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.