Marie-Noëlle Pourtois and husband Pierre-Alex Carlier are schoolteachers living in Blaugies who have come up with a formula for great traditional specialty beers. She does the brewing. Their hearty, flavorful, and sometimes exotic styles are all made in their tiny garage brewery. The brewery was first fired up in 1987.

The Brasserie de Blaugies uses yeast from Dupont, but its beers are generally a bit warmer and fruitier and less hoppy and hard-edged than Dupont’s. The Darbyste and Saison d’Epeautre are quite dry. The Blaugies beers are discussed at some length in Jackson’s The Great Beers of Belgium, with photos of the brewers and the beers. The brewers are very adventurous in recreating traditional beer styles – and some of the nicest people you will ever meet. The beers are very highly regarded among connoisseurs in Belgium. The Moneuse Winter beer and Darbyste are especially highly rated in The Beers of Wallonia.

The brewery is very literally built into the garage of a comfortable farmhouse in tiny, agrarian Blaugies. When the mashing is finished, Marie-Noëlle backs the tractor up to the door and shovels the spent grain into the back. The grain goes right out to the livestock. The Carlier/Pourtois family enjoys good food and beer, and consumes a lot of its own product for cooking and drinking. We like the rougher, grainier malt texture of all of these beers. They give you the feeling that the brewer put this beer in the bottle just a few days ago, especially for you. Like many saisons, the beer is over-lively in carbonation, due to conditioning in the bottle with perhaps a touch too much live yeast. This does give it a little youthful freshness to offset the impression of age and the strong “cellar” aromas.