ReportingA four-century-old brewing heritage is coming back to life in Armentières, in the North. Taking advantage of a buoyant market, the tenth generation of Motte relaunched the family business.
The smell of hops is gone. But not the memories. Construction helmet on his head and safety shoes on his feet, François Motte, his wife and their son Henry stroll through the ancestral family brewery Motte-Cordonnier, today under construction. In this factory castle, built by the grandfather, René Motte, and typical of the 19and century of the Northern region, it is effervescence.
It is not the bubbles of beer that rise to the surface, but the images of this time when beer supported part of the population of this city in the Lille metropolis. “Every year, to be elected class leaders, children from schools in Armentières were promised a visit to the brewery”, remembers François Motte, 59 years old. They were entitled to a glass of Moco, “the lemonade that we made here in addition to the beers”. At the heart of the Flemish room with almost intact stained glass, old chairs and a few dust-covered objects reveal the grandeur of a glorious past, which saw thousands of workers, often from generation to generation, parade through the site of this building. listed today. “In the family, castles are industrial! We don’t live there.” point out the Motte.
In this town in the North, there is not a single inhabitant who does not have a link, directly or indirectly, with the history of the Motte-Cordonnier brewery. “When we come to present our productions on the Armenian markets, explains Anne-Catherine, the wife of François Motte, people all have lots of stories to tell us”. The five hundred members from the facebook group alumni of the Motte-Cordonnier brewery today exchange old photos, anecdotes and winks, like this 1954 calendar, with the photo of a little boy all smiles, in overalls and a checkered shirt , a glass of beer on the edge of the lips. “In kindergarten, we were served beer colored with theine, at 1.5 degrees. And, in the schools, there was beer in the canteen. We added sugar, we shook, and it pschittée! », says laughingly François Motte, also business manager of a fences and gates company.
“Starting all over again”
The history of this regional brewing heritage, born in 1650, could have ended in 2018 with the death of Bertrand Motte, the last family manager of the brewery. “That summer, with the whole family, we drank a good beer thinking of him, and we said to ourselves that the thread of the story couldn’t stop there, that we even had to relaunch the mark and start all over again from scratch”, explains Henry Motte, a young 29-year-old engineer from Centrale, the eldest of the tenth generation, and now president of the Motte-Cordonnier brewery, since he left his position as project manager in IT.
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