Archive record · Brewery
Jopen
Haarlem, North Holland, Netherlands
- Founded
- 1994
- Archive ID
- TB-P00K527Q
- Last checked
- Not yet checked
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From the record
Summary
Brought brewing back to Haarlem by recreating the 1407 bierkeur — the city's own beer recipe, preserved in the municipal archives. Operates out of a converted church, the Jopenkerk. Founding year disputed: the beer society dates to 1992 and the brewery to 1996, while this record has long held 1994.
A summary written during research. The sourced facts are in the sections below.
Tally’s Take
Haarlem cared enough about its beer to write the recipe into the public record, and in 1407 the city's bierkeur — its beer ordinance — specified a mash of barley, wheat and oats bittered not with hops but with gruit, a herb mixture dominated by sweet gale. Jopen went into the municipal archives, found it, and brewed it. That beer is Koyt, and it is the only traditional gruit recipe still in production anywhere: every other gruit beer on the market is a reconstruction or an invention. The brewery works out of a converted church, the Jopenkerk, which is the detail everyone mentions — but the archive is more interested in the fact that a fifteenth-century town clerk is the reason the recipe exists at all.
Where it is
52.38123, 4.62977
Supplied by the research pass; method not recorded
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Beers
Jopen Koyt
Year-RoundGruit Ale
Brewed with a gruit herb blend including bog myrtle instead of hops, reconstructed from a 1407 Haarlem recipe. This is what beer was before hops won.
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What the archive does not know yet
Open questions
- DisputedfoundedFounding year DISPUTED. The Stichting Haarlems Biergenootschap, the beer society behind the revival, was established in 1992; the Jopen brewery itself is dated to 1996. This record holds 1994, which is unsourced and matches neither. All three are recorded and none is chosen.
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Sources
- recordConfirmed
Koyt is brewed from the 1407 bierkeur, the Haarlem city beer recipe preserved in the municipal archives — a gruit beer bittered with a herb mixture dominated by sweet gale rather than hops, and the only traditional gruit recipe surviving in production. This corrects an earlier entry describing it as a 14th-century recipe; 1407 is the 15th century.
Jopen and the 1407 Haarlem bierkeur · Reference and brewing sources, cross-checked · 2026
ReferenceMedium reliabilitySource accessed 2026-08-20Claim last checked 2026-08-20 - foundedDisputed
Founding year DISPUTED. The Stichting Haarlems Biergenootschap, the beer society behind the revival, was established in 1992; the Jopen brewery itself is dated to 1996. This record holds 1994, which is unsourced and matches neither. All three are recorded and none is chosen.
Jopen and the 1407 Haarlem bierkeur · Reference and brewing sources, cross-checked · 2026
ReferenceMedium reliabilitySource accessed 2026-08-20Claim last checked 2026-08-20
Only the claims above are sourced. Everything else on this page is the archive's own research and has not yet been tied to a document — which is worth knowing rather than hiding.
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