The Alken brewery, famous for its Cristal lager, celebrates its 100th anniversary this year.
The milestone will be marked on Saturday with the organisation of the Cristalfeesten in the Limburg village itself. However, the brewery is increasingly taking on an international dimension, and parent company Heineken considers the site to be a benchmark in the development of special beers in particular.
Equipment enabling a raw hopping technique for beers was recently inaugurated at the Alpen site – a €3.7 million investment. Just before the outbreak of the novel Coronavirus crisis, a new bottling line was installed, with improved water management at a similar cost, while another €4 million will be released to accommodate a new packaging line.
'An SME within an international entity'
“With all the investment in recent years, we’ve become a sort of big ‘craft brewery’ within the Heineken group; like an SME within an international entity,” says Ellen Mertens, Alken-Maes’s resident brewer, who cut her teeth at the now-closed Affligem brewery.
She now shares her knowledge at other Heineken sites in the Netherlands, Germany and Ireland. “Every day is different,” she says.
Dutchman Marc Josephus Jitta became CEO of Alken-Maes just under a year ago. “I thought I knew all about the passion for beer in the Netherlands, but I realised that beer was clearly in people’s genes here in Belgium,” he says.
Diversity
The forty-year-old likes to highlight the diversity of the company he runs. “At Alken-Maes, we’re lucky enough to be involved in all the different stages of the production process. It starts with the farmer, with our Albert malting plant in Puurs, through production, in Alken for example, to the on-trade market with our coffees.”
Not to forget the Stassen cider factory in Aubel, a market that is stable in Belgium but growing abroad.
In all, some 600 people work at Alken-Maes, around a third of them at the Alken site. Two million hectolitres of beer are produced there under a wide range of brands, including Maes, Grimbergen, Affligem, Hapkin, Ciney, Postel, Watneys, Desperados, Birra Moretti and Amstel.
'First Belgian pilsner'
The brewery’s impressive two-tone vats leave no doubt as to the star of the show: Cristal lager, soon to be a century old too, having been launched just five years after the brewery was founded.
“It was the first Belgian pilsner, brewed using the Czech pilsner method, which was very fashionable at the time,” explains Yannick Boes, grandson of the brewery’s co-founder and himself a career member of the company.
When his grandfather Edouard set up the Alken brewery with Jozef Indekeu, it was clearly to specialise in bottom-fermented beers. And they succeeded. By the 1930s, hundreds of thousands of hectolitres of beer were already flowing out of the vats of the Limburg brewery.
The first vat even arrived at the Royal Palace in 1950, after Leopold III asked his tutor, Paul Paelinck, whether he did not know a brewer. Being the good Limburgian that he was, Paelinck sent him a sample that charmed the sovereign's palate.
Everything has not always been rose-coloured
Today, Alken-Maes is the only brewery on the Court’s list of patented suppliers.
“We again served Cristal at the garden party organised in Laeken for the 10th anniversary of King Philippe’s reign,” Yannick Boes proudly claims.
But all has not always been rosy, and when the French BSN (Danone, Kronenbourg…) entered the fray in 1978, the local structure looked grim. “They weren’t brewers,” says Jan Indekeu, son of the co-founder, who comes from a family of brewers that has been active since the 17th century. “They gave us a big book to tell us how to make beer, but it just wasn’t made for the Belgian market,” says Indekeu, who started at the brewery in 1963.
“Proof that they didn’t know the market at all? They tried to make Kronenbourg the main brand in Belgium, the heart of the market. But that obviously didn’t work,” Yannick Boes recalls. “Rival brands took advantage and Cristal sales collapsed.”
Acquisition by Heineken
In 1988, Alken-Kronenbourg merged with the Maes brewery based in Waarloos, Antwerp Province, which went on to become the current Alken-Maes.
It was this merged entity that was taken over by Scottish & Newcastle in 2000. The business did not get any better. “They were financiers with one aim: to make low-cost beer,” according to the descendants of the founders.
The British group was making savings directly on brewing, and deferring investment in production facilities.
Scottish & Newcastle did not do well and in 2008, it was acquired by Heineken and Carlsberg, which split its assets split between them. The Dutch giant inherited the Limburg brewery, and, to hear Messrs Indekeu and Boes tell it, the parent company has more than lived up to their expectations.
"Heineken immediately raised the quality of the two beers,” says Boes, who is also delighted with the national distribution launched in 2017 for Cristal, until then largely confined to Limburg. Since its marketing throughout the country, sales have soared by 50% in five years.
Local anchoring
Building on the success of Limburg Pils, which has recently been produced with a greater proportion of local ingredients, Mr Jitta hopes in the medium term to continue this local anchoring, although production manager Mertens is aware of the limitations.
“Belgium is a small country,” she says. “Just to source hops exclusively from Belgium, we’d have to take over the whole market for our own needs. The revival of malting barley in Belgium has been a success, but we can’t just source it from here, given the area available. If a storm hits the country, it could become a problem.”
The two managers also intend to dig into the non-beer segment (Beyond Beer). As the hard-seltzer, a flavoured, lightly alcoholic fizzy drink, does not at all meet the expectations of the Belgian public, Alken-Maes does not plan to dwell on this category and is already scouring new possibilities. “We have know-how in Beyond Beer with our Stassen cider house,” notes Ellen Mertens.
On the festive front, Alken-Maes is taking advantage of the centenary to relaunch the Cristalfeesten, which had not been organised for some thirty years. From midday on Saturday until the early hours of Sunday, a number of concerts and DJ sets are planned in the centre of Alken.
The event is sold out, and Marc Josephus Jitta is delighted. He hopes to make the event an annual one.
