Having achieved the first objective, It was time to Focus on the second. Inbetween running sessions Grégoire and Max started taking their first steps into brewing. Brewing once a month at first and then little by little they started brewing once a week. Their beers were getting better and they considered it a shame they couldn't share their creations with a wider audience. So the idea of starting a brewery themselves started to take shape. They formed a company together in January 2017 and in May of the same year their first beer hit the market the Saison de Bruxelles.
From Brouwerij Hendrix to L'Annexe
When looking for a name for the Brewery many options had been considered when they realised there was a long lost family brewery. Indeed Gégoire's wife, Sylvie, stemmed from a long line of family brewers. On the father's side the Van de Keelen family stems from the Primus family and on her mother's side she was part of the Hendrix family. The Hendrix Family had a brewery in Peer from 1797 to 1981. Wanting to reinstate the Brewery to it's former glory Grégoire and Max decided to name their Brewery "Brouwerij Hendrix".
Unfortunatly when they deposited the name, there was an objection from a well known brewery in Bruges. Suddenly there were two urgent problems to resolve, a change of name that had to be implented within days, and 10000 bottles of labeled beer that had to rebranded by hand. After many sleepless nights we decided to rename the brewery after the name of the building where we brew. L'Annexe of the Van der Keelen school. And the rest is soon to be history....