3 Fonteinen
Perseverance makes legends.
In the year 1953, Gaston Debelder was a farmer. He had been a farmer all of his adult life. He had never held a job in the beer industry. Not as a brewer. Not as a distributor. Not even as a bartender.
He was a farmer.
A farmer with a dream.
As dreams so often do, his dream led him to the unlikeliest of places, where he would discover the most incredible of things.
A passion.
He bought an old bar and geuze blendery in Beersel and mastered the ancient and noble craft of blending lambic into geuze. Later he bought a larger property as the popularity of his blends flourished. He settled into a comfortable life as a skilled geuze blender and brought his son Armand into the business. All was well until changing customer tastes and a fickle market almost crushed the lambic industry in the early 1990's.
Gaston retired, but Armand was not so ready to give up on a father's dream which had now become his own. So he persevered through those lean years and began brewing his own lambic wort in 1997, officially making 3 Fonteinen a brewery. Then just as the market for lambic and geuze returned, the brewery suffered a catastrophic cooling system failure in 2009 resulting in the explosion of over 13,000 bottles of inventory. Bankruptcy loomed.
But still they persevered.
And today, 3 Fonteinen is known as one of the finest producers of lambic and blenders of geuze on the planet. Their incredible offerings are sought far and wide, and are beloved worldwide, for their exquisitely balanced and blended mix of sublime citrus, tart, and barnyard flavors.
A dream became a passion. A passion became an icon. And an icon became a legend.
Winter Dog Cellars is humbled and proud to be the official distributor of 3 Fonteinen in the District of Columbia, playing our own very small part to inspire the next generation of dreamers.
