"I made a quick trip to Valencia, Spain, and got mugged," Grootaert wrote me, "my bag stolen from me with my passport and credit cards in it. I was thinking of asking you to lend me some quick funds that I can give back as soon as I get in." What an honour and a privilege to be invited into the inner circle of one of the beer industry's rising stars.

Grootaert, together with three friends-cum-colleagues, started brewing beer under the name De Struise Brouwers (The Sturdy Brewers) as amateurs in 2001. By 2005, they were brewing commercially, and, in no time, the honours started pouring in.

Popular website ratebeer.com named De Struise the best brewery in the world in 2008. Earlier this year, the same site placed five De Struise beers on its list of the 100 Best Beers in the World (only four other breweries had more).

Sales followed accordingly. De Struise's production in 2010 doubled compared to the year before, and they expect production to double again in 2011. Trying to meet the demand for their beers is "like trying to mop a floor with the water still running," says Urbain Coutteau, a fellow brewer alongside Grootaert.

"My email's actually been hacked," Grootaert told me when I called to offer financial assistance after his supposed mishap in Spain. So much for my plans to be a hero. Yet it wouldn't have surprised anyone had Grootaert reached out to a customer for help. The four brewers - Coutteau and Grootaert, along with Peter Braem and Philippe Driessen - are social-networking whizzes and in tune with their clientele.

When their Facebook page isn't receiving fan feedback (to which one of the brewers will respond within the hour) one of them is offering updates about what beers are currently in the brewing or bottling process. The brewers also read reviews from beer drinkers on public-driven sites like ratebeer, or beeradvocate.com. "Their reviews are very important to us," Grootaert says.

The stuff of legends
In the most recent edition of his Good Beer Guide Belgium, prominent beer writer Tim Webb wrote that if the brewers behind De Struise "did not exist, you probably could not invent them".

Indeed. For instance, they all had interesting jobs - like army officer, wine seller and ostrich farmer - when they decided to begin tinkering with home brewing. Their first was a witte, a wheat beer. Friends and family gave favourable reviews, and the brewers themselves enjoyed the beer as well.

"The second beer we made is actually the same recipe as the witte," Grootaert explains, "except that we were so drunk the night before that we were hung over the next day and made an error with the selection of the malts."

The accident produced an amber beer, now called Struise Rosse. It looked nothing like the cloudy wheat beer they intended to make. Yet the mistake not only yielded a tasty beer, it provided a sort of revelation. Brewing didn't have to follow strict rules or a recipe. Making beer could be open to experimentation.

That philosophy has guided their brewing ever since and has been fundamental in the creation of the beer that put them on the map. After perfecting the witte and rosse -"boring beers", jokes Grootaert, - they wanted to make a "strong, rich brown beer". But where to start?

The answer came from Grootaert's family heritage. He remembered hearing of an old recipe for a flavourful beer that wives would have ready for their fishermen husbands after a day at sea. The four friends created their own interpretation of the beer, resulting in a chocolaty, spiced ale they call Pannepot. The name comes from a type of fishing boat, called a "pot", combined with the name of the Belgian coastal town where it is indigenous, De Panne.

The beer was first distributed in Denmark, where it was a hit. The confidence boost led to more risky, unconventional beers. In 2007, De Struise developed a brand new type of beer, the Belgian Royal Stout. They call it Black Albert, partly after the Belgian king and partly because - as the label reads - Black Albert "is black as hell".

The guys at De Struise have since been experimenting with Black Albert. They have aged it over coffee beans to create the Mocha Bomb; aged it in bourbon barrels to create Cuvée Delphine; and they have even run the beer through a frozen distillation process that doubled the Black Albert's already head-throbbing 13% ABV to 26%.

The result, called the Double Black, "sold out within hours" at its debut at a beer festival, Grootaert says. Like De Struise's dozen-plus other beers, the Black Albert and its variations are bursting with flavour and complexity. They look and taste nothing like traditional beers.

Masters of export
Despite a certain reluctance among Belgian population to adopt De Struise - "We often say that people on our street don't even know there's a brewery here," Grootaert says - exports (especially to the US) has given De Struise a long shelf life.

And there are, of course, local enthusiasts. Customers steadily stream into De Struise headquarters, and nearly every weekend Grootaert conducts beer seminars, apropos of their brewery's location, a converted schoolhouse. De Struise used to make all its beer at a nearby brewery but recently opened what the guys call a "laboratory" inside the schoolhouse, where they brew some of their beers and are constantly finding new ways to experiment.

With their rate of success, it is certain that at some point the four will get offers from a bigger company to sell their beer.

"No, no. We can't even think about doing something like that," Grootaert says. "The brewery is our little baby. We take care of it, watch it grow. It is what we do."

www.struisebrouwers.be

Pictured (clockwise from top): Urbain Coutteau shows how to pour; Pannepot, named after the fishing boats of De Panne; Carlo Grootaert explains the ins and outs of beer brewing