The history of the brewery goes back to 1784. Many hundreds of home breweries in Flanders made their own beer for their own consumption or as a side activity of farming, because it was safer to drink beer than water. In Ertvelde, Jean Baptise De Bruin started the brewery DE PEER. He turned the beer brewery into its main activity and sold the beer. De Bruin married Angelina Petronella Schelfaut who continued the brewery after his death. When she died, she left the brewery to her cousin, Jozef Schelfaut, who had assisted her for many years in the brewery and knew the art of brewing. His daughter Margriet married Paul Van Steenberge, a professor of microbiology at the Ghent brewing school. After the First World War, he took charge of the brewery.