Francois-Xavier had been moving cases of wine for years before the elixir came to him in 1870. Antwerp in those years was thick with small distilleries; by 1885, the city's five largest were producing more than a quarter of all Belgian jenever. He took his new herbal liqueur to the Antwerp International Exhibition that same year, and the orders began arriving faster than the Bredastraat workshop could handle. Within two decades he had bought a parcel of land on the Haantjeslei that came with its own small castle and parkland, and in 1894 the architect Jules Hofman, who would later become a celebrated Art Nouveau designer, drew up plans for the buildings that still stand. Stepped gables, layers of white stone and blue stone against red brick, herringbone parquet inside the director's office, leaded windows catching the southern light. The Flemish neo-Renaissance style was a deliberate gesture, a Flemish bourgeoisie announcing itself in stone.

Five generations of de Beukelaers have run the company, and the family tree reads like a history of the twentieth century's interruptions. Francois-Xavier died in 1917. His son Emile was carried off by influenza in 1922, four years after the great pandemic wave that had emptied wards across Europe. Louis-Xavier took the reins with his brother's son Edmond. Then a V2 rocket fell on Balthazar-Xavier's home during the German vengeance-weapon campaign that pounded Antwerp in the winter of 1944-45, and a third de Beukelaer was lost to war. After 1945, Edmond carried the company forward; when he died in 1969, his son Emile inherited the office. Emile would be the last of the founding family to sign the books. In 2008 he withdrew completely, and the company passed to the Nolet de Brauwere family, themselves an old distilling line, brought in as CEO a decade earlier.

Almost half a million bottles leave the Haantjeslei every year, most of them bound for Belgian cafes, Dutch supermarkets, and the kitchens of grandmothers who still take a small glass after dinner. The Elixir d'Anvers itself, golden and bitter-sweet, anchors a small range that grew slowly over the decades. Jenever arrived in 1904 under the name Snaps. Elixir de Spa joined the family in 1956 when De Beukelaer absorbed the smaller Spa distillery, and with it the royal warrant that made the company Purveyor to the Court of Belgium. A vodka line called Bokland came in 1996. An advocaat, that yolk-rich Dutch-Belgian custard liqueur, was added in 2015. The royal warrant lapsed when Emile left in 2008, but the elixir kept selling. A 2014 spike in excise duties on spirits drove prices up and bottle counts down twelve percent, and the workforce shrank from twelve people to eight. Small numbers, but the kind of small that lets a recipe survive.

In 2009 the building at 132 Haantjeslei was listed on the Architectural Heritage Inventory, and in September 2018 it received provisional monument protection. The inspector cited four kinds of value that all happened to coexist at one address. Cultural value, because the elixir captured the changing tastes of a nineteenth-century city. Historical value, because Antwerp's distillery boom shaped Belgian drinking habits for generations. Industrial-archaeological value, because the entire production line, from raw ingredients through copper-pot distillation to oak-cask maturation to bottling, has been kept intact, with much of the original machinery still in service. And architectural value, because Hofman's Flemish neo-Renaissance was a moment, never repeated. Walk past on a winter morning and you can sometimes catch the herbal smell drifting onto the pavement, juniper and angelica and gentian, a city's bitter aperitif still being made by hand a few blocks from the apartment buildings.