Copyright 2006: B. United International Inc., All rights reserved.
At the beginning of the 20th century, all the small villages in Belgium counted at least one firm-malt factory-brewery. In consulting the statistics, one notices that there were 3,387 breweries in 1907, but only approximately 117 in 2001, including around 20 in Wallonia. These figures leave me wondering, but full of sadness. What were the reasons for these losses? Was it the establishment of a beer industry of low fermentation – a problem of succession – of industrialization infection? What became of these 3,200 and some breweries?
Some were reconverted to farms, depositing their beer onto the fields... But how many others, left abandoned, merely waited to be demolished? It was nearly the legacy of the Biset brewery, located at the center of the village of Pipaix.
That destiny was avoided in 1984 when a young couple repurchased the brewery. These two did not believe that the Biset brewery should suffer this cruel fate. The inhabitants of Pipaix had to go and see for themselves and the skeptics had to trust their own eyes when they saw smoke leaving the large chimney of the brewery again. Pipaix’s brewery was again alive. These two young people, Sittelle and Jean-Louis, would not be denied. Their history is as fairy tale which could have started with, "Once upon a time..."
