Meteor
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Country of Origin: France
Location: Alsace, France
People: Haag Family, Owners
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Social Media
Instagram: @brasseriemeteor
Twitter: @Bieres_Meteor
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Sitting in the heart of some of the most beautiful and abundant farmland in Alsace, one independent, family-owned brewery has been crafting beer for over four centuries. The Meteor brewery has been growing and thriving among a lush backdrop of hop fields since 1640. Today, Meteor is the oldest brewery in France that is still active.
Meteor is the only industrial brewer from Alsace that is still entirely a family-owned company. The first sentence of what the company stands for leaves no room for doubt: “Meteor brewery is an independent family-owned brewery from Alsace, which intends to stay that way.” Alsace, which had 21 family-owned industrial breweries in 1960, has been left with only one: Meteor.
The Metzger-Haag family has been brewing Meteor beer in Hochfelden, a few miles north of Strasbourg, for eight generations. Michel Haag has been the head of the brewery since 1975. His son Edouard Haag, 8th generation, joined the company in 2014 as the National Retail Sales Director. Through a love of work, an ongoing investment policy, solid know-how, and a social commitment to maintaining its 200 jobs, the Meteor brewery has managed to remain independent and keep control of its destiny.
Today, Meteor brews a wide range of beers, each with a unique character. The secret of the unique flavor of Meteor beers lies in the selection of top-quality ingredients. The malts come from the best barley in France: Brie, Beauce, and Gâtinais. The hops are grown in Alsace (Strisselspalt, Aramis) and the Czech Republic (Saaz). The ingredients are brewed with pure water from the Vosges Mountains.
Each Meteor beer is unique and designed via a controlled process that follows 3 main production processes:
- Brewing: A brew consists of barley malt crushed into flour, mixed with water and heated in copper kettles. The wort produced is then filtered, and the hops are added.
- Fermentation: Yeast is added to the wort in refrigerated tanks. The sugars are turned into alcohol and carbon dioxide, and the wort becomes beer. Today, the Meteor Brewery has a sound knowledge of “high” and “low” fermentation techniques and can therefore produce a wide variety of recipes from Abbey-type beers to Pils-type beers.
- Conditioning: The beer is then left to mature at a low temperature in a conditioning cellar out of direct light. During this rest period it achieves balance, finesse and reveals its personality.
In 2015, Meteor became the first brewery to be awarded the ISO 50001 certification for their energy management system. They have an integrated water filtration unit that enables them to purify their waste water before releasing it into the Zorn River. Other types of waste is sorted and recycled through approved channels. In addition, they recover 500-600 tons of CO2 from the fermentation process every year through liquefaction. Read more about Meteor’s environmental commitment.