The Milkman Who Saved a Style: How Pierre Celis Brought Witbier from Hoegaarden to Austin

A Style That Died

For about five hundred years, the village of Hoegaarden in Flemish Brabant brewed a beer unlike anything else in Belgium. It was pale, cloudy, lightly sour, lightly sweet, spiced with coriander and the dried peel of a particular bitter orange grown on the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao, and made with a generous proportion of unmalted wheat alongside the barley. The villagers called it witbier, white beer, for its pale, milky color when poured. It was farmhouse refreshment, summer drinking, the kind of beer that tasted good in a field after a morning of hay-cutting. By the eighteenth century, Hoegaarden had built an entire local economy around it.

The numbers from that period are remarkable. In 1709, the village had twelve breweries. By 1758, it had thirty-eight. The total population was around two thousand people. That works out to one brewery for every fifty-eight residents, in a single village, brewing a single style of beer. The town also supported one hundred and ten malt houses. Hoegaarden witbier was exported across the Low Countries, helped along by a quirk of regional tax law that let the village's brewers move their product without the heavy excise duties paid elsewhere. For a few decades in the late 1700s, this small Flemish farming village was one of the most concentrated brewing centers in Europe.

Then the slow disappearance began. By the nineteenth century, Hoegaarden still had thirteen breweries and nine distilleries, diminished but recognizable. By the early twentieth century, the count had fallen further. Belgian drinkers were turning away from cloudy, spiced, top-fermented farmhouse beers in favor of clean, golden, bottom-fermented pilsners imported from across the German border. The two world wars devastated rural Flemish brewing infrastructure. Postwar consolidation finished the job. By the early 1950s, only one true Hoegaarden witbier producer was left: a small operation run by an aging brewer named Louis Tomsin, working out of a brick brewery on the edge of the village.

In 1955 (some sources say 1957) Tomsin closed his doors. The equipment was eventually moved to a museum. The village's last witbier brewer hung up his apron. And just like that, after five hundred years, the style was extinct. There was no longer a single brewery anywhere in Belgium making the spiced wheat beer that had once defined this corner of Flanders. People who had grown up drinking witbier could still remember the taste, but they had nowhere to buy it. The recipe survived only in memory. The yeast, if anyone could find it, would have to be coaxed back from whatever Tomsin had left behind.

The Milkman Who Remembered

Pierre Celis was born in Hoegaarden in 1925 and lived next door to the Tomsin brewery his entire childhood. As a boy he had helped out around the brewhouse: running errands, washing bottles, watching Louis Tomsin work. He was not formally trained as a brewer; his actual trade as an adult was milkman. He drove a small horse-drawn cart through the village in the early morning hours, delivering fresh milk to the houses on his route. He knew every gable, every cobblestone, every kitchen door. When Tomsin closed in 1955, Pierre Celis was thirty years old and selling milk for a living.

He spent the next decade unable to drink the beer he had grown up with. Friends would ask, in cafés, whether anyone remembered what the old witbier had tasted like, and Pierre would say he remembered exactly. He remembered the cloudiness, the soft bread-like sweetness of the unmalted wheat, the bright lift of coriander, the bitter-orange perfume from the Curaçao peel. He remembered the way the beer cooled the throat in summer. He remembered everything except how to make it himself.

In 1965, at age forty, Pierre Celis decided he was going to bring the beer back. He had no brewery. He had no commercial license. He had a barn behind his house, a milkman's income, and a memory of how a beer from his childhood used to taste. He bought a few small fermenters, cobbled together a brewhouse in the hayloft above his father's stables, and began experimenting. He went to see Louis Tomsin, by then well into his seventies, and asked him questions. Tomsin shared what he remembered: proportions of wheat to barley, the timing of the spice additions, the particular way the wort should be cooled. The recipe was incomplete; some things had to be reconstructed from taste memory alone.

Celis brewed batch after batch. The first ones were not right. He adjusted the wheat ratio. He tried different coriander grinds. He sourced dried Curaçao orange peel from spice merchants in Antwerp who had imported it for centuries for the medicinal trade. He moved spice additions earlier and later in the boil. He saved promising yeast cultures and re-pitched them. By 1966 (sources differ on whether the first commercial batch was that year or 1967) he had a beer that was unmistakably the witbier his neighbors remembered. He called it Oud Hoegaards Bier, Old Hoegaarden Beer, and started selling it in small batches out of his father's stable, three hundred and fifty hectoliters in the first year.

It is worth pausing on the specifics of what he made, because Pierre Celis's version became the global template for witbier. The grist was roughly half pilsner malt and half unmalted raw wheat, a ratio almost no other modern Belgian beer uses. The hops were minimal, bittering only, no aroma additions. The spice bill (added late in the boil, just minutes from the end) was crushed coriander seed and dried bitter orange peel. Historians later pointed out that pre-twentieth-century Hoegaarden recipes had not necessarily included those two spices in quite that combination; oats and other grains had been more common, and cloudiness had often come from wild fermentation rather than wheat. Celis's version was less an exact reconstruction than a refinement: his interpretation of what the style should have been, finally given a chance to be made deliberately rather than incidentally. The world embraced it. The style as the world now knows it is, in essence, Pierre Celis's recipe.

From Hayloft to Empire

By the early 1970s, Pierre Celis had outgrown his father's stable. He moved the brewery into a converted lemonade factory on the edge of Hoegaarden and renamed it Brouwerij Celis, then later De Kluis, The Cloister, in reference to the village's medieval monastic brewing past. The brand of beer kept the village name: Hoegaarden. By 1980, production was in the tens of thousands of hectoliters annually. By 1985, it was hundreds of thousands. A style that had been extinct twenty years earlier was now Belgium's most successful new beer brand, exported across Europe and beginning to appear in the early specialty beer shops of North America.

Then, in November 1985, the brewery caught fire. The damage was extensive. Celis was underinsured. To rebuild, he needed capital he didn't have, and the only investor willing to put money in at the scale required was Interbrew, the large Belgian brewing group that would later become Anheuser-Busch InBev. Celis sold them a controlling stake, used the proceeds to rebuild, and stayed on as the technical and creative authority. For a few years, the arrangement worked. The beer kept its character. The brewery kept growing. Pierre Celis was, by the late 1980s, one of the most celebrated brewers in Belgium.

And then, as these stories tend to go, the corporation started fiddling. Interbrew's brewers, eager to make Hoegaarden more efficient and more consistent at scale, began proposing changes to the recipe. Less coriander. Different orange peel. A faster fermentation. A smoother, less yeasty product better suited to mainstream export. Pierre Celis fought every change, and lost most of them. By the late 1980s, he was watching his beer being subtly stripped of the character he had spent twenty years rebuilding. In 1990 he sold his remaining shares, walked away from De Kluis, and left the company that bore his name and his life's work. He was sixty-five years old. He had revived a dead style, made it famous, and watched it be diluted by the people who bought it from him.

Most men at that age would have retired. Pierre Celis decided to start over. In another country. From scratch.

Why Austin

By the early 1990s, Pierre Celis was looking for somewhere to rebuild. He visited California. He visited the Pacific Northwest. He visited several cities in the eastern United States. None of them felt right. Then he came to Austin, Texas, in 1991, and the things he was looking for turned up in a single place. The water was hard, full of limestone-derived calcium and bicarbonate, similar in mineral profile to the water of Hoegaarden. The local craft beer scene was just emerging, hungry for European-style beers, and small enough that he could be a major figure in it from day one. The pace of life was slower than the East Coast. The Texas regulatory environment was friendlier to a small brewing operation than several other states he had considered. And, by his own later accounts, he liked the people. The Southern hospitality reminded him of Flanders.

He flew to Austin to scout sites in 1991, and what he carried with him in his luggage was, technically, contraband. The yeast strain that produced authentic Hoegaarden-style witbier, the descendant of the cultures he had isolated in his father's stable in the mid-1960s, was the most valuable thing Pierre Celis owned. He could not legally export live brewing yeast from Belgium to the United States, and even if he could, the process of getting it through customs would have taken weeks during which the culture might have died. So he carried it in his suitcase. A small sealed vial of yeast slurry, packed among his shirts, smuggled past customs at Houston Intercontinental on a flight from Brussels. By the time he landed in Austin, he had brought across the Atlantic the only living link between modern witbier and the Tomsin brewery of pre-1955 Hoegaarden.

In 1992, he opened Celis Brewery on Industrial Boulevard in North Austin. The flagship beer was Celis White: his original Hoegaarden recipe, made the way he had always wanted to make it, without a corporate brewing committee diluting it. He brewed a Grand Cru, an abbey-style strong ale, and a pale bock alongside it. The brewery was small by American macro standards but enormous by craft standards of the period, a serious commercial operation producing tens of thousands of barrels of authentic Belgian-style ale within a year of opening. Celis White won a gold medal at the Great American Beer Festival in 1993, then medals at the World Beer Cup that followed. It was, briefly, the most prestigious Belgian-style brewery operating anywhere in the United States.

There is a small fact embedded in this that is worth saying out loud. Pierre Celis revived an extinct Belgian beer style in his father's stable in 1965, built it into one of Belgium's largest exporters by 1985, lost the brewery to a corporation that ruined the recipe, and then chose Austin, Texas, among all the cities in the world, as the place to start over. He was already in his late sixties when he arrived. He had family and a life and a reputation back in Flanders. He came here anyway. Austin's craft beer history is full of important figures, but Pierre Celis is the only one whose presence in the city represents, quite literally, the rescue of a five-hundred-year-old European brewing tradition from extinction-by-corporate-acquisition.

The Second Loss, and the Third Rebirth

The Austin brewery's commercial success was real but uneven. Belgian-style ales were not yet mainstream in 1990s America. Distribution costs were high. The craft beer market was crowded with hop-forward American pale ales and IPAs that drew more attention than a careful, spiced wheat beer from a Flemish exile. By 1995, Pierre Celis was looking for an investment partner to keep the brewery growing. He found one in Miller Brewing, which took a minority stake. By 1999, Miller had increased its position and acquired controlling interest. By 2000, Miller had moved Celis production out of Austin entirely, closed the brewery, and discontinued most of the labels. The Austin facility, which had won medals and put Belgian-style beer on the American craft map, sat empty. Pierre Celis had now watched the same thing happen to his second brewery that had happened to his first.

He went back to Belgium. He stayed involved in the small Belgian brewing world. He gave interviews. He was honored as one of the architects of modern Belgian brewing. He died in Hoegaarden on April 9, 2011, at the age of eighty-six, having spent his last years watching the global craft beer movement, a movement his own work had helped inspire, explode into something he could never have predicted. By the time of his death, there were thousands of witbiers being brewed worldwide. Almost all of them traced their lineage to his recipe. Blue Moon Belgian White, the most commercially successful witbier in American history, was a direct stylistic descendant. Allagash White, the gold standard of American craft witbier, was modeled on his Hoegaarden. He had revived a dead style and then watched it become a global category, only to lose the breweries that bore his name twice. Few brewers in history have had a comparable arc.

But the story does not end with Pierre Celis's death, and it does not end in Belgium. His daughter, Christine Celis, had grown up in the brewery. She had worked alongside her father in both Hoegaarden and Austin. She had watched both operations get sold and both recipes get changed. After her father's death, she began the long, careful work of getting back what had been lost: buying back trademarks, reclaiming original equipment, securing yeast strains, and assembling the family recipes that her father had kept written down in his own hand. In 2017, exactly twenty-five years after the original Austin opening, she opened Celis Brewery 3.0 in a new facility on Metric Boulevard in North Austin. Her own daughter, Daytona Camps, joined her in the operation. Three generations of the Celis family were now brewing the same beer that Pierre had pulled back from extinction in his father's stable in 1965.

The Metric Boulevard brewery still pours Celis White today. It is brewed to Pierre's original recipe, using a descendant of the same yeast that crossed the Atlantic in his suitcase, in a city he chose because the water reminded him of home. The taproom is open most days. If you drive twelve miles north of Mort Subite up MoPac and cross under 183, you can sit in the room where the third iteration of one of the most remarkable brewing stories of the twentieth century is still being written.

The Glass: A Heavy, Honest Tumbler

Witbier has, by Belgian standards, an unusually simple glassware tradition. Most Belgian beers demand a custom-shaped vessel (the tulip, the chalice, the flute, the snifter) but witbier is served in a heavy, slightly tapered tumbler, often with a hexagonal cut along the sides. It is a glass borrowed from the eighteenth-century farmhouse, when delicate stemware was a luxury and a working man's beer was poured into whatever heavy glass could survive a kitchen table.

The shape does its work quietly. The wide mouth lets the soft, billowy head develop fully, and witbier produces an extraordinary head, thick and white as meringue when poured correctly. The straight sides showcase the beer's pale, milky color, the haze rising through it in slow drifts. The heavy bottom keeps the glass cold longer in a Belgian café where the beer is meant to sit on the table during a long lunch. There is nothing fragile about it. You can set it down hard without flinching.

Serving temperature for a properly made witbier is colder than most Belgian beers, around 40-45°F (4-7°C). The cold preserves the spice aromatics, keeps the soft carbonation lively, and makes the wheat sweetness sit cleanly on the palate. Pour with the bottle held a few inches above the glass, fairly aggressively for the first half, then ease off as the head builds. The yeast at the bottom of the bottle should be swirled and added in: witbier is a beer that wants its sediment, both for the cloudiness and for the rounded body the yeast contributes. Some Belgian cafés serve a thin slice of fresh orange perched on the rim. This is divisive; purists object that the spice profile is complete without it. We think it is fine as a serving cue but should never replace the orange peel that was always meant to be in the beer itself.

What to Eat With It

Witbier is one of the most generous food beers in the Belgian canon. Its mild bitterness, soft body, and bright citrus-spice profile make it a near-universal seafood pairing, and the classic Belgian café match is, without question, moules-frites. The cream-and-white-wine mussel broth picks up the wheat sweetness of the beer, the coriander mirrors the herbs in the pot, and the high carbonation cuts the richness of the dish in a way that few other beverages can. Order a pot of mussels at any traditional Brussels café and the waiter will assume you want a witbier alongside; the pairing is so reflexive it does not even require asking.

Beyond mussels, witbier has a quiet talent for matching almost any preparation built around citrus, fresh herbs, or briny seafood. Raw oysters, particularly briny ones, are extraordinary with a cold witbier: the wheat's natural sweetness rounds out the minerality of the oyster, and the orange peel highlights its faint marine sweetness. Grilled white fish dressed in lemon and brown butter is a textbook match. So is a simple roast chicken seasoned with fresh thyme, parsley, and a squeeze of lemon. The pairing principle, in every case, is that witbier amplifies whatever bright, herbal, or citrus element is already on the plate.

The less-discussed pairing, and one we have come to rely on at the bar, is witbier with the spicier Asian cuisines that have become a major part of Austin's food culture. A Thai green curry, a Vietnamese pho bo, a Sichuan dry-fried chicken: all of these dishes have enough chili heat to overwhelm a more subtle beer, and enough aromatic complexity to clash with anything malt-forward. Witbier's coriander, its soft body, and its clean finish make it almost uniquely suited to this role. The beer cools the palate without coating it, and the spice profile of the beer harmonizes with the spice profile of the food rather than fighting it. There is a reason Hoegaarden was, for years, the default beer at every upscale Thai restaurant in Brussels.

For desserts, witbier is less natural: it does not have the sweetness or the depth to stand up to chocolate or rich pastries. But it does work surprisingly well with light fruit-based finishes: a lemon tart, a slice of orange poundcake, a bowl of strawberries with whipped cream. The citrus echoes the orange peel in the beer, and the wheat sweetness mirrors the dessert without overpowering it. Treat it as you would a glass of sparkling wine, a brightening drink for a lighter ending.

How We Serve It at Mort Subite

There is an obvious reason a Belgian bar in Austin would care about the Pierre Celis story, and a slightly less obvious one. The obvious reason is that we serve witbier and we serve it the right way: proper tumbler glass, cold from the cooler, full sediment swirl on the pour, no fruit stuck on the rim unless someone specifically asks. The less obvious reason is that the Celis story is the closest thing Austin has to a homegrown Belgian beer mythology, and a bar named after a Brussels lambic café has a particular obligation to remember it. Pierre Celis chose this city. The brewery he built here is still operating on Metric Boulevard. His granddaughter is still pouring the beer. We are not the only people in town who care about that, but we are one of the few places in Austin where Belgian beer is the entire premise of the room.

Our witbier service is straightforward. We pour into a proper thick-walled witbier tumbler, never a pint glass. We pull the bottle cold and pour with the bottle held high to build a generous head, then bring the angle down as the glass fills. If the beer comes from a 750 with sediment, we swirl the last inch to suspend the yeast and add it to the glass. This is non-negotiable; the yeast is the body of the beer, not a contaminant. We bring the glass to the table fast, while the head is still full and the aromatics are still rising. A witbier sitting on the bar for two minutes loses half of what makes it beautiful.

The beer goes out, more often than not, in the early evening: after work, before dinner, when someone walks in needing something light and refreshing before committing to a stronger beer for the meal. It is one of the few Belgian beers that pairs naturally with the Austin climate. A 95-degree June evening on Congress Avenue calls for a cold witbier in a way that it does not call for a quadrupel or a strong dark. Our regulars know this. The bar gets a long, quiet run of witbier orders between four and seven nearly every weekday from May through September.

We do not currently pour Celis White itself on our regular taps (Christine Celis's brewery deserves to be visited on its own ground, and we send people there often) but we keep authentic Belgian witbier on the bottle list and on draft, served the way Pierre Celis intended. The lineage matters. When you drink a witbier at Mort Subite, you are drinking a beer that did not exist between 1955 and 1966, that was rebuilt by hand in a Flemish hayloft by a milkman, that crossed the Atlantic in a suitcase, that took root in Texas water, and that survived two corporate acquisitions and is now being brewed twelve miles north of our front door by Pierre's daughter and his granddaughter. There is no other beer style with quite that history. We pour it carefully because the story it carries is worth carrying carefully.

If you have never visited the Celis taproom on Metric Boulevard, do it. Take an Uber up (it is not a walk) and pull up a stool. Order a Celis White. Look at the photos of Pierre on the walls. Read the small plaques about the original Hoegaarden brewery. Then come back to Congress Avenue and have another witbier with dinner, sitting in a room named after a Brussels brewery that competed with Pierre's all his life. The two experiences belong together. Austin's Belgian beer culture is small, but it has a heritage that almost no other American city can match, and the Celis family is at the center of it.

Check the draft menu, or ask the bar what is on today. Order one cold on a warm evening, ask for the proper tumbler, and raise a glass to a milkman who refused to let a five-hundred-year-old beer die quietly.