Like many homebrewers, Gerrit Lewis and Beejay Oslon of Chicago’s Pipeworks Brewing Company had the urge to open up their own professional brewery. Instead of attending brewing school or calling their local brewery to volunteer, though, they wrote a letter to their favorite brewery overseas and offered to work for free. That brewery was De Struise Brouwers in Oostvleteren, Belgium. “It was as simple as writing Urbain Coutteau, the owner and head brewer at De Struise, and asking him if we could work at his brewery for free. He said yes, so we went.” Oslon says.
The two stayed at Urbain’s nearby bed and breakfast—located on his former commercial ostrich farm—while they brewed, bottled, and delivered beer for De Struise. Among their chores was feeding spent grain to the ostriches, which is why the Pipeworks War Bird Session Ale sports an ostrich on the can.
“We were in Belgium in early 2009, when the world’s beer industry was starting to change dramatically,” Lewis says. “It was a lot of the Michael Jackson–type beer culture where all these brewers who had known each other for years got together to drink each other’s beers. They’d come to the De Struise farm about once a month to see what Urbain was concocting,” which could fall just about anywhere on the scale from traditional Belgian beers to experimental one-offs. That experimentation is what Lewis credits to the changes that occurred in the industry around that time. “There was a whole new group of people and traditions,” he says. “The beer got better. Brewers got smarter. They were creating traditional styles in new formats.”