Gageleer was born out of a combined passion for beer and nature. Gageleer desires to brew beer using a traditional, historical ingredient, employing state-of-the-art brewing techniques that satisfy the demands of the modern consumer. Gageleer is a beer with the taste of the land where it is born: bog myrtle from nature, and barley from fully organic agriculture.

Around 1980, a desire for a beer brewed `to medieval tastes´ led us to the Cruydeboeck (“Book of Herbs”) by Belgian botanist and physician Rembert Dodoens (1517–1585). The road to actually realizing this desire was long, but following a detour through a (then) small Walloon brewery in 1988 we arrived at our first “garage beer” in Beerse (province of Antwerp). On 23 November 1996, the “Proef” brewery in Lochristi bottled the first 1,000 liters of Gageleer. In 1997, five members of De Wielewaal nature society raised the capital to found a co-operative, with the goal of marketing a beer to fund the purchase and conservation of nature reserves in the Campine.

In 2017 Gageleer cvba-so uit Oud-Turnhout heeft de commercialisatie van haar bieren overge­dragen en heeft hiervoor een licentieovereenkomst afgesloten met Biosano uit Wommelgem. Gageleer zal met de royalty's op de bierverkoop zoals in het verleden projecten voor natuurbehoud ondersteunen.