Qualla: Bosteels Brewery

Bosteels Brewery: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Order a Kwak in any bar in Belgium and you will be asked for one of your shoes. The bartender hangs it behind the counter as collateral, because the glass that is about to arrive cannot stand on its own. It is a strange, ballooned vessel set into a wooden yoke, and it walks home with patrons who leave the pub forgetting they have surrendered footwear in exchange. The glass, the brewery claims, dates to an 18th-century innkeeper named Pauwel Kwak, who is said to have shaped it for coachmen who could not climb down from their boxes for a drink. The Bosteels family - who have run a brewery in the village of Buggenhout since 1791 - put their version of his strong amber beer on the market in the 1980s, and the iconic glass has been hanging behind bars worldwide ever since.

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Bosteels Brewery: Seven Generations in Buggenhout

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paul Hermans, CC BY-SA 4.0. Buggenhout sits on the edge of the Flemish Diestian hills, about thirty kilometres west of Antwerp. It is a quiet East Flanders village whose biggest landmark, for centuries, has been the chimney of Brouwerij Bosteels. The brewery was founded in 1791, the year French revolutionar...

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Image: Paul Hermans | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bosteels Brewery: Tripel Karmeliet

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Soti, CC BY-SA 3.0. The brewery's most celebrated beer was created remarkably recently. Tripel Karmeliet was first brewed in 1996, based on a 1679 recipe that the Bosteels family traced to an old Carmelite convent in Dendermonde, twelve kilometres away. The recipe calls for three cereals - wheat, oa...

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Image: Soti | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bosteels Brewery: A Beer Finished in Champagne

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gordito1869, CC BY 3.0. DeuS - the brewery calls it 'Brut des Flandres' - is the family's strangest creation, and arguably the most ambitious project any small Belgian brewery has ever attempted. It begins in Buggenhout as a strong, spiced golden ale fermented for a month with two yeasts. Then it travel...

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Image: Gordito1869 | CC BY 3.0

Bosteels Brewery: The Coachman's Glass

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gordito1869, CC BY 3.0. The Pauwel Kwak glass is a piece of pub theatre. A bulbous spherical bottom, a long flared neck, a heavy wooden stand to keep it upright - the design is supposedly meant to hook over a coachman's box, though no surviving 18th-century example has ever been found. Whether the inn '...

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Image: Gordito1869 | CC BY 3.0

Bosteels Brewery: Visiting Buggenhout

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Trougnouf (Benoit Brummer), CC BY 4.0. Buggenhout is small enough to cross on foot in fifteen minutes. The brewery itself does not run regular public tours, but the village pubs all carry Kwak, Tripel Karmeliet, DeuS, and Monte Cristo - the brewery's first new beer in seventeen years when it launched in 2019. Antwerp ...

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Image: Trougnouf (Benoit Brummer) | CC BY 4.0