The Estate Journal

When I read about the new rules on alcohol advertising, one sentence stayed with me: alcohol is harmful to health. From now on, that warning must appear clearly in advertising for alcoholic drinks. Visible, legible, and large enough not to be hidden away in a corner.

Of course, this touches a brewery. Not only its posters or its communication, but the craft itself. It touches the glass, the café, the terrace table, and the way people gather around a drink.

This should not be treated lightly. Alcohol misuse exists. It damages lives. A brewer who denies that does not understand his own trade. But a glass of beer brewed with care also asks for care when it is drunk.

Belgium has known this tension for a long time. In 1919 came the Vandervelde law. It was aimed above all at spirits, jenever, public drunkenness, poverty, and families damaged by alcohol. Beer then stood in another category: a fermented drink, tied to cafés, meals, villages, work, and rest. Not harmless, but not quite the same thing either.

Today, that nuance seems to be narrowing. The older phrase still spoke of craftsmanship and judgement. Then came misuse. Now the language turns mainly to danger and health.

In the outbuilding of the Château de Durbuy, that feels close. We brew without excuse, but also without carelessness. We brew beer that knows its place: at the table, in company, in moderation.

Perhaps that is what a small brewery can still defend. Not the right to drink without thought, but the right to make distinctions. Between pleasure and excess. Between warning and frightening. Between alcohol as a problem and beer as culture.

A beer brewed with attention, precision, and craft is also a tribute to the place it comes from. The warning can stand on paper. The awareness must live in the work.

Enjoy your drink, whether it is one of ours or someone else’s. But always in moderation.

When I open a bag of hops, there is always a moment of silence.

Today, hops arrive as pellets. We choose them for bitterness, for oils, for perfume. At the start of the boil, they give bitterness; later, sometimes cold, they keep the aroma. It is a technical ingredient, but fragile. Well placed, it gives length to the glass.

In Durbuy, hops are not only a raw material. Old notes speak of the Haie Himbe, said to have served as a hop yard until the end of the nineteenth century. In 1659, a plot beyond the mill was given to the Récollets to become lupularia, a hop yard. The Récollectines appear through their walls, their convent, their gardens.

Of Philippe Marckloff, around 1560, we know neither the recipe nor the hops. But a beer brewed here likely already knew that bitterness, that way of holding the grain.

The link remains modest. We do not brew as he did. We brew in the old stables of the Château de Durbuy, with technical sheets, numbered lots, and present-day gestures. But hops return in the hand, in the tank, in the warm scent of the wort. They do not prove a perfect continuity. They offer something better: a trace.

I am ordering the grains, malts, and hops for the next brew. Nothing remarkable: quantities to check, sacks to plan, one variety to track down. Then, sometimes, something is missing.

Today, an unavailable hop is a modest inconvenience. We wait, adjust, move the schedule. The brew does not vanish. Still, that small absence leads back to a time when grain was never simply a material for brewing.

Older accounts of Durbuy already mention hop gardens around the town. The trace still needs careful handling, but it says something true: here, beer has never been separate from soil, gardens, and harvests.

In the early eighteenth century, during poor harvest years, some authorities forbade or restricted brewing so that cereals could be kept for food. A local history of Durbuy, citing ordinances of the provostry, records that in 1709, after a severe grain crisis, brewing was banned in the court of Barvaux.

It is worth measuring what that meant. Beer was not only a drink for pleasure. It belonged to the ordinary rhythm of houses, taverns, work, and meals. To remove it, even briefly, touched a daily habit and a real part of nourishment.

Grain first had to become bread, porridge, seed, reserve. In hard years, brewing came after subsistence. Brewing itself, sometimes imagined as free and convivial, in fact depended on a fragile balance: the land, the market, the harvest, and the decisions made when everything begins to run short.

So when I look today for a hop that is not available, I know the comparison soon reaches its limit. Our consequences are small. But the delay recalls a simple thing: a beer begins long before it reaches the kettle. It begins with what the season has left behind.

In recent days, the work has gathered around a discreet but decisive object: the label. Before a beer is presented, offered, or simply placed on a table, that small piece of paper has to find its proper measure.

A first physical proof settled several questions. The paper was not right. The format felt too narrow. On screen, certain balances appeared possible; in the hand, on the bottle, they asked for something else.

So the direction is being taken up again with more width, without changing its spirit. The point is not to enlarge in order to show more, but to let the centre of the label breathe: the château, the name, the presence of the estate. The required details must remain clear, legible, and properly held.

This work is quieter than an announcement. It is necessary all the same. An estate brewery cannot afford an approximate image. Paper, margins, cut, legibility, colour: each belongs to the same standard of care.

The files are being reopened, checked, corrected. A new physical proof still has to be examined before final approval. It is a slow step, but the right one. Here, it is better to delay a label than to set an error too early.

A question came to me the other day: what remains of a man about whom we know almost nothing?

Philippe Marckloff was brewing in Durbuy around 1560. He lived at La Ferme au Chêne, at the entrance to the town. The archive is thin: a name, a date, a location. No portrait, no recipes, no testimony. Only the record that he existed.

It is precisely that spareness that brings him close. He brewed here, in this same valley, under the same light. Four centuries later, I fill tanks in the same valley. Beer changes name, form, century. Something of the same thread remains.

This is not to pretend that we brew as he did. We do not know that. But we brew here. Perhaps that is enough.

The former stables of the Château de Durbuy are not a backdrop. They are working walls, built to hold, shelter, and carry the passage of days.

The brewery has settled there without trying to erase what the building was before. One still feels the logic of the outbuildings: the nearness of the château, the stone, the measured openings, the direct relation to work.

I like the thought of an estate building changing use without losing its deeper function. The estate’s horses were once kept here. Today, fermentations, temperatures, and brews are watched with the same discreet regularity.

It is not the château itself that brews. It is one of its old rooms of practical life. For a brewery, that may be exactly the right setting.

I am wary of grand words. A local beer does not need to summon an entire region with every sip. It must first be made here, with care, in the real rhythm of the estate.

In Durbuy, that rhythm has its own character. The town is compact, mineral, held between stone and the Ourthe. Work happens close to the walls, close to the water, in a light that changes quickly with the seasons.

To brew here is not to manufacture a souvenir. It is to accept a scale: small batches, closely watched gestures, a daily presence in the estate’s old outbuildings.

The rest comes later. The name of the château, the town, the history. They do not replace the work; they make it answerable.