Sad day as Hoegaarden leaves home - ROGER PROTZ column

The heart is being ripped out of a small town in Belgium. The town is called Hoegaarden, home of a brewery of the same name that produces a cult "white" or wheat beer now sold worldwide.

The brewery will close in the autumn. It is owned by the world's biggest brewer, InBev. In a display of astonishing insensitivity in a country divided by culture and language, the manufacture of Hoegaarden beer will be moved 70 miles from a Flemish-speaking area to a lager brewery near Liège, a French-speaking region.

In the windows of bars, shops and homes in Hoegaarden there are fading posters that say, in Flemish, "Hoegaarden Brews Hoegaarden". Last December the people in the town took part in a rally to demand that InBev withdraw its decision to close the brewery.

But a global giant that once used the slogan "the world's local brewer" took no notice. The local brewery will close, people will lose their jobs and the many bars in the town, all of which exhibit the sign of the famous eight-sided Hoegaarden glass, will end up serving beer made in a lager brewery in a French-speaking area.

The closure has nothing to do with falling demand for the beer. Hoegaarden is a phenomenon. When the beer was launched by Pierre Celis in 1966 just 750 hectolitres were made that year. When he sold the business in the 1980s, production had climbed to 300,000 hectolitres a year. Today, 1m hectolitres are being produced.

Celis, now aged 81, still lives in the town and he is clear why the brewery he founded is being closed. InBev, he says, is run by bankers not brewers. Their aim is to maximise profit and the best way to do that is to concentrate production in a few massive factories.

The closure of Hoegaarden will kill a great beer tradition. The town is in Brabant, which has rich soil ideal for growing barley, wheat and other cereals. Wheat beer was brewed there since at least the 14th century. In the 19th century there were 30 or more breweries in and around the town. Dutch and Flemish traders brought exotic spices and fruits back to the Low Countries and the brewers of wheat beer started the practice of adding coriander and orange peel to their brews.

One by one the wheat beer breweries closed, unable to compete with the much bigger producers of lager, particularly Stella Artois in the nearby city of Leuven. The last brewery to close in Hoegaarden was called Tomsin, where Celis had done some part-time work as a boy.

Celis was a milkman, delivering from the cowsheds next to his father's house. Celis's friends and neighbours jokingly suggested that he should move from one cloudy white drink to another. He used his wife's copper to make beer and it proved so popular that he decided to brew it commercially.

He bought a small, 25-hectolitre brewing plant and installed it in the stables of his father's dairy in 1966. Aided by a distinctive eight-sided glass, Old Hoegaarden's White became a cult drink in Leuven, spread to Antwerp and then into the Netherlands and France.

Celis moved to a former lemonade factory in the town, but in 1985 the site was destroyed by fire. Celis was underinsured and the banks refused to help him rebuild. The only benefactor was Stella Artois, which offered to invest massively in the brewery in return for a 45% shareholding.

Then Stella merged with Piedboeuf of Liege to form Interbrew and the bankers, says Celis, took over. He was put under enormous pressure

to make his beer more cheaply. He refused and retired at 65.

He brewed in the United States for some years but he has returned to his family home in Hoegaarden, in time to witness the destruction of the brewery he founded.

Will Hoegaarden beer survive? Why is it moving to a factory in a French-speaking area when the Stella Artois brewery is close by? The answer is that the Leuven plant has launched a new wheat beer called Peeterman, which is likely to find more favour with Flemish-speaking drinkers.

The bankers, as always, will have the last say.