A nice weekend getaway to my hometown, Groningen. Years and years have I lived in this beautiful city without knowing that one of the best Dutch breweries, specializing in gueuze-type beers, sits just around the corner. Vandenbroek is the name, named after brewer Toon van den Broek. Vandenbroek is one of the top-rated breweries from the Netherlands on Untappd, coming in at place fifteen. Not a bad performance for a microbrewery like Vandenbroek. Now, it is finally time to visit this brewery. I’m meeting with Toon on a beautiful sunny Saturday afternoon at his brewery, in a small village just outside Groningen.
When I arrived, I was greeted by his wife, GerryAnn, and the brewery cat, Droef. We sat down in his garden and talked about his brewery and their upcoming move to Spain while tasting some of his beers. We started with a regular Watergeus, then a Watergeus with prunes, and finished with a Watergeus with honey. All amazingly tasty beers. Officially no gueuze, but at least as tasty as a gueuze from Belgium. The craftsmanship and labor that goes into making these beers is astounding. Toon and GerryAnn do all the work themselves by hand. From brewing to bottling to labeling, to rinsing all the bottles. Every single bottle has passed their hands multiple times.
The brewing installation is completely self-designed and set up as a traditional lambic brewery. It consists of a 250-liter copper open brew kettle, which is fired by wood-fired ovens. There is also a traditional cooling vessel where -after three to four hours of boiling- the wort cools overnight, and of course many wooden barrels in a barrel room. Furthermore, he has some stainless steel kegs filled with all kinds of lambic beers. The barrel room was the highlight of my visit as Toon let me taste a lot of his beers straight from the barrel. Sequentially tasting 1-year-old, 3-year-old, and 5-year-old lambic really showed that time is probably the most important ingredient in these beers. The complexity of the 5-year-old lambic was phenomenal. The different grape lambics I tasted were out of this world too.
He brews in limited quantities, so the bottles have limited availability. If you’re curious and want to try one of his delicious beers, you can order them online at beerdome.nl. Or you could try or buy them at several places in the Netherlands. De Bierkoning, Proeflokaal Het Arendsnest and Foeders in Amsterdam, Proeflokaal Mout, Bierlokaal De Koffer, Just in Beer, and De Kaaskop in Groningen, Proeflokaal Gist and Rubens in Utrecht, café Meijers in Arnhem, Burg Bieren Ermelo and ‘t Biermenneke in Nijmegen, among others. In Belgium, among others, at Bierhalle Deconinck in Vichte and in Antwerp at Billie’s Bierkafétaria.
Vandenbroek has brewed a lot of different kinds of beer throughout the years. The following beers you may still find in stores or bars if you’re lucky:
- Watergeus, a gueuze style beer, aged on oak barrels. Several special editions exist, honey, peach, prune, retsina with rosemary, and medlar (only available at Het Arendsnest in Amsterdam).
- Cluyn 1467, a traditional oat beer from Groningen.
- Flemish brown ale (with and without cherries).
- Droef, grape ale using organic Frankenthaler and Southern Italian Aglianico grapes with Vandenbroek’s own Watergeus. Droef is named after the brewery cat.
- Brut Olasz, lambic-style beer with grapes from the Olasz Riesling variety.
- Several other grape lambics in limited quantities.
So, how did it all start?
At the age of 15, Toon worked as a part-time brewer’s apprentice at brewery “De Kroon” in Oirschot, to gain more knowledge of the complicated craft of brewing. He then started brewing beer in his parents’ barn until he moved out to go study.
How did you get into spontaneously fermented beer?
A long time ago, as a thank-you gift for catsitting the cat of a Belgian school teacher, he got a wooden crate with some lambic beers from Belgium. These bottles were without any labeling or the name of a brewery, and he liked them a lot. That’s what got him into this style of beer. A few decades later, after having sold his dairy farm and moving to where the brewery is today, Toon wanted to try making it himself too. Also because GerryAnn loves lambic and gueuze too. Toon was the first brewer in the Netherlands to make lambic-style beers. For a long time, he was the only one.
His success in brewing lambic however took some effort. The first-ever batch was a total disaster. By using the dregs from bottles of gueuze and dumping them on the floor throughout his house and brewery, Toon was able to create the right microbial environment to brew lambic beers. This started just as a hobby, pouring his drinks at tastings or lectures about sour and wild beers. After a while though, they registered as an official brewery and brewed around 40 to 45 hectolitres per year. Compared to other breweries this doesn’t seem to be a lot. Take into account though that for most of the time this has been done outside his normal day job, and just with the two of them doing everything by hand. Therefore, they never felt the need to grow or expand the business and always kept the brewery small-scale and low budget. Furthermore, they never felt the need to gain any attention and didn’t do any advertisements, and don’t have a social media presence too. If you search online for Vandenbroek you won’t find much, especially in the English language. This blog post may very well be the first ever ‘interview’ published online. Sadly, however, it probably is the last one as well. Toon and GerryAnn will move to Spain later this year and it’s unclear what will happen to Vandenbroek.
Moving to Spain and the future of Vandenbroek
As mentioned above, they are moving to Spain, Galicia to be more precise. All barrels of beer that are still in the brewery will be sold to other breweries or blenderies (like Symbiose from Groningen) or will be bottled and sold to stores and restaurants. It’s still unclear whether they will restart in Spain. But given that it’s very hard for Toon to sit around and do nothing, I guess that he will be brewing again in Spain too, even just as a hobby. Looking at the pictures of the beautiful house they bought there, there’s certainly enough room in the cellar to create a new barrel room.
We’ll see what the future will bring for them. I certainly hope we can still enjoy their beers in the future.
Who should I interview after this?
Toon recommended I either go to Nevel Wild Ales in Nijmegen or Tommie Sjef in Den Helder. The beers Tommie Sjef produces are closer to what he’s doing, Nevel has a different style of wild ales with the use of a lot of herbs and botanicals, all locally sourced. If you’re interested in this, stay tuned. This July I will visit Nevel in Nijmegen to chat with the founder, Mattias.
I had a fantastic afternoon and want to thank Toon and GerryAnn again for having me over and sharing their passion with me. I hope we meet again soon, either in the Netherlands or in Spain!
Thanks for reading and stay tuned for an upcoming post starring the Vandenbroek Watergeus Retsina and Rosemary that I took home with me after the visit.