A family brewery in East Flanders.

Kwak is brewed by Brouwerij Bosteels in Buggenhout, in the Belgian province of East Flanders. The brewery dates itself to 1791. Sources differ on its founder: the Kwak website says Jean Baptist Bosteels founded the brewery in 1791, while Dutch Wikipedia names Evarist Bosteels. Dutch Wikipedia counts seven generations of the family at the head of the business, the most recent being Antoine Bosteels, and records that an earlier Antoine Bosteels was mayor of Buggenhout from 1943 to 1958.

For much of its history Bosteels was a local brewer, and Dutch Wikipedia lists pilsners such as Prosit Pils and Bosteels Pils among its discontinued beers. Its reputation today rests on three speciality beers. The Kwak website calls Kwak Amber the brewery’s first speciality beer. Dutch Wikipedia says the name Pauwel Kwak was registered as a brand in 1980 and reached the market shortly afterwards; English Wikipedia, citing the beer writer Michael Jackson’s Great Beers of Belgium, also places the launch of the beer and its glass in the 1980s.

Two more beers followed. Tripel Karmeliet, first brewed in 1996 according to English Wikipedia, is made with wheat, oats and barley, and English Wikipedia says it follows a recipe of 1679 from the former Carmelite convent at Dendermonde. It won gold for best Belgian-style tripel at the World Beer Cup in 1998 and silver in 2002, English Wikipedia says; after it was named best pale ale at the World Beer Awards in 2008, demand rose and the brewery raised its production by about 30 percent with a new brewing vessel, the same article says, citing Het Nieuwsblad. DeuS, sold as “Brut des Flandres,” is refermented near Épernay in Champagne before it is bottled and cellared. In 2019, English Wikipedia adds, the brewery released Monte Cristo, its first new beer in 17 years.

Pauwel Kwak and the coachmen.

Kwak is an amber, top-fermented beer of 8.4 percent alcohol, filtered before bottling and kegging, according to Dutch and English Wikipedia. Its name comes from a figure called Pauwel Kwak, whom the brand describes as an inventive innkeeper of 18th-century Belgium.

The story attached to the beer is about a glass. In the brewery’s version, as English Wikipedia reports it, Kwak designed a glass for the coachmen who stopped at his tavern and brewery, De Hoorn. Dutch Wikipedia sets the legend in Napoleon’s time and places De Hoorn, a coaching inn, in Dendermonde: the coachmen could not leave their carriages, so a glass with a heavy, rounded bottom was held in a clamp on the coach. Dutch Wikipedia calls Pauwel Kwak a mythical brewer, and English Wikipedia says the beer is “supposedly” named after him; Michael Jackson wrote that the beer and the glass were introduced only in the 1980s.

The glass is the brand’s most recognisable asset. It is served standing in a wooden holder, and in Dutch it is called a kwakglas or koetsiersglas, a coachman’s glass. Dutch Wikipedia suggests the form more likely descends from the British “yard of ale” glasses of the 17th and 18th centuries, used in drinking games, in which trapped air could release a sudden rush of beer. The Kwak website treats the glass as part of the serve: the pour is right, it says, when the foam starts at the bottom of the logo, and it sells the glassware online and in gift packs.

The holder has been defended. In September 2012, Dutch Wikipedia reports, citing Het Nieuwsblad, Bosteels took a small Walloon brewery to court over another speciality glass in a wooden holder that it considered too similar.

Brewing heritage and ownership.

The seven brands in this group are all beer names: Orval, Delirium Tremens, Kwak, Augustiner, Hofbräu, Schneider Weisse and Goose Island. Beer brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from abbeys and family breweries that still carry an old name to labels that now belong to much larger brewing groups, and a single brand can be poured everywhere from a village café to a bar on another continent.

A beer brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name, a glass and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its brewing or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its beer is actually brewed and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its beer is brewed and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family brewery inside a global group.

Bosteels did not stay wholly in family hands. Dutch Wikipedia says the Dutch investment firm Waterland Private Equity took a stake in the brewery in 2014. On 8 September 2016 the takeover of Bosteels by AB InBev was announced, Dutch Wikipedia says, and trade press including Good Beer Hunting and Brewbound reported the deal that month. According to those reports, AB InBev said Tripel Karmeliet, Kwak and DeuS would go on being brewed at the original brewery in Buggenhout. Antoine Bosteels stayed on as chairman of the board and remained involved in running the brewery, Dutch Wikipedia says.

Today the Kwak website names the Bosteels brewery in Buggenhout as the beer’s home and describes Bosteels as part of AB InBev; its footer carries an Anheuser-Busch InBev copyright. That places Kwak in the same group as two other Belgian beers in this library, Leffe and Hoegaarden.

No brand guidelines, typefaces or colour codes have been published for Kwak. The tones in this guide take their cue from the amber of the beer and the wood of the holder, as an interpretation rather than a specification.

For a design guide, Kwak shows how a single piece of glassware, and the legend attached to it, can carry a beer’s identity. Compare Leffe, another Belgian beer in the AB InBev group with a story rooted in the past, and Hoegaarden, a Belgian wheat beer in the same group. For this guide we use amber, oak and a dark bark brown with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Kwak’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.