vandervelden II is born, named after his grandfather. Henri will later be the third generation brewmaster of Oud Beersel.
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.
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.