Caulier 28 // The strange life, inevitable death, and curious rebirth of a Brussels brewery

Skieven Architek. Not many cities have a dedicated curse word for architects and malicious developers, but Brussels does. For locals it reflects their animosity towards the developers and urban planners who through their periodic, megalomaniacal plans to reinvent Brussels – the imperial power projections of Leopold II, 19th century public works, the ghastly reconfiguring of Brussels as a post-World War II car-centric city – have trampled on the city’s residents for centuries. Brewers have suffered as much as anyone at the hands of these scheming architects. Whenever developers arrived in a neighbourhood, breweries were among the first businesses to fall victim to the wrecking ball of progress. 

So when Eric Coppieters, the man behind the Caulier Sugar Free beer brand, in an interview in December 2018 said that he “loves to build”, the people of Brussels may be wary. Luckily for Coppieters, and Brussels, his intention was to build a brewery. Actually, rebuild is probably a better description because, in Coppieters’ stated ambition to open a Caulier brewery in Brussels by 2021, he’s bring a stalwart of 20th century Brussels brewing back to the city, and to Caulier’s ancestral Brussels home 50 years after it was demolished. 

Facade of Brasserie Caulier brewhouse, Rue Herry. Source: Eric Christiaens, Wim van der Elst

Facade of Brasserie Caulier brewhouse, Rue Herry. Source: Eric Christiaens, Wim van der Elst

Brewing on cobblestones

For nearly a century, Brasserie Caulier stood on Rue Herry, in the wedge of land hemmed in by the Brussels canal and the train tracks terminating in the Brussels North station. In Caulier’s time, locals knew it as the kasseienwijk for the abundant cobbled streets. This was a neighbourhood that would have thrummed with commercial activity - the jangle of streetcars, the thud-thud-thud of car wheels on cobbles, the parping foghorns of barges moored on the quays of the adjacent docks. The neighbourhood was alive with industry, with factories, warehouses, and artisan workshops.

Caulier was just one brewery of several to open in the kasseienwijk as Brussels beer experienced a boom in the last quarter of the 19th century. In 1893, the brothers Caulier inherited a business their grandfather had grown to include breweries in Brussels and in Wallonia. They consolidated this network of breweries under the banner of Caulier frères and Brussels – then the industrial heartland of Belgian brewing – became their base of operations. By the 1920s, the brewery included a six-vessel brewhouse, and 200 square tanks in the fermentation cellars. On this equipment, the brothers built Caulier’s success, focusing on foreign beer styles – Bock, Double Bock, and the brewery’s flagship, Perle Caulier 28. 

Caulier 28, the pearl of beers

Dubbed “the pearl of beers”, the 28 referred to a trick the brewery pulled to avoid paying additional excise duty. At the time, there was a special levy on beers brewed with more than 28 kilos of grain per 100 litres of water. Spotting a marketing opportunity, and a chance to save money, the Caulier brothers brewed a quality beer to these exacting specifications. Perle Caulier 28 was the result, and the brewery plastered their iconic round logo with the number 28 all around Brussels.

As the brewery grew, the Caulier brothers kept it anchored to the kasseienwijk. Each evening, as the brewing day ended and the sweet smell of spent grain hung rich and thick in the air, farmers trekked their horses over the cobblestones and into Caulier’s courtyard to collect steaming piles of spent grain to feed their animals. Locals were invited into Caulier each year for a party at the brewery’s parquet-floored ballroom, to carouse on the account of the brewery’s owners. 

Elsewhere in the city, the brewery hired illustrious local architects to build their own pleasure palaces in which they sold Caulier beer to the locals. One such example - designed by Adrian Blomme, the architect of the landmark Wielemans-Ceuppens brewery in Vorst - is still standing today on the corner of Boulevard Lemonnier and Boulevard du Midi in the shadow of the Gare du Midi. Even though it’s long since converted into a fast-food restaurant, Perle Caulier in bright blue ceramic tile still dominates the building’s facade, alongside the iconic white “28” in a red circle logo of the brewery. 

Caulier’s fatal decision

Caulier’s location on the periphery of central Brussels spared it the upheaval faced by other breweries forced to relocate when the city centre was transformed by the burying of the Senne river underground from the 1870s onwards, and the later wholesale destruction caused by the construction of the north-south rail link that cut an unresolved psychic scar through the heart of the medieval core of Brussels. The brewery grew steadily in the first half of the 20th century, and after World War II, Caulier increasingly focused its energies in growing its exports to France and Germany. 

But, in a hubristic decision in September 1960, Caulier’s owners determined to bring their now-sprawling brewing empire under one roof in order to increase production to satisfy and expand these growing export markets. They chose the industrial village on Ghlin on the outskirts of Mons as the site of a new 27,000m2, 700,000-hectolitre brewery.

The move to Ghlin was a failure for Caulier, which with the move rechristened itself Brasserie Ghlin in a complex corporate structure incorporated the original Brussels business and several other breweries they had acquired over the years. Caulier/Ghlin struggled through the economic downturn of the early 1970s, and after an abortive takeover by US brewery Schlitz intended to give that company a beachhead through which it attempted to sell American beer in the European market, the Belgian government was forced to rescue Ghlin in 1978. It negotiated a then-secret joint takeover by the Artois and Piedboeuf breweries – the first step to what would become Interbrew, and eventually AB Inbev. But even they couldn’t save what was left of Caulier. When, in 1993 the Ghlin brewery complex in Ghlin bottled its last Jupiler and Interbrew shut it down, Caulier’s history in the Brussels kasseienwijk was already a dimming folk memory. 

Manhattan-on-the-Senne

The Caulier site in Brussels had continued to operate at a smaller scale after the opening of the Ghlin facility. When it eventually shut down around 1968, it was soon gobbled up into the maws of Brussels’ rapacious nexus of developers and politicians. By the late 1960s, this group had spotted an opportunity in Caulier’s hardscrabble neighbourhood. Light and heavy industry alike had abandoned this corner of Brussels in favour of less cramped lodgings outside the city, and the lower middle class had fled after them into the suburbs. In their stead came “guest workers” from Turkey and Morocco, moving in alongside pensioners and those who were too poor to escape the decrepitude facilitated by an indifferent - or worse - government. 

The tenement housing declined to a parlous state, and with the construction of the new Brussels north train station in the late 1950s, the area was ripe for redevelopment. The neighbourhood between the canal and the station was lively but poor and politically disenfranchised, with little representation or voice in the face of Belgium’s political-developer industry. In place of crumbling row houses and “arthouse cinemas”, a cabal of developers and politicians around then-Belgian Prime Minister Paul Vanden Boynants dreamed of a car-centric business district packed with towering skyscrapers and pedestrians relegated to walkways high above street level. In 1967, Vanden Boynants and his acolyte Charly de Pauw – a developer who went by the nickname “King Carpark” – announced their dream to the world: The Manhattenplan. 

Corbusian nightmare

It was a vision of rectilinear streets and buildings, 80 in total. There would even in time come a motorway interchange intended to link Brussels to the then-emerging pan-European motorway network. The crowing glory would be the World Trade Centre, a series of office tower blocks originally planned to be taller than their New York equivalents. As part of the plan’s rollout, the remaining industry in the neighbourhood was demolished. A wrecking crew came for the Caulier brewery in 1970 to put an end to the brewery’s association with Brussels.

Aerial photo of the kasseienwijk, St. Josse and Schaarbeek, 1938. Source: Hersleven, Jacques

Aerial photo of the kasseienwijk, St. Josse and Schaarbeek, 1938. Source: Hersleven, Jacques

The kasseienwijk - now Noordwijk - in 1988. Source: urban.brussels

Their dream of a Manhattan-on-the-Senne was, in reality, a Corbusian nightmare. A down-at-heel community of poverty, lasciviousness and foreign workers was emptied and replaced by empty, windblown boulevards flanked by identikit post-war apartment blocks. Virtually all of the tenement housing, cafes, cinemas, and sex shops that gave the neighbourhood life vanished in the space of a decade. The wrecking crews moved in even as residents were still living in their homes or on the verge of eviction. 

Today, only the cobblestones and a few tenement row houses predating this scorched-earth policy remain. Rue Herry and the surrounding streets on which the Caulier buildings were located were wiped off the map, and where they once stood is now a park given over to an informal camp for transit migrants in a brutalised neighbourhood bearing little resemblance to what came before. 

And it was all for nothing, because the Manhattenplan was an unrealised failure.

It was crippled by economic crises throughout the 1970s before it ever really started. The motorway never came, nor did the skywalks for pedestrians. Of the eight World Trade Centre towers originally planned, only three were ever built. Even today, the city’s planners and architects are working to undo the damage wrought by a generation of feckless political leadership. Despite the wholesale failure of the plan, the impulses that drove the destructive plan never really went away; instead, they slunk off into the shadows, waiting until more lucrative economic circumstances returned. 

Revenge of the developers

And returned they have. Brussels in 2019 is struggling with growing housing demand. Once again, the neighbourhoods around the Kasseienwijk and the opposite canal bank are humming with construction activity as developers work to make up the shortfall. Now though, they are working from a blank canvas, filling in the gashes in the urban landscape left behind by their bankrupted predecessors, and there are no more breweries to demolish. Quite the contrary, in fact. The modern-day descendants of the developers that razed Caulier to the ground are increasingly attracted to businesses like breweries, considering their inclusion in new developments as one more – increasingly attractive – bauble to attract high-earning, young residents to unfashionable neighbourhoods. Exactly the kinds of places that Caulier once called home.

Enter Eric Coppieters, a builder of a different sort. Coppieters spent two decades in business, leading the international expansion of the Belgian restaurant chain Le Pain Quotidien, and chocolatier Pierre Marcolini. He didn’t know much about brewing when he bought the right to use the Caulier 28 brand in 2009, but he did see an opportunity to re-launch Caulier as a low-calorie beer and capture the health-conscious, beer drinking market. “I’m quite sporty. I have a lot of friends like me who like to enjoy life and they don’t want to put weight just for the sake of it. That’s what got me in the project,” he said in an interview with Brussels Beer City in December 2018. 

Caulier’s revival

Coppieters worked with Dirk Naudts of De Proefboruwerij and Belgian brewing eminence grise Willem van Herreweghe to hone the recipe for the new Caulier 28, and his team spent the first five years getting their marketing right. Coppieters took over day-to-day management when a business partner left in 2013, and has guided Caulier’s growth strategy since. His approach is simple: target an urban market, grow sales to 10,000 hectolitres, and contract production locally. It’s an approach that led Coppieters to merge Caulier Sugar Free with Italian brewery Birrifico Toccalmatto in 2017, and to launch plans to open a brewpub in Mexico City in January 2020 (as of May 2020 there has been no official announcement made about its opening). It was always clear that the company couldn’t contract their beers to De Proef indefinitely, and Brussels had been earmarked as the site of a new Caulier brewery for some time.

According to Coppieters, he was in talks with Naudts to open an extension of De Proef in Brussels for several years, anticipating that they would hit 10,000 hectolitres of sales in the Benelux by 2020. Naudts eventually secured permission to expand his existing site, so Coppieters kept working on his Brussels plans alone. “We had other possibilities for a location, but in the end we had a preference for going back to the story of the brand,” he says, even if the Caulier of 2019 is a very different beast from its Brussels ancestor. Coppieters’ first step in returning to Brussels was to open a branch of the company’s Brasserie28 chains in an old post office building adjacent to Brussels’ central station. He acquired in the summer of 2019 the lease of a long-defunct restaurant - Maxim’s - on the Grand Place, with the intention to open another brasserie-type venue.

“Brussels should be able to have a craft local beer market of 200,000-300,000 hectolitres in the future. To have Brasserie de la Senne, Brussels Beer Project and us in a five kilometre [radius], it will be a good tourist attraction”
— Eric Coppieters, Caulier

The return of Caulier brewing to Brussels was secured when Coppieters was contacted by the company responsible for the redevelopment of the massive Tour & Taxis site next to the Brussels canal. He expects his 20,000-30,000 hectolitre brewery to be operational there by 2021, even if he didn’t confirm exactly where it will be located. As of July 2019, Coppieters’ company announced it was on track to open a 20,000 hectolitre capacity brewery at Tour & Taxis by the end of 2020. It remains to be seen what impact the Covid-19 crisis will have on these plans.

Formerly the goods terminal of the Thurn und Taxis postal company, the collection of Victorian-era warehouses, goods sheds, and jumble of other industrial buildings that make up the Tour & Taxis site has been under development since 2000. Its current owners are eager to ensure a healthy mix of residential, office, and light industrial activity on the site; and breweries fit that brief perfectly. And, unlike their 1960s equivalents, Brussels’ current generation of urban planners and city administrators think the same. 

Brewing in Brussels is back – and so is Caulier

They have worked hard to show that productive industries still have an important place in the city, and they have supported breweries in finding space and financing to stay in the city in the hope that breweries could in the future provide low-skilled industrial jobs in an area of Brussels that has struggled with chronic unemployment ever since the previous generation of Brussels breweries and the rest of the city’s industry vanished in the 1960s and 1970s. 

The breweries, at least, are now returning. Many of them are heading to Tour & Taxis. En Stoemelings and No Science have been operating close to Tour & Taxis since 2017. Brasserie de la Senne completed a purpose-built brewery there in late-2019 complete with a new tap room, and La Source Beer Co. opened in October 2019 in a shared space with a fermentation workshop. Even Brussels Beer Project was offered a site there – next to de la Senne – but turned it down in favour of another canal-side location further west. 

Coppieters is sanguine about competing with his future neighbours. “Brussels should be able to have a craft local beer market of 200,000-300,000 hectolitres in the future. To have Brasserie de la Senne, Brussels Beer Project and us in a five kilometre [radius], it will be a good tourist attraction,” he said. “There is really room enough for all three, and we all have our specific orientation…It’s really possible to do a good job together.”

Returning to equilibrium

In the original Caulier’s heyday, most of the beer sold in Brussels was brewed in Brussels. Brewing in the city may never reach those levels again, but Coppieters confidence that there’s enough room for everyone is not misplaced. After a period of tumultuous and at times cataclysmic change, Brussels brewing is again inching back to some kind of equilibrium. His Caulier may be an outlier in the Brussels scene – too much business and not enough romanticism. But, the story of Caulier’s birth, death, and strange revival is a good indication of the place of beer in Brussels in 2019. 

Beer is relevant again to Brussels in a way that it hasn’t been for half a century. It’s no longer just a part of the past, but is an urgent part of the city’s present and future – essential to conversations about localism and the place of industry in a densely populated city. By convincing Brussels’ cadre of developers of their worth, the city’s brewers have insulated themselves from the capricious swing of the wrecking ball. For now, at least, breweries in Brussels have nothing to fear from Skieven Architeks.

Sources

History and HeritageEoghan Walshcaulier, caulier 28, tour et taxis, eric coppieters, noordwijk