The battle for Brussels’ industrial soul // How Brasserie Wielemans-Ceuppens was saved
In October 1988 Guido Vanderhulst had storage problems. La Fonderie, the Brussels-based museum of industry and labour, which he founded two years prior, needed boxes for its archival material. Thinking beer crates were perfect for the job, Vanderhulst got on the phone to local breweries. When someone at Brasserie Wielemans-Ceuppens picked up, Vanderhulst received some very unpleasant news. “There are no more crates. There is no more Brasserie Wielemans,” the person said. Wielemans’ owner, Artois of Leuven, were shutting it down, stripping it out, and selling the land.
(A version of this article originally appeared in Belgian Beer and Food Magazine. Thank you to Paul for letting me republish it.)
By the time Vanderhulst hung up the phone, he’d forgotten all about the crates. Instead, the frontlines of a fight were clarifying in his mind. A fight to save the last of the family-owned Pils breweries of Brussels. A fight to save an industrial icon from the city’s golden age of brewing. A fight for a final sliver of the soul of old Brussels. In the months and years that followed, Vanderhulst was witness to political wrangling, the odd broken bone, and no little subterfuge. But on that October morning, all he knew was that he couldn’t just let them destroy this brewery. “Wielemans is of the people of Brussels,” he says. “We had to do something.”
Crisp, clean and clear beers from Bavaria
The story of Brasserie Wielemans-Ceuppens is the story of how industrial brewing arrived in Brussels, and how it departed. Starting out in the city’s old medieval centre as a brewer of lambic and faro, by the 1860s Wielemans followed its contemporaries in fleeing to the periphery in search of room for expansion. Under Constance Ida Ceuppens and her sons Andre, Prosper and Edouard, Wielemans settled on a plot of land in Brussels’ Vorst district and set about plotting their brewing empire. The change in location was matched with a change in direction. Their new brewery was built to produce the international styles that had become a riotous success in Brussels in the late 19th century – fresh, crisp, and clear beers from Bavaria and Bohemia.
“Wielemans is of the people of Brussels,” he says. “We had to do something.”
In search of expertise, the Wielemans brothers barrelled through Germany and Austria, returning with a German-designed brewery and a head brewer from Wurzburg to operate it. German-style beers soon followed; Wielemans was the first in Belgium to launch a blonde bottom-fermented beer, when its bavière and petite bavière were released in October 1885. The beers were a hit, and the Wielemans brothers consolidated their growing dominance through expansion of production and constant modernisation and innovation at the Vorst brewery for the next two decades.
CTS Stout and Scotch
Their growth was halted by World War I. Occupying German soldiers stripped Wielemans of its copper, and restrictions on raw materials forced the brewers to use potato meal and beets in lieu of malt. And yet, two years after armistice and some canny investments from the Wielemans family, the brewery was back, pumping out 320,000 hectolitres of beer and about to lead the last great era of Brussels brewing. As consumer tastes drifted from the defeated Germans to the victorious English, Wielemans adjusted accordingly. In the early 1920s they launched Crown Tree Stout, bottom fermented and named for the trees that lined the avenue in front of the brewery. CTS Scotch ale followed, and the success of these beers propelled the brewery to national attention and financed the construction of a new brewhouse.
What was built in 1931 was an art deco icon that came to define Wielemans in Brussels. A multi-storey brewing tower, it was the largest brewhouse in continental Europe when it was finished, housing two identical rows of four copper brewing vessels in parallel lines framed by double height glass curtain walls. It was, one contemporary commentator wrote, “a perfect modernism, from the industrial point of view, the most beautiful built in Belgium”. The brewing tower has stood there ever since, remaining largely unchanged in the intervening decades until it became the focus of Guido Vanderhulst’s rescue effort in the 1980s.
Patrice Lumumba makes a cameo in Congo
With this statement of intent, Wielemans flourished. Leon Wielemans, scion of the family business and head of the brewery, became mayor of Vorst and lavished money on constituents and employees alike. Success was interrupted again by a second occupation of German troops in the 1940s, which reduced output and forced Wielemans, for lack of available manpower, to hire women in the brewery for the first time. By the 1960s the brewery had recovered once more, buying up several regional breweries, and expanding into soft drinks – once employing Patrice Lumumba, future prime minister of an independent Congo, as a sales rep for their Coca-Cola business in Belgian Congo.
Wielemans’ green uniform-clad workers milled around on the streets outside, their work in the brewhouse blanketing the neighbourhood with the sweet, sticky smell of Wielemans beer. On most days, they brewed Wiel’s Pils, the brewery’s flagship that had started out as a so-called fluitjesbier – low alcohol beer, at 0.8° – during WWII, but re-emerged retooled and stronger in the late 1940s. It remained their marquee beer right through to the 1980s, its quality attested to by a neophyte drinker. “I was a huge drinker of Wiel’s Pils, it was my favourite pils. Nothing super exceptional with them…the owners made a point of making a high quality beer,” says Yvan De Baets, co-founder of Brasserie de la Senne. “And I can testament to the quality of Wiels for sure.”
“...a perfect modernism, from the industrial point of view, the most beautiful built in Belgium.”
Enter the villains from Leuven
And yet, as the 1960s ticked over into the 1970s, all was not well at Wielemans. Belgium was buffeted by economic uncertainty and the city drew up plans to level the brewery and replace it with a parking lot or a metro terminus. Martin Vandenborre, the brewery’s final technical director, told the in-house magazine of La Fonderie in an interview in 1990 that, even as they had hit a production record 538,000 hectolitres in 1976, “it was clear that the Wielemans brewery was condemned, in the short or longer term”. Vandenborre was unsurprised when, on summer holidays in Morocco in 1978, he received a letter informing him of the brewery’s sale to their Leuven rivals Artois.
Artois kept Wielemans open while gradually shifting its activities to Leuven, and eventually shut down the brewery in 1988. In late September of that year, what remained of the workforce gathered to brew one last batch of Wiel’s, a black flag flying from the brewhouse roof in mourning. Artois was eager to move on, as they wanted the Wielemans site disposed of quickly. What machinery that could be removed was shipped to Artois headquarters, and the land was put up for sale to developers.
But Artois hadn’t reckoned with Guido Vanderhulst. Speaking to him now, thirty years after that fateful phone call, it’s clear that the passion drove him to prevent the brewery’s destruction still burns bright. Vanderhulst returned to Brussels in the 1970s, after a childhood in Africa, to discover a city crumbling under the white heat of de-industrialisation. It was a formative experience for him. He saw the factories that had dominated the Molenbeek district where he settled were disappearing, and the industrial heritage they were leaving behind was being left to rot. He saw the people that had worked and lived in the neighbourhood were fleeing with too.
“We placed the maximum pressure to make sure it was protected. The mayor did all he could to support me. Brasserie Wielemans was that important”
The crusade to rescue Wielemans begins
“For me, it’s man that interests me. The work. The machines, and the buildings, that came afterwards. I became an expert in industrial heritage because of working men and women,” Vanderhulst says. From this experience grew his desire to rescue from oblivion the industrial fabric that had been brought to life by these people. It was a mission that led him to found La Fonderie, the Brussels museum of industry and labour. He set up the offices of the museum in a ramshackle abandoned ironworks, its outdoor areas strewn with a century of industrial flotsam, in a knot of Molenbeek streets behind the Belle-Vue brewery. It was from this redoubt, he launched his crusade to save Brasserie Wielemans from predatory developers and indifferent owners.
In the autumn of 1988, as Artois hired demolition contractors, Vanderhulst was busy. By the end of October, he’d launched a national media campaign against its destruction. He wrote that this was a battle not only for “a little of the soul of Brussels, but also its memory and its urban landscape.” When Artois saw the local media reaction, they accelerated their plans. They had already had to face down striking workers, resulting in the odd broken arm or leg of picket-breakers; Artois didn’t want to drag out the process much longer.
The first things to go were the brewing vessels, to be cut out in pieces and sold for scrap. That’s where Vanderhulst started. He got the ear of the contractor charged with their removal and convinced him to stall. Suddenly, the demolition crew began experiencing problems. “There was some complicity between him and me,” says Vanderhulst. “I said, ‘between you and me, you know, we have to save these. So don’t go too fast.’ As a result, there were lots of problems, by accident or luck. They started cutting them [the vessels] from the top, they had problems. They cut a little bit, they had problems. Lots of false reasons. Because he understood we had to protect the cuvees.”
“Brasserie Wielemans was that important”
At the same time, Vanderhulst implored the mayor to step in and save a Vorst icon. He found another willing accomplice. “They understood the pressure that I put on them, the region, the commune,” says Vanderhulst. “We placed the maximum pressure to make sure it was protected. The mayor did all he could to support me. Brasserie Wielemans was that important.” Convincing Artois was a lost cause and, yo-yoing between Brussels and Leuven, Vanderhulst’s objections fell on deaf ears. Artois did offer to donate the machines of the machine hall to La Fonderie, but were insistent that the brewery had to be demolished first.
Then, two months after Vanderhulst discovered the brewery was to be demolished, his campaign scored a critical success. On December 9, 1988, the regional Brussels government halted the destruction of the brewing vessels. Protected status followed in 1993 for the art deco brewhouse, the machine house, and the brewery offices. The battle to save the brewery was just the beginning, however, because now a question lingered: what to do with what was left standing? No one could answer with any degree of satisfaction; the site remained stuck in development purgatory for over a decade, as failed housing projects followed failed office plans.
“We didn’t completely win the battle. But, what we did win wasn’t bad.”
Meanwhile, the land around the brewery flooded and descended into the swampland, and squatters occupied the art deco brewhouse. Eventually, the Brussels government expropriated the protected buildings. Following extensive renovations, in 2007 the brewhouse started its second life as the contemporary arts centre Wiels. The machine house next door became home to a cultural centre and Vorst’s Dutch library a year later.
“It was because of me”
By then, Vanderhulst had officially retired from the frontline fight. When I meet him in December 2018, he’s sitting on a bench in the old machine house and surrounded by the unique 19th century pistons and compressors that have sat there for 100 years. Together with a cohort of volunteers and some European union funding, he’s spent the past decade coaxing them back to their former glory. He’s surveying the room, he’s evidently proud of what he achieved. “It was because of me.”
And why shouldn’t he be. For every Wielemans, dozens of breweries were demolished and with them a rich seam of Brussels folk history. Wielemans is special, it means something, not only for its architecture and its history, but because the brewery complex - or at least, some of it - survived when so many others didn’t. Because of the fight in people like Guido Vanderhulst Wielemans didn’t end up as one more tombstone to a forgotten industrial past. Instead it stands tall, incomplete but unbowed by time and its ravages. It is, once more, shining its light on the streets and buildings around just as its creators intended.
“We didn’t completely win the battle,” says Vanderhulst, a smile creeping out from under his moustache.
“But, what we did win wasn’t bad.”
Highlighted Sources:
“Wielemans-Ceuppens: Grandeur et decadence d’une brasserie”, Jean-Paul Vaes, Les Cahiers de la Fonderie: Biéres Brasseries Patrimoine Industriel, La Fonderie, 1990
La Revue Documentaire: Organe mensuel de l’industrie du batiment, Etablissement Henri badoux, July 15 1931 http://monuments.tipos.be/opac_css/doc_num.php?explnum_id=61
“Wielemans-Ceuppens - Le métier de maitre brasseur: Entretien avec Martin Vandenborre”, Les Cahiers de la Fonderie: Biéres Brasseries Patrimoine Industriel, La Fonderie, 1990
W: Zeven wandelingen rondom Wielemans-Ceuppens, Zimmerfrei, Wiels, 2013
“Bruxelles en mouvements: N°164 – 13 avril 2006”, Bruxelles en mouvements , IEB, April 13 2006: http://www.ieb.be/IMG/pdf/bem164_13042006-2.pdf
“La Fonderie veut sauver”, Guido Vanderhulst, Les Cahiers de la Fonderie: Biéres Brasseries Patrimoine Industriel, La Fonderie, 1990
Wielemans Machines, accessed March 6 2019: https://www.wielemansmachines.com/