In the face of mounting industry challenges, how should a brewery play the modern beer game? The owners of Brouwerij Het Nest in Turnhout—the world capital of playing cards—gambled on the brewery’s future with strategy, ambition, and a little bit of luck.
This editorially independent story has been supported by VISITFLANDERS as part of the “Common Place” series.
I.
The Game
Turnhout is the playing card capital of the world. The city is to playing cards what Kobe is to Japanese Wagyu beef; what Parma is to Italian Prosciutto; what Fez is to leather. The biggest card producing company in the world, Cartamundi, is headquartered in Turnhout. 1.3 million decks of cards are produced there every single day. If you have ever played poker, performed a magic trick with cards, traded Pokémon cards, or played Monopoly, Risk, Clue, or Catan, then you’ve touched something that comes from Turnhout.
So on 3 January 2009, when Turnhout local Bart Cuypers and a group of his friends attended a brew day to witness the birth of their first commercial beer as the new beer company Het Nest, they already knew what they were going to call it. An Amber-coloured Tripel of 8.5% ABV, brewed with fresh coriander and cascade hops, Schuppe Zot referenced the Jack of Spades. It would be launched by Cuypers and friends at a local festival in Oud-Turnhout in March that year.
After the beers had been bottled, Het Nest were contacted by Brouwerij De Halve Maan, a large regional family brewery based in Bruges whose main beer brand is Brugse Zot (The Fool of Bruges). De Halve Maan had gotten wind of Het Nest’s plans and felt the proposed name bore too many similarities to their flagship. Unwilling to risk a fight before they had even started, Cuypers and his colleagues at Het Nest changed the name to SchuppenBoer, different enough from Brugse Zot to avoid a court appearance, but still close enough to honour the industry of their hometown.
The story of Het Nest is about navigating the pitfalls—both minor and potentially fatal—of the modern beer game: Cuypers and friends would suffer legal headaches due to their playing card branding; there would be COVID closures and a war in Ukraine that would send brewery energy costs through the roof across Europe; export markets on which they relied would collapse like a house of cards; and Belgium’s attitude to alcohol—especially amongst its young—would shift more quickly than they could ever have imagined.
“If I would go back and have to decide, am I going to open the brewery or not, the answer would be no,” says Bart Cuypers. Opening a brewery these days, he says, is playing a hell of a risky hand.
II.
The Order
Brouwerij Het Nest, as many breweries do, began as a homebrewing collective. In early 2000, the wives of Bart Cuypers and his friends had started a cooking club, taking turns once a week to prepare a meal, dine together, and chat for the evening. So they were not getting in the way of the weekly cooking activities in their houses, Cuypers and his friends started a society of their own, a beer tasting club called The Order of the Drunken Sparrow (De orde van de zatte mus)—“We say ‘as drunk as a sparrow’, if you’re, like, completely wasted,” says Cuypers.
The Order would explore beers in Turnhout’s idiosyncratic beer cafés. Places like Café In Den Spytighen Duvel (“The Mournful Devil”) on Turnhout’s Otterstraat, where Cuypers still remembers his first visit as a 16 year-old and where he and the Order would keep coming back to be served by the café’s moustached bartender Dirk Appels, luxuriating in the decades of history that had impregnated the bar’s dark wood walls, exposed brick interior, and tiled floors. “That was the bar where I learnt to appreciate craft beer,” says Cuypers.
The Order started a monthly homebrew club in 2004 on a small 40-litre system in Bart’s garage. They were inspired by the courses they took with the VAW (Association of Artisanal Winegrowers, Winemakers, and Brewers) and by the boldness of the beers they admired from Belgian breweries like Alvinne, De Struise, and Het Anker.
Cuypers had recently completed his bachelor’s degree in Chemistry and was making regular work trips to the United States for his day job at a local chemicals company. In the United States, Cuypers discovered IPAs and Russian Imperial Stouts, beer styles that were relatively unknown in Belgium at the time. He took ideas and hop varieties back to The Order, and eventually into his garage. “We experimented a lot,” says Cuypers. “Some beers were good, some beers were awful.”
The Order decided to send their initial attempts off to the 2006 Dutch Open Championship for Homebrewers with the idea of getting feedback from a professional jury that they could use to improve the beer. 107 contestants entered. The Order’s beer was awarded third place, just two points behind the winner. A full-scale brewing installation was financially not on the cards for them at that time, but that same year, they started a beer company that would move production out of Cuypers’ garage and into a nearby contract brewery.
The new company Het Nest—named as a reference to the nest of the “drunken sparrows”—began contract brewing batches of 5 hectolitres (HL) at Brouwerij Boelens in nearby Belsele. Schuppenboer was among the first of these beers, and it struck a chord locally very quickly, and soon they were moving between various facilities to match demand depending on what the facilities could offer: ‘t Hofbrouwerijke in Beerzel, de Scheldebrouwerij in Meer, Brouwerij Pirlot in Zandhoven, and Anders! in Halen. In 2013, Het Nest sold 350 HL of beer; then within a year they had sold double that volume.
But with this success and this attention came a decision that Cuypers and co. had to make: with Het Nest having no brewing facility of their own and none of those involved possessing professional brewing experience, would they fold and wind down what was still a side project for them, or would they bet the house on making their dream of running an actual brewery in Turnhout a reality?
III.
Cartamundi
Like any good card sharp, Turnhout’s inhabitants are savvy players and scrappy fighters. Take Dries Leysen, for example, who has worked at the National Playing Card Museum in Turnhout for almost 20 years. He does a bit of everything: selling tickets, answering phones, and debriefing visitors. When a tourist recently called in to ask for help repairing a broken sandal, Dries fixed it with a playing card and some duct tape. “Playing cards can do anything,” he jokes.
According to Leysen, the arrival of playing cards to Turnhout was a “political coincidence.” In 1796, a printer from Leuven—Pieter Corbeels—fled to Turnhout (a place then, Leysen says, at “the edge of the world”) to escape French occupying forces who had arrested him for printing political leaflets. Crucially, he was accompanied by an apprentice, Philippus Jacobus Brepols, and together the pair set up a printing shop in their new home.
But politics and the French army eventually caught up with Corbeels, and in 1799 he was executed as a counterrevolutionary. Brepols took over their printing company, producing books, comics, and playing cards.
“By the end of the 19th century in this little town, there were six major playing card companies,” says Leysen, as others sought to replicate Brepols’ success and a playing card cottage industry bloomed in the town. “Each company had a production of about 10 million decks a year or so being sent all over the globe.” Turnhout playing cards turned up everywhere—in the gambling dens of the American West, on steamboot ships heading to colonise South America, in the knapsacks of Tommies fighting in First World War trenches, and in the games room at Belgium’s scientific bases at the South Pole.
The 20th century was a less rosy time for Turnhout’s main export industry. After the Second World War and with the rise of television and computer games, global sales of playing cards fell. Of the six major playing card companies in Turnhout, only three survived—run by the Brepols, Van Genechten, and Biermans families, respectively.
In 1970, they formed a joint venture, calling it Cartamundi. The newly-merged concern would become the largest producer and seller of cards and games in the world. “Even if you do not know our name, you have experienced our magic,” says Cartamundi’s website. “We are the brand you don’t know you love.”
IV.
The Nuts
Leaning into the playing card iconography, and to complete a five-card Royal Straight poker hand, Het Nest’s core range had expanded from SchuppenBoer (Jack of Spades) to include: the KlevereTien (Ten of Clubs), a Dark Strong Ale of 10% ABV that marked the 10th anniversary of the Order of the Drunken Sparrow; KoekeDam (Queen of Diamonds), a Saison of 6.5% ABV; HertenHeer (King of Hearts), a hoppy Blond Ale of 4.8% ABV; and the SchuppenAas (Ace of Spades), a Brett Pale Ale of 6.5% ABV modelled on Orval.
“We were just thinking, okay, we are going to brew some beers and they will be sold in the surrounding villages,” says Cuypers. But playing cards carry meaning beyond Turnhout. By 2012, Het Nest had attracted the attention of importers from the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Russia, the United States, China, Taiwan, and Japan, many drawn in just by the card branding itself: “Some of them started importing our beers before they tasted them.”
But despite international success, Het Nest had little domestic visibility, making it difficult to win over investors and banks. As the business grew in the early 2010s, they secured private finance and refined their business model, the key moment coming when they partnered with an experienced professional brewer: Gust Hermans, who had been helping to produce their contracted beers at the Scheldebrouwerij in Meer.
Hermans had always wanted to start his own brewery, but he didn’t have any brands. Het Hest had the brands, but no professional brewer. Hermans was brought on as a partner, and his 10 years of brewing experience was a crucial factor in unlocking financing from banks for the construction of Het Nest’s own facility.
In 2015, Het Nest opened a 30 HL Italian-manufactured brewery system at an industrial site on the border of Turnhout and Oud-Turnhout. Hermans was head brewer, with Cuypers and the original members of the Order of the Drunken Sparrow remaining as partners with full-time jobs away from the brewery.
By 2017, Het Nest was already producing 3,800 HL of beer annually, capable of bottling 5,300 bottles an hour, and with 1,000m2 of warehouse space right next door to store beers destined for export. The deck seemed stacked in their favour.
V.
The Rake
Only the game of Belgian beer was changing.
Het Nest’s playing card branding set them apart internationally, but they still suffered from a relative lack of impact in their competitive local marketplace in Turnhout and the wider Kempen region in the east of Belgium.
Then came the legal issues.
It started when US authorities took exception to the presence of the illustration of a heart on the brewery’s HertenHeer beer. Based on the King of Hearts playing card, US authorities argued the inclusion of the heart would in some way mislead drinkers into thinking the beer was healthy. “I kid you not,” says Cuypers. Het Nest would either have to rebrand the beer, which would have been a financial and administrative burden, or discontinue its export to the US. They decided to stop exporting Hertenheer to the US, but US residents can still buy it directly from online retailers in Belgium.
More of the same came when they launched a similarly-themed range of spirits featuring a “Jack of Spades” whisky. This prompted a cease-and-desist letter from the Tennessee Bourbon company Jack Daniels demanding that they drop the name. Concerned that the Jack Daniels complaint would widen to include attacks on the brewery’s beer brands referencing “Jack”, Het Nest immediately withdrew the brand from the market and eventually relaunched it as Four Aces, a name they had previously used for experimental beers.
Cuypers saw too that fewer and fewer young people were playing cards and he fretted that this would dilute the value of their branding and reduce the brewery’s appetite to extend the range in the same vein.
COVID-19’s impact on drinking patterns, and the separate emergence of a new generation of breweries in many of their export target markets meant that Het Nest saw their orders from abroad disappear very quickly, especially from the USA and Asia. Where at one point the brewery exported around half of its production, that number has since declined to 5%.
Then came the war in Ukraine and massive disruption to supply chains as well as the explosion in the costs of energy and raw materials—at one point, Het Nest’s gas bill shot up to as much as €8,000 per month. Cuyper and his friends had, it seemed, been riding high with a winning hand on the turn, only to be betrayed by the river. They might not have liked it, but it was the hand they had been dealt, and Het Nest would have to play it. To survive, though, they’d need a new strategy.
VI.
A Different Game
Het Nest’s new game strategy was centred on three elements.
The first was to forget about export and to focus all of their attention on the local market in the Kempen region. “Our customers live nearby, right under our noses,” said Cuypers in a recent interview with De Zytholoog magazine. “We only realised that (too) late.”
But Het Nest was not the only local brewery seeking to dominate the region. Among them was brewer Guy Pirlot, owner of the eponymous Brouwerij Pirlot. Located 25 kms to the southwest of Turnhout on the road to Antwerp, Pirlot had garnered his brewery a reputation with a high-quality range of beers under the Kempisch Vuur (“Kempen Fire”) brand, including a Tripel, Dubbel, and an IPA. Though his beers did not lean on Turnhout’s illustrious playing card history, Pirlot had, in seeking to grow his business, teamed up with a scion of one of Turnhout’s major playing card families.
At the same time as Cupyers and Het Nest were making waves in the local beer scene in the early 2010s, Antoine de Cartier de Marchienne was getting a taste for beer. De Cartier de Marchienne was a member of one of the families that owned global playing card conglomerate Cartamundi. He remembers talking to his father Jean-Louis de Cartier de Marchienne (Cartamundi’s chairman) about Het Nest’s arrival on the scene years previously. “He was very enthusiastic,” says de Cartier de Marchienne.
His family understood why Het Nest had adopted the playing card branding; after all, the business runs through their blood. “Me and my brother and sister, we are eight generation printers, eight generations of people that make playing cards. That was the main business in Turnhout. It’s known for that.”
As Antoine de Cartier de Marchienne tells it, his father met Bart Cuypers around the time Het Nest were starting out in the early 2010s to see if he’d be open to an investment, an offer that he says Cuypers declined. “I think from what I understand… maybe they were a bit intimidated, you know, such a big multinational,” says de Cartier de Marchienne. Cuypers disputes this chronology, saying that he didn’t meet de Cartier de Marchienne’s father until much later—not until 2019.
Whether Het Nest refused or not, Guy Pirlot—mid-fifties with no successors—was open to partnership, and de Cartier de Marchienne came on board as a co-owner of Brouwerij Pirlot in 2018.
But times were changing, and with some of Het Nest’s stakeholders seeking to disinvest, Cuypers approached Pirlot and de Cartier de Marchienne with a simple proposition: would they be interested in merging Het Nest and Pirlot? For Cuypers, the decision was a no-brainer: Brouwerij Pirlot was established in the Kempen market and had a sound production unit, but lacked Het Nest’s sales engine and strong branding. De Cartier de Marchienne agreed: “I thought it was a very good idea and I didn’t really hesitate.”
With the merger, Het Nest would get better access to local markets and substitute lost export revenue by brewing for regional beer companies, associations, and individual contract clients on Pirlot’s smaller brewery system. The business pivot has resulted in almost all of the merged brewery’s sales effort going into “an area roughly 60 kilometres around the brewery,” says Cuypers.
VII.
Focus
The second strategic change Het Nest made was to shrink their range of beers. “We’re restructuring our product portfolio to be a little bit more lean and mean,” says Cuypers. “We had too many references. [Now] we’re focusing on our flagships.”
Key to this is their Tripel SchuppenBoer, but they have also tapped into what Cuypers calls a “lower alcohol” segment with two new beers that have experienced early signs of success: Gardiaan, a Blonde Ale of 5.8% ABV with floral and fruity notes and brewed in collaboration with the Kapucijnenklooster monastery in nearby Meersel-Dreef; and Troef!, a Pilsner of 5.5% ABV named for the “trump” card which is elevated above its usual rank in trick-taking games. They’re also working on a new non-alcoholic beer which they will contract at another facility due to the absence of an in-house bottle pasteurizer.
The third thing Het Nest did to survive was to re-invent their team. Guy Pirlot retired on 1 January 2025. They were forced to make some lay-offs—three of their seven employees were let go—but they were also able to recruit a second brewer in Dennis Warrens.
Then Michaël Cordie, the owner of the Taxandria brands, came aboard as Commercial Director of Het Nest. Cordie brought decades of experience in beverage marketing, having worked as a trainee at Coca Cola, as brand manager for both Rodenbach and Palm, and Marketing Director at Antwerp drinks distributor Alcobrands (where he gained experience with whiskey). Not only that, but Cordie knew the local market well through his own Kempen beer company Gallico.
With these three significant changes—a focus on the local market around Turnhout, a smaller but more considered offering of beers, and a strategic roster of talented team members—Het Nest was able not only to survive, but to thrive.
In 2025, the brewery celebrates the tenth anniversary of their Oud Turnhout brewery, producing 4,500 HL in the last year. At current staffing levels, they would be able to reach 6,000 HL annually. 85% of this beer is sold locally, and of the eight friends who started Het Nest 25 years ago from the embers of the Order of the Drunken Sparrow, five are still at the table today.
VIII.
Turnova
Cartamundi’s global headquarters are still located in the centre of Turnhout. In fact, they are still on the site of what was once the home of the Brepols printing company, where the antecedents of Antoine de Cartier de Marchienne built a global dynasty.
Only today, standing there 72 metres tall, is the Turnova tower. Comprising twelve residential floors, two floors of offices, and three floors dedicated to hospitality, from the outside it appears as a white skeleton raster of intersecting columns and beams reminiscent of a rectangular beehive. The interior might be mistaken for the set of a sci-fi movie, with an escalator into a circular portal through a silver ceiling that shimmers like water.
Cartamundi’s offices are on the Tower’s 16th floor. Two floors above Cartamundi is Den Hert, a Michelin-star restaurant owned by chef Alex Verhoeven, Gault Millau’s 2025 Young Chef of the Year.
In October of 2023, Turnhout hosted the Brussels Beer Challenge, a prestigious annual beer judging competition that takes place in a different Belgian city each year. Het Nest would go on to win two bronze medals—for HertenHeer and for Poker Face. One evening, after a judging session, several of the judges were invited to the Turnova Tower for a meal at Den Hert where Verhoeven presented food pairings with Het Nest beers. “I have to stay true to our local companies,” says Verhoeven.
When the judges looked out the restaurant windows from the Tower’s 18th floor, they could see all the way across the city’s red-brick skyline to the moors and wetlands of the Kempen countryside beyond.
Each of the judges present was offered a beer to accompany their meal, a SchuppenBoer from Het Nest. Many of them had never been to the city before, and many might not have known they had spent much of their lives intimately connected to Turnhout’s most famous export. But for at least one evening, atop this tower, Turnhout could claim to be one of the most important places in Belgian beer; a scrappy city often ignored, but with a defiant ambition. A city that when it plays, it plays to win.
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