Wait, How Old Is Your Brewery?
Every label of Stella Artois proudly boasts “Anno 1366,” suggesting to any reasonable consumer that this beer or the brewery making it has been around for 658 years. If not a blatant lie, it is at the very least a bold deception. Go to their website and you learn that in 1366, “a tradition of brewing beer had been established in Leuven, Belgium.” It doesn’t even claim to have a direct connection to this date. The brewery then connects itself to the Den Hoorn Brewery in Leuven, but that brewery wasn’t founded for another hundred years. It would be another 250 years before the ostensible brewery father, Sebastian Artois, would begin apprenticing at Den Hoorn, a brewery he would later buy. The beer itself, Stella Artois, dates to 1925. In 2004, Artois became part of the borg that would become AB InBev.
Is the Artois brewery 658, 558, 307, or 20 years old?
Dating breweries, like counting them, is an act of interpretation. Once a brewery’s age passes into the centuries, interruptions are certain. Perhaps there was a change in ownership. Maybe the brewery moved. It might have been destroyed in a war and later rebuilt—on the same site or elsewhere. In many cases, breweries are mothballed for a period of time—it can be decades—before reviving, under the same or different ownership. If we demand that the same family own the same brewery and make the beer in the same place, the oldest brewery probably dates to just the 19th century. If we allow the “Artois” criteria—brewing once happened somewhere near here—a lot of breweries can claim vast antiquity. There’s no “right” answer to this question, but it’s worth being alive to the debate, because breweries are using the most favorable date in order to sell more beer. They have a lot of little green reasons to push back their heritage as far as the consumer will tolerate.
I don’t think anyone would credit Stella with the 1366 date. But they’re hardly the only brewery to stretch the truth. Take for example Weihenstephan, which has long claimed to be the world’s oldest brewery. Does it really date to 1040, though? If we apply the same criteria Weihenstephan uses for its own date, does it produce any rivals to Freising’s finest? This topic recently cropped up on Twitter/X and most people agreed it was pretty legit. I haven’t done the historical research to make a big claim here, but based on the brewery’s own timeline, there’s at least some room to quibble. Either way, it also serves as a good case to illustrate why dating breweries is dicey business.
According to its own history, Weihenstephan started life as a monastery, going back to the 8th century. A nearby farm produced hops, so the brewery believes the monks were making beer there, but they don’t mark their start date until 1040, when the abbot received a license to brew on the grounds. Over the next four centuries, the monastery burned down four times and was depopulated by three plagues, and hit by armies and at least one earthquake. Still, the monks rebuilt. While the history through this period is pretty sketchy, I don’t have any problem calling this legit continuity. You can’t really help it if the brewery burns down. Stuff happens.
However, here the historical record fragments for the next 400ish years and we skip to 1803, when the monastery was secularized. Did the monks continue to brew consistently that whole time? It was the period when lager-making became standard in Bavaria; what were the monks making? They offer no info on any of these matters.
Instead, we leap forward to 1803. The monks are chased out and brewing stops, apparently for at least a half-century. According to the brewery, in 1852 the Central Agricultural School moved to Weihenstephan “and with it the Bavarian brewing students.” How soon did brewing start there? It wasn’t until 1895 that it was renamed the "Royal Bavarian Academy for Agriculture and Beer Brewing,” and the rest is left undocumented.
To say the least, this history is incomplete. It’s possible that enough brewing took place during the monastic years to count as a continuous lineage—but it’s just as possible that for decades or centuries at a time the monks took a break from brewing. (As Benedictines, their order required self-sufficience as well as public outreach, so that counts in favor of continued brewing.) Leaving that rather lengthy period aside, we have the substantial break at the turn of the 19th century in which the brewery changed hands, stopped for decades, and almost certainly restarted in a new location. (My tour guide in 2012, a brewing student, mentioned that historic brewing happened elsewhere—take that for what it’s worth.) So, enough continuity to justify the 1040 date or not?
My friend Franz Hofer is a professional historian, and as I write this I feel him sitting on my shoulder clucking. I would love it if he or someone with facility Middle High German could check the record. But if what I’ve just written isn’t historical research, it is a writer explaining why he doesn’t find the case persuasive. One thing you learn when your credibility is on the line: beware sources with a vested interest. There are too many gaps in Weihenstephan’s own history to count as proof of continuity, and they have too much at stake for me to take it on faith. The brewery has successfully convinced the world it’s the oldest, and that has to be good for sales. Moreover, finding out it was a romantic fact and that we should really be dating Weihenstephan to 1852 might be actively damaging to business. I don’t have a horse in this race—if someone can produce the receipts, I’d love to give them the credit. Put another way: some brewery out there is the oldest. It may even be Weihenstephan.
Consider this an invitation to debate the oldest brewery, the 1040 date, or anything else to do with the veracity of brewery dates.