Bart Adons is brewing a 250-year-old recipe on a historical brewing installation with a local guild of brewers in the Belgian province of Limburg.
Bart comes from a village only 12 kilometers away from here, but he's living in Ireland at the moment, where he co-owns Mescan Brewery with his friend Cillian O’Móráin. In between, he spent 13 years in Kenya, Malawi, and Somalia working as a vet. “The most similar place to Africa I could find in the world was the west of Ireland,” he says.
The old Paenhuys brewery is set in a historical recreated village, with magical forests, authentic bakeries, and crumbling brick schoolhouses. The brewing system was once owned by Hoegaarden, has been housed here at Bokrijk since 1995.
It’s Bart’s third time brewing with the guild. After all the time away from Belgium, there’s been a reconnection with the place he is from. “For a long time I didn’t come back here,” he says. “There are a lot of things I don’t like about this place. But now there are a lot of things I love.”