Two and a half years of test batches
By day Anirudh Bobbili develops drinks for one of the largest companies on earth. The one he actually owns took two and a half years of weekends in a house in Tervuren.
Anirudh Bobbili
Belgium ¡ 3 min read
The switch flipped on a brewery tour
Anirudh Bobbili grew up in Hyderabad and took a degree in biotechnology, which is not, on the face of it, the beginning of a story about beer. Then came a student visit to the Carlsberg brewery.
That was the switch. Beer stopped being something you drink on a Friday and became something you could make â a process, with variables, and science underneath it. He went to Lille to study food technology with a focus on brewing, and then to Brussels, which is not a bad place to land if you have decided to take beer seriously.
Two and a half years of test batches
In 2017, at a company in Brussels, he met Dimitri Tips â a Belgian from Leuven, an industrial engineer and biochemist who had spent the better part of two decades developing drinks with no alcohol in them at all. They discovered the same obsession and started brewing at home in Tervuren. A hobby, on weekends.
It took two and a half years of test batches before there was something they were willing to put a label on. That beer is Tervoerke Tripel â built on Belgian tradition, with a creative streak running through it. In 2019 the pair founded AD Brewing Company together, brewing out of Wezembeek-Oppem: Anirudh and Dimitri, co-founders. They chose the name for a deliberately unromantic reason: it is easy to say in any language, by anyone, whatever they grew up speaking.
Formulating by day, brewing by weekend
The day job never went away. He is a product development manager at The Coca-Cola Company in Brussels, currently working on next-generation and accessible nutrition â fortified dairy and protein drinks. Before that came years of alcohol ready-to-drink work, and before that sugar reduction and sweeteners. Somewhere in there he also sat the Wine & Spirit Education Trust spirits course, and passed it with distinction.
So there are two versions of one craft running side by side: one at industrial scale with a laboratory behind it, and one in Wezembeek-Oppem with two founders and their own name on the bottle.
The torch
In July 2024 the Olympic flame crossed France on its way to the Paris opening ceremony, and for one stretch of it in Colmar, Anirudh was the one carrying it.
It is not a beer story at all, which is part of why it belongs here.
Holding the torch has left me with enough motivation for the decade to come.
A tripel, and a plate of Indian food
Ask him what he likes best about Tervoerke and it is not the brewing. It is where the glass ends up: a Belgian tripel in a garden, next to Indian food, in a kurta, in company.
That is the pairing he will argue for with anyone â a beer made in Flemish Brabant to a tradition centuries old, holding its own beside the food he grew up on.
Tervoerke paired with Indian food and great company
The people you find, a long way from home
Outside the brewery and the lab there is a great deal of moving about: fifteen years of training, the Deauville triathlon five times over, and a Hyrox entry he talked his friends into as a group project in suffering. He takes photographs, too.
But ask what he is grateful for after all these years in Belgium, and it is not the races or the beer. It is who turned up.
Over many years of being away from home, I'm so grateful to have met and shared my journey with warm and loving friends.