Brouwerij Excelsior

Brouwerij Excelsior was a major Ghent brewery, best known for its Star Pils. Its roots lay in the brewing activities of the Vander Stricht family. Alphonse Vander Stricht had previously operated a small family brewery called Excelsior in Dikkele before moving to Ghent in 1884 to join the brewery business there. In 1923 the growing Ghent concern adopted the name Brouwerij Excelsior, deliberately reviving the name of the family’s earlier brewery in Dikkele. During the 1920s and 1930s it built a substantial modern brewery complex around the IJkmeesterstraat and Nieuwpoort, with Art Deco offices on the Steendam.

Star Pils became its most familiar beer and was widely advertised in cafés well beyond Ghent. Excelsior was acquired by Brouwerij Haacht in 1969 and brewing ceased during the 1970s. Most of the buildings were demolished in 1997 for a housing development, leaving only small reminders of this once-important Ghent brewery.

The Excelsior name, however, had another life ahead of it. In 2016 the Geo Verbanck Foundation, which had been researching the sculptor's connections with the family behind the former brewery, approached Brouwerij Corsendonk with the idea of creating a new beer bearing the old Ghent brewery's name. Corsendonk agreed, and the new Excelsior — appropriately, another Pils — was unveiled in Ghent on 7 September 2016, before its wider commercial release.

The modern Excelsior is not a continuation of Star Pils, but its name deliberately commemorates the former brewery. Rather wonderfully, this was not the first resurrection of the name: the Ghent brewery had itself revived “Excelsior” in 1923 from the Vander Stricht family's earlier brewery in Dikkele. A brewery name that has twice disappeared has therefore twice found its way back onto a Belgian beer.