Pierre Celis Revives Hoegaarden Witbier

In 1966, Pierre Celis began brewing witbier in a small brewery in Hoegaarden, Belgium. Celis had assisted at the local Tomsin brewery in his youth and retained knowledge of the town’s white-beer tradition. When Tomsin closed in 1957, commercial production of witbier disappeared from Hoegaarden. Celis revived the tradition using wheat, coriander, and orange peel and initially brewed on a small scale in a barn. Celis’s beer restored witbier as a pale, cloudy, spiced wheat beer and formed the basis of the modern Hoegaarden brand. As demand increased, the brewery expanded and became known as De Kluis. The success of Celis’s revival returned witbier to commercial prominence in Belgium and provided an influential model for later Belgian-style white beers brewed internationally.