Jef reaches over the bar and fumbles around. After much scrabbling and clinking, he hands me a 70ml glass and pours what looks like a dark, brown stout from a bottle. Taking a small sip, it’s full-flavoured and smooth, going down surprisingly easy for such a dark beer. It’s a slightly sweet mix of rich chocolate and a hint of raspberry.
“This is Framuesa Y Chocolate. Of all our beers, it’s the one that I’m most proud of.”
Jef, Hof Ten Dormaal’s youthful and heavily-tattooed master brewer, had spent the afternoon lugging kegs and crates from the brewery’s yard to a marquee set up beside the lake in the opposite field. A family friend was getting married and Hof Ten Dormaal’s rural, farmhouse setting seemed the perfect, romantic location.
He arrived in the tasting room looking sweaty and dishevelled from the manual labour and in desperate need of a drink. Within seconds of talking to him, it became clear that he has an insatiable passion for beer and was incredibly proud of the brewery’s output, judging by his desire to thrust samples on me. I didn’t mind though, I want to try as many of the brewery’s beers (based on my rapid counting of bottles perched above the bar, there’s more than 25) as possible.
When I mention that I wanted to try the Barbera, a 7.5% lager made with Moscato Bianco grapes that I had read about, Jef explains that it is a once-a-year brew and he wasn’t sure if it was ready. Rather than leave it at that, he asks me to wait while he rushes out back to see if he could get me a sample.
By this point, I’m already a little light in the head and unsteady on my feet. I had travelled the 10km out of Leuven by bus, arriving for the tasting room’s 2 pm opening (it is only open 4 hours a week, from 2 pm – 6 pm on a Saturday), intending to catch the same bus 2 hours later on its return to the city. It never showed. With two more hours to kill, I decided to walk back to the brewery – 15 minutes through the beautiful Belgian countryside in the sun, zigzagging through rows of corn and hop fields – and continue sampling beer.
It’s the rural setting that makes Hof Ten Dormaal a little special. In the UK, we become so used to seeing breweries tucked away in suburban industrial estates or hidden in city-centre warehouses (or under railway arches as the trend in London, particularly on the Bermondsey beer mile, dictates). This one is set within a beautiful farmhouse surrounded by sprawling, green countryside. From the outside, the only indication that it is a brewery at all are the branded crates being stacked in the yard.
The location is no accident; Hof Ten Dormaal is a working farm as well as a brewery. In the fields beside the brewery, Dries – Jef’s brother and the farmer of the family – grows his own barley, Dingemans malt, and hops. A farm can hard work for little yield, so the brewery serves as the perfect financial backbone. When Dries takes a seat beside me, I ask if growing your own hops is a common practice in Belgium. He mulls it over for a while before informing me that, no, they are one of the two breweries in the whole country that do it, creating everything that goes from field to glass.
The whole enterprise is a family affair. Although Dries and Jef work at growing and fermenting the ingredients, it is their father, André, that started it all. He wasn’t always a brewer. In fact, he was an accountant for most of his life, until he suffered a stroke at the age of 50.
He could no longer carry on with his accountancy work and a long bout of depression followed. His wife packed him off to travel the US, ordering him not to return until he had a smile on his face. It was here that he stumbled upon the idea of starting a brewery, despite his lack of experience. On his return to Belgium, he set about the practical difficulties of learning to brew, getting equipment, creating a brand, and building a brewery. Hof Ten Dormaal was born.
As I step through the arched gateway into the courtyard, a beautiful little garden filled with greenery and blooming flowers, I see André rushing between the brewery and the beautiful farmhouse that flank either side of the yard. I’m the first customer of the day to arrive. André’s wife greets me with a beaming smile and ushers me to the small, glass-fronted taproom. It’s fairly rustic inside, with a small bar just a few metres wide and farmhouse style furniture. Crammed into one corner are two enormous brewing kettles.
“If you need to know anything about the beer, you’re best asking my sons,” she says. “They’re the experts. I’m just here to clean up after them”. I peer behind her into the fridges and survey the dozens of beers on offer, making a selection almost at random. Anchored within the Belgian tradition, their main beers are blond, amber and brown, although they brew a Wit Goud, or white gold, replacing half the hops with locally grown chickory to produce a blond copper beer. However, it’s the more experimental beers that I’m interested in.
Leuven is considered by many to be Belgium’s beer capital. It was here that Stella Artois was first brewed at Brouwerij de Hoorn, a brewery that has existed in one form or another since 1366. Today the city is home to over 30 breweries churning out over 250 different brews, so innovation is a must in order to stay ahead of the competition. Hof Ten Dormaal does this with their barrel-aged beers and their Taste Lab series; beers brewed using unusual local produce such as fruit, local raspberries from a farmer, and reed from a nearby pond. I start by choosing ‘Summer of ’67’, a psychedelic labelled bottle with contents made of hemp.
One by one, members of the seemingly enormous Janssens clan come and sit with me to chat about beer and Leuven in general. They make me feel like a guest in their home because, after all, that is what I am. Eventually, André arrives to show me around the brewery itself. He explains that he can’t explain much, because he isn’t too sure what Jef has been up to in there but he lets me wander freely. I try to decipher the scrawls on the whiteboards beside each kettle but it seems that Jef is trying to be incredibly secretive, or just has terrible handwriting.
By the time I arrive back at the tasting room, Jef is there handing out samples of his prized Framuesa Y Chocolate. Upon hearing I have come from England, he can’t wait to show me one of his latest creations, brewed in collaboration with London’s Weird Beard Brew Co. It’s a sour mash IPA named ‘If Only the Hoff Had a Beard’ with a label featuring David Hasselhoff with facial hair made from hops. Jef had been in London to work with Weird Beard and found it difficult to get Brouwerij Hof Ten Dormaal a foothold in the capital’s beer scene. Belgian beer, it turns out, is seen as uncool in the UK.
I find it difficult to see why. Hof Ten Dormaal’s beers are as inventive and tasty as anything I’ve drunk at home, if not more so. I suppose that people have preconceptions that are hard to shift.
I take an ‘If Only the Hoff Had a Beard‘ and head for the sun-drenched courtyard, settling in my chair and sipping my ice-cold beer to the distant sounds of the wedding band knocking out the closing refrains of The Beatle’s Blackbird. Suddenly I was incredibly pleased that my bus didn’t arrive.
How to get to Brouwerij Hof Ten Dormaal
Hof Ten Dormaal is around 10km from the centre of Leuven and the easiest way to reach the brewery is by bike (approx. 30 mins). Bikes can be rented from Leuven Leisure (Tiensestraat 5, open 10 am – 7pm on a Saturday) at €6 per hour or €20 for a full day.
Alternatively, it takes around 45 minutes to reach the brewery by bus. Take the number 5 bus from Leuven City Centre (€3 each way, 30 minutes), stopping at Tildonk Wakkerzeel Kelfsstraat. From there, it is a 13-minute walk through the countryside to the brewery.
The tasting room is open every Saturday between 2 and 6 pm.
If you ask at the bar, a member of the Janssen family will be more than happy to give you a free tour of the brewery.
My trip to Leuven was Facilitated by Visit Flanders, however, all views expressed are my own.
