When I moved to the Austin  area in 1999, it was a beer oasis in the middle of Texas. There were plenty of brewpubs — including Waterloo, The Copper Tank and The Bitter End. There were two homebrew shops. And, there was a world-class brewery — Celis. 

The Celis Brewery was the namesake of Pierre Celis, the Belgian brewer who revived the witbier style with his Hoegaarden witbier. After his Belgian brewery burned down, Celis was unable to reopen because he was underinsured. However, he was able to secure funding to open a brewery in the US and he came to Texas. 

His Austin brewery produced Celis White, which was a world class beer — and earned the medals at various commercial beer competitions to prove it. To top it off, the brewery also made a second world-class beer — Celis Grand Cru. (To be fair, they also made Celis Raspberry and Pale Rider, a beer advertised as having been brewed to the specifications of Clint Eastwood. But, with two home runs in Celis' portfolio, it's silly to spend much time on the bunts.) 

Celis was thinking big when he set up shop in Austin, a kind of big that few US craft brewers were back in the 1990s. He came to Austin primarily because of the water, but he also knew that Austin put him between two of the biggest cities in the US (Dallas, to the north and Houston, to the east), near a major seaport (Houston) and near a major US highway (the brewery was located right off I-35). Celis wanted his brewery to be huge. And for awhile, it looked like that was going to happen. 

Sales of Celis White were initially strong. At it's peak, the brewery was cranking out 22,000 barrels of beer a year. But then, Celis struck a deal that gave Miller Brewing a controlling interest in the brewery. 

Now, I'm not the kind of homebrewer who thinks every last thing "The Big Boys" do is evil. (They make a kind of beer that is very popular. Good for them.) But, Miller did kill one of the best breweries ever. Miller insisted on cost-cutting measures, including using cheaper ingredients and soon — I would argue, as a direct consequence — production dwindled to 15,000 barrels a year. (Gee, who would have thought that cheapening a world-class product would have a negative effect on sales? What they did was akin to buying Lamborghini, then putting inexpensive 4-cylinder engines under the hood because that's what worked for Toyota.) Then, because the brewery wasn't selling enough beer, Miller pulled the plug. Contractually, Celis could have bought the brewery back from Miller, but he didn't have the funds. 

Today, Waterloo, the Copper Tank and the Bitter End are all gone. One of Austin's homebrew shops switched to wine supplies only and Celis White is becoming a distant memory. And  sadly, Pierre Celis died this weekend at the age of 86. 

I believe there are two things homebrewers can learn from Celis — three if you count "don't let Miller tell you how to brew your beer:" 

1.) Doing something great doesn't exempt you from failure. Both Hoegaarden and Celis White were world class beers, but bad luck (and perhaps some bad planning) put an end to them both. (And yes, I know there are breweries brewing Hoegaarden and Celis White today.) 

2.) If you don't get discouraged, you can bounce back from almost anything. Celis responded to the brewery fire at Hoegaarden by coming to America and making a world-class beer. Two, actually. Next, he responded to the failure of his US brewery by going back to Belgium and . . . any guesses? . . . producing another fantastic beer. (Anyone remember Grottenbier Bruin? Michael Jackson called that "perhaps my Beer-of-the-Year" when it was released.)  

If I were a completely different type of person, I might wrap up this quasi-eulogy blog-entry-type thing by mentioning the old saying, "In heaven, there is no beer," and remarking that, now that Celis is there, there would be. (If I did write that, I would probably ruin the moment by going on to express the hope that the management at Miller were rotting in hell, so they couldn't get anywhere near Pierre's brewery in the clouds.) 

So, I'm not going to write that. Instead, I'm just going to say that, when I first moved to Texas and first tried Celis White, I was blown away. So, thanks Pierre for that. 

[And, just in case you're wondering, you can find great witbier in Austin, Texas again. The (512) brewery brews an excellent wit, made with 2-row, unmalted barley and oats, coriander and Texas grapefruit peels. And, although the brewery deserves much credit for making this beer, I think Pierre should also get a bit of the thanks as well.]