OUR STORY
IN-HOUSE PRODUCTION
HIGH QUALITY
SUSTAINABILITY
How it all started
Tipsy Tribe is a family-owned craft brewery-distillery run by first-generation immigrants from the US and Turkey. We first started brewing beer as a hobby in 2016 and quickly found an interest in distilling spirits as well! We began looking for a home for Tipsy Tribe and finally found it in the commune of Koekelberg, in the city and country we proudly call home: Brussels, Belgium.
​We decided early on in our journey to take the hard route; to build our dream from scratch and make our own beers and spirits in-house entirely.
Sustainability at the core
Sustainability is at the heart of Tipsy Tribe. We've taken several initiatives to reduce our carbon footprint, including but not limited to:
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Installing solar panels on our roof
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Making our own cleaning products from our distillation byproducts
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Giving our spent grain to a local farmer
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Prioritizing locally sourced ingredients
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Limiting water waste via our water capture and reuse system
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Upcycling of furniture and equipment
Tipsy Tribe is also proud to be a member of Brussels Good Food - an initiative that promotes a sustainable food system in the Brussels-Capital Region. We’ll continue to try and find ways to become more sustainable all this while creating amazing, local, craft beers and spirits!
THE HISTORY OF THE BREWSTILLERY
So, what do an evangelical cult, marijuana farmers and a craft beer and spirits company have in common? All of these (usually) unrelated groups once called the Brewstillery ‘home’!
Located in the back of a 1909 maison de maitre in the vibrant commune of Koekelberg in Brussels, Belgium, the Brewstillery was over time home to many different dreams.
From what we gather, for most of the 20th century, the location was used as a simple storage area, home to numerous businesses just needing some extra space. In the early 2000’s the fun started...
Religious worshipers found the place and made it their temporary home. After unsuccessfully trying to convert the garden into a bathroom and randomly opening an emergency exit in the wall that led to the neighbor’s back yard (allegedly, of course), the group decided to preach elsewhere. We were fortunate enough to be left with some pretty cool tile artwork of a castle... or something...
One thing’s for sure though, we guess this qualifies the Brewstillery as a church... So what’s more appropriate and original than making high quality alcohol in an old church? We may not be monks but we can brew like the best of them!
We don't have records of all the different groups that called this magical location their home, but word on the street is that sometime after the evangelicals left, some very industrious renters chose to set up a marijuana growing operation at this location (again... allegedly)... Thanks to some shoddy electrical wiring, the place went up in flames, taking most of the roof with it. Strangely, the renters were never seen or heard from again... bizarre huh?
On the bright side though, the roof was brand new when we found it... (Score!)
Today
More than 100 years after its initial construction, during our long, long, very long, too long, search for a place to brew, we stumbled across the Brewstillery and despite the sad state of it, we fell in love. We made this place our new home in 2021 and embarked on major renovation works, bringing new life to a building that had many others over the years.
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Today we are proud to be the home of the first whiskey made in Brussels and the only whiskey distillery in town.
THE TEAM
It takes a whole tribe to make Tipsy Tribe... too many people to acknowledge here who deserve their own wall of fame.
