Our commitments

The classic Belgian categorization — blonde, brown, amber — is comfortable but lazy. It says nothing about a beer's character, only about its color. It's like classifying wine by hue without mentioning grape, terroir or method.

Yet the global beer universe is incredibly rich : tropical IPA from the American Northwest, juicy NEIPA from New England, Nordic imperial stout, Walloon farmhouse saison, salty Gose from Leipzig, spontaneously fermented Lambic from the Pajottenland, Czech Pilsner, Bavarian Hefeweizen, Trappist Quadrupel, English porter, kettle sour, Scottish Wee Heavy, Berliner Weisse, Schwarzbier, Helles, Märzen… Each style tells of a country, an era, a technique, sometimes centuries of history.

At Borderline, we embrace this diversity : stating the real style of a beer — not hiding it behind a generic label — is respecting the person who drinks it. It's also an invitation to travel with the glass in hand — discover, compare, be surprised.

Drinking less, but drinking better : for us, that also means drinking more varied.

Most commercial beers display the bare minimum : name, volume, ABV, barcode. Sometimes vague terms like « craft beer » or « brewed with care ». Nothing that really tells you what you're going to drink.

At Borderline, we bet on the opposite : say it all, or almost. On our cans you'll find :

• The precise style (IPA, NEIPA, Imperial Stout, Saison…) and its origin.
• Complete ingredients (malts, hops, yeast, others).
• Explicit allergens — not buried in tiny print.
• Technical indicators : ABV, IBU, EBC.
• The brewing date and best-by date.
• Suggested serving temperature and food pairings.

Why so much info? First, for transparency — anyone opening one of our cans deserves to know exactly what they're drinking. And to guide — an informed drinker enjoys more, makes wiser choices, becomes curious about other styles.

The label is our product ID card. We want it readable, complete, no tricks.

Honestly? We are not organic-certified. Certification requires administrative costs and regular audits we haven't tackled at this first stage — we'd rather put the investment into raw materials.

That said, we brew exclusively with organic malt. Why? Because grains are the dominant ingredient in a beer, and malt from organic farming is grown without pesticides or synthetic fertilizers — better for the consumer's health, better for soils and groundwater, better for local biodiversity and neighboring beekeepers.

For hops and yeasts, we lean towards organic whenever availability and quality allow it, without making a dogma out of it.

It's a real but imperfect commitment. Certification may come later; for now, the effort goes into the raw material that matters most.

At the back of our garden in Mussy-la-Ville, we have been growing hops since 2018. What started as a handful of plants quickly turned into a testing ground : up to 60 plants across several varieties to find those that thrive in the Gaume terroir — climate, soil, exposure, local pests.

These years have been full of learning : diseases to spot, pruning to adjust, trellis to refine, harvest calendar to dial in. Lots of trial and error, a few honest failures, and an ever-growing share of usable cones.

Today the hop garden is above all a place to experiment : testing new fresh-hop recipes, understanding how aromas evolve year after year, and bringing a little local terroir into our batches. It stays small-scale — not enough to feed a full production — but it's a living lab that fuels every idea.

In practice : whenever a harvest delivers the right quality and quantity — and the recipe is a fit — these home-grown hops go straight into some of our beers, most often as dry hop to capture the freshness right after picking. Not a default, more of a seasonal choice.

Glass was long considered the greener choice. For craft beer, it's actually the opposite — and the numbers speak for themselves.

• Light: cans are 100 % opaque. UV is one of hops' worst enemies (it triggers the infamous "skunk taste"). A brown bottle lets some through; a green one, nearly half.
• Oxygen: total, long-lasting hermetic seal. A bottle, crown-capped, slowly lets in traces of oxygen that oxidize the beer and dull its aromas over months.
• Transport CO₂ footprint: an empty can weighs ~13 g, a 33 cl glass bottle ~200 g — that's 15× more. On a pallet of 1,000 beers, you move 187 kg of air and glass… or 13 kg of aluminum. Easy call.
• Recycling: aluminum recycles 100 % without quality loss, infinitely. A can produced today already contains ~75 % recycled aluminum. Glass recycles too, but takes far more energy to remelt.
• Quick chilling: a can drops in temperature in minutes in the fridge, where a bottle takes much longer. Energy savings at tasting time, and quicker enjoyment.

For anyone who takes both the quality of the contents and the environment seriously, the can wins on every front.

An empty can weighs about 13 g, a 33 cl glass bottle about 200 g. For the same volume of beer, shipping in cans emits far less CO₂.

Empty glass weighs more than its contents — every kilometer essentially transports air and glass. With cans, we ship the beer, not the packaging.

Most industrial breweries force carbonation by injecting massive amounts of industrial CO₂ into the finished beer. Most craft breweries go for a second fermentation in bottle or can (re-fermentation) : sugar is added, the residual yeast eats it and produces CO₂. "Natural", yes — but that CO₂ is still freshly produced. Just a shift of the source.

At Borderline we chose a third path : natural carbonation in the tank. We capture under pressure the CO₂ the yeast has already produced during primary fermentation — the one that would otherwise escape into the atmosphere — then transfer the beer into cans under pressure. If a final adjustment is needed at the end of the tank, we add only a minimum of industrial CO₂ — just enough to fine tune, never to carbonate from scratch. No second fermentation, no mass injection : our industrial CO₂ usage is a fraction of what conventional forced carbonation requires.

Advantages :

• Industrial CO₂ kept to the strict minimum — only to fine tune, never as the primary source.
• No new CO₂ generated by re-fermentation — we don't add sugar to make more.
• Finer bubbles, more stable foam, preserved aromatic complexity.
• No risk of overcarbonation (can occur in re-fermentation if the yeast eats too much sugar).
• The can is ready to drink straight off the line — no 2 to 3 weeks of re-fermentation to wait.