Brouwerij Duvel Moortgat

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Brouwerij Duvel Moortgat
Duvel
Location Breendonk, Belgium
Year opened 1871
Annual production 270,000 hl (2001)
Active Beers
Duvel Strong golden ale
Bel Pils Pilsener
Maredsous 10 Tripel
Maredsous 6 Pale ale
Maredsous 8 Dubbel
Passendale Pale ale
Vedett Pale lager

Brouwerij Duvel Moortgat is a Belgian family-owned brewery. Its beers are exported to more than 40 countries. Its strong golden ale, Duvel, is particularly popular and widely considered to be style-defining. Duvel (pronounced /'dʏːvəl/) is Flemish for Devil (the standard Dutch word however being Duivel). Duvel was founded in 1871 by Jan-Leonard Moortgat, who descended from a family of brewers that lived in Steenhuffel. They delivered their beer in carts, pulled by the local people of Breendonk who since are called 'Meuttes' (Oxen) by the neighbouring communities.

During World War I, the Moortgats renamed their beer Victory Ale to commemorate the end of the war. But during the 1920s, an avid drinker described the beer as "nen echten duvel" (a real devil), and the name of the beer was changed to Duvel. It has become the brewery's flagship beer.

In 1930, the brewery launched Bel Pils.

The Vedett, a pilsener, was created in 1945 by Albert Moortgat, Jan's son. Since 2003, Vedett has been relaunched as a trendy luxury lager, aimed at young customers in upscale urban bars. Vedett currently has a marketing scheme that gives customers the chance to have photos of themselves placed on the labels of bottles. These bottles are then sold commercially, so one never knows when one might run into oneself in a bar.

In the 1950s, the third generation of Moortgats took control of the brewery. In 1963, Moortgat began brewing its Maredsous line of abbey beers, under license of the monks of Maredsous abbey. A local urban legend had it that this beer got its--somewhat strange--taste because the brewery used water that came from under the (indeed nearby) cemetery of Breendonk. This is completely unfounded--as urban legends go--but Brewery Moortgat had always been very mysterious about their source of water (of prime importance for a brewery), and the legend spread, so it took many years before the beer caught on.

In the early 1970s, when business had gone down dramatically, and there were talks of an imminent bankruptcy, a huge co-operation was set up with the Danish brewery Tuborg. The beer, still brewed in Denmark, was transported to, and bottled by, Brewery Moortgat which undertook distribution in a larger part of Western-Europe. This arrangement resulted in a continuous traffic of the large Danish trucks (carrying the beer in bulk) through the small town of Breendonk. A major disagreement between the two companies ended this arrangement in the early 1980s, but it did save the brewery who, by then, had mannaged to also set up massive distribution channels for their flagship beer, Duvel.

In 1989, they decided to create a new wheat beer in collaboration with Palm Breweries called Steendonck.

In June 1999, Duvel Moortgat NV went public on Euronext Brussels.

In 2000, a new beer (Passendale) was born as a result of the association between Moortgat and cheese factory Campina (which produces Passendale cheese). This product has since been discontinued however.

Duvel Moortgat was an original investor in the Brewery Ommegang craft brewery founded in Cooperstown, NY, in the late 1990s. More recently, the Belgian company took over complete control of the brewery and founded a stateside sales organization Duvel USA to handle both Ommegang and Duvel Moortgat brands and others (including Rodenbach).

In September 2006 Duvel Moortgat has bought fellow Belgian brewery d'Achouffe.[1]

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