2016 - ... | New chapters. And an end.

Six thousand square metres. That is how much space they could suddenly use. Armand, Mich and Werner could not help but catch their breath when they first walked through the large halls of the old warehouse, but they realised that so much space also meant that they could take more time.

The entire brewing process of 3 Fonteinen relies on slowness and patience: patience for the lambic in the barrel, for the macerating fruit, for the geuze in the bottle. And now, finally, there would be plenty of room for slowness. Or in the words of Armand: “Geft ne lambikbrààver of ne guizestèker plosj, en ze legge voete.” Give space to a lambic brewer or a geuze blender, and they roll the barrels in.

The barrel room, the bottling and labelling lines, the warm room and the administration: they could all come together now. Only the brewery itself would remain in the village centre of Beersel, because that location is at a higher elevation, which has a different nightly weather dynamic. However, it would be 2020 before the last barrel was moved and rolled into Lot. Filled barrels of lambic should not budge, so it took some years before they were all used and rinsed, ready for the next round.

Armand summed it up during one of his tours: “Our dad could just step in here today and continue to do his thing.”

From then on, the capacity of the barrel room grew steadily, keeping one golden rule in mind: maintain a good balance of young and old lambics. Visitors may be impressed by so many oak barrels, but the process has not changed. Armand summed it up during one of his tours: “Our dad could just step in here today and continue to do his thing.”

A vast variety of dozens of landraces wheat and barley. A manual brewing process. A completely natural cooling on the coolship. A full spontaneous fermentation and paturation on oak barrels and foudres. Never on draft, always on bottle. No artificial additions. Such a 100% natural process is certainly not the standard in today’s lambic world. But respect for tradition does not mean there is no room for experiments. Quite on the contrary. Between 2015 and 2020, the team grew to twenty people, and together they blew a breath of fresh air into the Zenne Valley.

More old wine and sherry barrels were brought in, together with new varieties of fruit, for trials in the brewery and experiments in the barrel. They all appeared under the heading ‘Speling van het Lot’ (Twist of Fate). The premise was simple: keep trying. If the result was good, it would be sold, otherwise it wouldn’t be. Armand’s beloved lambik-O-droom was also revived: a meeting place and tasting room, attracting both the locals and the international beer aficionados.

The concept of ‘terroir’ stands for the involvement of fruit growers, farmers, artisans, enthusiasts and even neighbours.

The ambition, meanwhile, extended beyond the walls of the brewery. 3 Fonteinen wanted to help bring our terroir back to life. How? By involving fruit growers, farmers, artisans, enthusiasts and even the neighbours. Because together, they are intertwined in one story, one tradition, one culture.

The first example of the organised approach started with an —almost accidental— call for Schaarbeekse sour cherries. These small cherries have little commercial value in the supermarket, but are the best for a typical Kriek. The response was overwhelming: in addition to a few families that already brought in their harvest, some twenty new families suddenly came over. By now, the count has already reached over one hundred. The Centre for Botanical Enrichment, which specialises in old fruit species, is now also helping with a multiplying programme, in the hope of reaching over 2,000 trees in about ten years, allowing to only use local sour cherries. By then, also all other fruit is sourced directly with organic fruit farmers.

Other collaborations ran along the same line: with a potter (for the lambic jugs), with a basket weaver (for the willow baskets), with a glassblower (for real geuze glasses like back in the day) and with an enamel company (for the traditional enamel beer signs).

But the pièce de résistance would be the cereals. Our old barley and wheat varieties have been entirely supplanted by industrial agriculture, and it would take a whole network of organic farmers and committed buyers to do something about that. The Cereal Collective is now up and running, added with some hops as well, fully fulfilling an old wish of Armand.

Only fate still tried to throw a spanner in the works. In the spring of 2019, a good two years after Armand's retirement, terrible news hit him out of the blue. His doctor told him he had metastasised cancer. With heavy medical treatment ahead, he decided to dispose of his stake in the brewery, “so as not to jeopardise the future of 3 Fonteinen, should something happen to me tomorrow.”

Despite the relentless desire to fight for it, he ended up in hospital in the summer of 2019, completely physically exhausted. From then on, Opa Geuze, as the children of the team called him, would spend less time at the brewery than he would have liked. The corona pandemic in the spring of 2020 made things even more difficult. Still, every opportunity was valid for Armand to make his rounds in Lot.

Until he couldn’t anymore. On Sunday 6 March 2022, just after midnight, Armand Debelder passed away. Pater familias of the brewery and blendery, and a second father to his successors.

With heart and soul, Armand determined the course of 3 Fonteinen, all his life. And in the last few years he had helped to set out and to draw the lines of the long future. For the beer of course, but also for the spirit, the values and the character. Will new chapters still be written for Brouwerij 3 Fonteinen’s story? Definitely. And that story will always belong to Armand.

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