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Object #19 - De La Vergne Compressor

19th century

Brewery Life

Only the best would do for brothers Prosper, Edouard, and André Wielemans. Born of brewing stock (father a beer merchant, grandfather a brewer), the boys joined their widowed mother Constance-Ida Ceuppens in the family trade in the 1870s, converting their father’s merchant business into a brewery. Finding success brewing local styles, in 1879 the boys and their mother uprooted the Wielemans-Ceuppens brewery from its home in downtown Brussels in search of room to grow and diversify. 

Centrifugal forces - the razing of central Brussels during the burial of the Zenne, the pressures of industrialisation, and the city’s dense urban squalor - scattered breweries like Wielemans from Brussels’ medieval core to its rapidly-industrialising periphery. Some breweries landed in Molenbeek. The Wielemans headed for Vorst, where land was cheap, plentiful and beside the railway and the canal.

Escaping their origins in Brussels’ medieval core, these breweries also shed their artisanal traditions, abandoning Lambic in favour of industrial-scale Bavarian-style Lager beers. Wielemans-Ceuppens were no different, but as they shifted in the 1880s from spontaneous fermentation to bottom-fermented Lager, they found their new brewery was not up to the job. So the brothers went in search of something better: a new, German-built brewhouse, and a Bavarian brewmaster from Würzburg to run it. 

In October 1887, Wielemans-Ceuppens released their first Bavière and Petite-Bavière. The beers were successful, securing medals and drinkers, but the brothers remained dissatisfied. Popularity meant increased demand for their beer. Which put pressure on the brewery’s artificial cooling system - providing the cold ambient cellar temperatures their Bavière needed while lagering in 400 50-hectolitre wooden barrels. Their German system could not cope, so the brothers went looking for something better. Not to Germany, but an engineering firm on the banks of the Harlem river in The Bronx. 

New York’s De La Vergne Engineering Company built for the Wielemans a steam-powered, wrought iron compressor. Four metres tall, it comprised two three metre-wide wheels and two vertical pistons. It was a unique piece of industrial engineering, absorbing fully half the brewery’s budget for their brewery upgrade. The Wielemans installed it in a new, brewhouse-adjacent machine room decorated with geometric tiling and beer-themed stained glass. Collectively, the De La Vergne and the other machines produced 750,000 frigories an hour. Enough frigories to keep the Wielemans’ beers sufficiently chilled.

Steam power was soon jettisoned for first coal and then electricity, and by the 1920s even New York’s finest could not satisfy Wielemans-Ceuppens’ demand for cold air. The De La Vergne compressor was replaced but stayed put, unused, for six decades. It stayed put when the brewery closed in 1989. And it stayed put when the machine room was abandoned, though its black paintwork rusted, its wheels seized, and its brass balustrades dulled. 

Rescued by industrial heritage preservationists, the compressor still stands where Prosper, Edouard and André left it. Embossed lettering on the side of the machine still proclaims, in newly-painted gold: “Built and erected for Wielemans Ceuppens by the De La Vergne Refrigerating Machine Company, New York, 1894”.