Brussels Beer City Podcast

This is the Brussels Beer City Podcast.

This edition of the podcast is a brief interruption to our regular broadcast schedule, as we’re not talking diaspora bars this time around. Don’t worry though, normal servicel will resume soon.

Instead, this episode is a one-off, about a very particular kind of beer that’s just about to be launched in Brussels. To mark the launch of Brussels Beer Project’s Dansaert Gueuze, I sat down with five of the people involved in making this landmark beer.

Why is it a landmark beer? Well, to get the full story, you’ll have to listen to our conversation, which took place a few weeks ago in the cellars under BBP’s Dansaert brewery in central Brussels. But suffice it to say this much by way of introduction. Lambic is Brussels’ indigenous beer tradition, and having dominated Brussels’ brewing scene 120 years ago, by the beginning of the 21st century Brasserie Cantillon stood alone as the city’s only Lambic brewer. Until BBP announced their Dansaert Lambic programme and released their first blends in December 2021. For the intervening two years, Cantillon could continue to claim their place as the city’s only remaining Gueuze producer - Gueuze being a blend of variously-aged Lambics. And now, with the launch of BBP’s Dansaert Gueuze, there are two.

But as I said, I’ll let the brewers explain it all.

It’s an episode for the beer nerds among you, and it’ a little longer than the usual format. But even if your knowledge of Lambic beer and brewing is barely skin-deep, I think you’ll find something interesting in the story behind Brussels Beer Project’s Dansaert Gueuze.

So here’s me talking to Tiago Falcone, David Santos, Jordan Keeper, Sam Fleet, and Dimirti Van Roy of Brussels Beer Project. I hope you enjoy it.

Click here to read the accompanying article.

This is the Brussels Beer City Podcast Diaspora Season: Chapter 3 - Ciao, Belga!

For almost 150 years, Italians who’ve travelled north to Brussels in search of work and better life, have been feeding the appetites and slaking the thirsts of the city’s residents.

Brussels’ Italian quarter - in the tangle of streets between the botanical gardens and North station - may have long since disappeared, but the community has made a signifcant and lasting mark on Brussels’ culinary world. And, as new arrivals from Il Bel Paese keep making their transalpine migration, what an “Italian” café in Brussels is keeps evolving.

Click here to read the accompanying article.

The Brussels Beer City Podcast: Diaspora Season is about Brussels’ immigrant communities and the places they love to drink. 

From ice cold Sagres with piglet sandwiches and pintjes in bruine kroegen, to creamy pints, fried plantains, and more, the podcast will explore the drinking cultures of just a small slice of Brussels’ diaspora communities.

Read about the project here.

This is the Brussels Beer City Podcast Diaspora Season: Chapter 2 - Big Trouble in Little Kortrijk?

For almost 40 years a small corner of central Brussels - comprising the Antoine Dansaertstraat, the Vlaamsesteenweg (the “Flemish Carriageway”) and the perpendicular streets that criss-cross them - with its bars and shops and cultural lodestones, has been a linguistic enclave for the city’s Dutch-speaking “diaspora”.

But the forces that made this neighbourhood a creative centre of Flemish life in Brussels look to be waning, and the Dansaertwijk’s grip on Brussels’ Dutch-speaking imagination might be loosening.

Click here to read the accompanying article.

The Brussels Beer City Podcast: Diaspora Season is about Brussels’ immigrant communities and the places they love to drink. 

From ice cold Sagres with piglet sandwiches and pintjes in bruine kroegen, to creamy pints, fried plantains, and more, the podcast will explore the drinking cultures of just a small slice of Brussels’ diaspora communities.

Read about the project here.

This is the Brussels Beer City Podcast Diaspora Season: Chapter 1 - Ireland’s Unofficial Embassies.

The centrality of the pub to Irish social life - and by extension, the pint too - may be clichéd, but it’s not any less true. In fact, it might even be more true for Ireland’s emigrants.

In Brussels, though it may not hold the global allure it once did, the Irish pub remains a fixture of the Irish emigrant experience. Everyone’s got their favourite pub, and their own pub stories. Including the Irish ambassador. 

Click here to read the accompanying article.

The Brussels Beer City Podcast: Diaspora Season is about Brussels’ immigrant communities and the places they love to drink. 

From ice cold Sagres with piglet sandwiches and pintjes in bruine kroegen, to creamy pints, fried plantains, and more, the podcast will explore the drinking cultures of just a small slice of Brussels’ diaspora communities.

Read about the project here.

The Brussels Beer City Podcast: Diaspora Season is about Brussels’ immigrant communities and the places they love to drink. 

From ice cold Sagres with piglet sandwiches and pintjes in bruine kroegen, to creamy pints, fried plantains, and more, the podcast will explore the drinking cultures of just a small slice of Brussels’ diaspora communities.

75% of Brussels’ population have foreign roots, and the city has long exerted a strong gravitational pull on new arrivals to Belgium. In the white heat of the industrial revolution, Flemish farm labourers were lured to the city with promises of factory jobs. 

Later, their 20th century successors came from the southern mediterranean and Anatolia to build motorways and metrolines. They were followed in turn by bureaucrats populating Brussels’ European quarter, and the descendants of colonial central Africa seeking refuge from civil war. 

Each wave of new arrivals has also brought with it new kinds of places to drink - Asturian cantinas, Roman trattorias, Turkish Pide places, Irish pubs, and Congolese ngandas - to name just a few.

Over the course of this new season, and in a series of accompanying articles at beercity.brussels, the Brussels Beer City Podcast will dig into the stories of these community spaces, and talk about how a city’s drinking culture is more than just the sum of its breweries and craft beer bars. 

In the company of the people that know them best, the podcast will explore how these places came to be, how they’ve adapted as Brussels has changed, and what place they still have as the city’s demographics continue to evolve, and new communities are constantly added to the mix. 

The Brussels Beer City Podcast: Diaspora season, launching on all good podcast platforms July 7.

HOLD ON A SECOND, this isn’t the podcast you’re used to listening to, you’re probably thinking. And it’s not - it’s a wee trailer for our sister podcast, Cabin Fever, which has cooked up something special to celebrate a very peculiar Christmas.

Have a listen…

Didn’t Eoghan say the podcast was done when lockdown ended in the summer? Well, yes, I did, because I expected - or at least hoped - that there wouldn’t be a second lockdown.

But here we are.

And while Lockdown 1.0 gave us the Cabin Fever Podcast.

Lockdown 2.0 is going one better and giving us the Cabin Fever Belgian Christmas Bonanza - a livestreamed evening on Thursday December 3rd, where we can celebrate the holidays  together while enjoying a drink-along of a selection of Belgian Christmas beers!

In the company of some of the world's beer beer writers (and drinkers), we'll drink 4 beers, play Christmas-themed quizzes, sing carols, maybe some prize giveaways, and whatever else happens on an evening spent drinking 10%+ beers.

I’m delighted to have teamed up with London’s Hop Burns and Black, and Belgium’s Etre Gourmet on tasting packs for the event. In each of these we’ve put some superb Belgian Christmas beers, including these classics: 

St.Bernardus Christmas Ale

De Dolle Brouwers Stille Nacht

Brouwerij De Ranke Pere Noel

If you order with Etre Gourmet your 4th beer will be Brasserie de la Senne's Winter Mess

And if you order from Hop Burns and Black your 4th beer will be Anspach & Hobday's The Pfeffernüsse Stout

And if you can't get hold of them, get something local and independently-brewed wherever you find yourself!

We’ll be live on YouTube on December 3, so be sure to join. You can find the link to the youtube stream in the show notes, and more details will be coming across Brussels Beer City’s twitter, facebook and instagram.

So, stay tuned and see you on December 3rd!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LddGvzbexLg 

Hannelore Goeman is a Brussels-based Belgian politician and the leader of parliamentary delegation of the sp.a, the Flemish social democratic party, in the Flemish parliament.

Over Zoom, Hannelore talks about Her early student adventures after moving from Leuven in Brussels, whether or not she would qualify as a stereotypical Dansaertvlaming, why Brussels is never boring but why its untapped potential led her to her political career and her focus on educational opportunity, and the different stages of Covid lockdown-induced mania.I hope you enjoy.

This is the final episode of the first season of the Brussels Beer City City Podcast, and the first one where Covid finally thwarted our efforts to record it. As you’ll hear, this week’s interview took place not in my guests favourite bar but from the comfort of our respective living rooms. Brussels is in the middle of a month-long Covid lockdown with bars, cafés and restaurants all closed. But we did our best to keep the mood positive, even if Covid talk did sneak in towards the end.

And as I mentioned, it’s also the last episode of what is just the first season of many of the Brussels Beer City podcast. In addition to putting the whole thing in limbo, the current context may mean some tweaks to the format if or when a second season does appear. But regardless, thank you for listening, and I’d love to hear your suggestions for guests for future episodes, so get in touch in the usual social media channels!

It’s been a hugely enjoyable experience for me, and I hope you listeners have enjoyed it too. Unless the world collapses in on itself over Christmas, I hope to be back for a new season early in 2021, so keep an eye on at br beer city on twitter, and Brussels beer city on facebook and Instagram for up dates. If there’s anyone who you’d really like to have, then let me know through the same channels.

And if you did enjoy the podcast, rate and review on iTunes and we can keep it in the top 200 arts podcasts in Belgium!

For one last time, thank you to all of may guests, all you listeners, and my wonderful illustrators Krump and Herlinde Demaerel for all their work on the podcast!

Anyway, on with the episode!

My guest on this, the penultimate episode of this season is Jean Van Roy. Van Roy is the owner of Brussels brewery Brasserie Cantillon.

Brewery doesn’t quite cover it though, because Cantillon is also a museum and a living piece of a part of the city’s heritage that almost disappeared - the funky, tart, confrontational spontaneously-fermented wheat beers called Lambic (here’s a beginner’s guide to what Lambic - and Gueuze - is for the uninitiated) that are indigenous to this part of Belgium.

On a scorching hot early September day on the eve of brewing season for Cantillon, we met at a bar influential not only for the city but also for him, and his family brewery.

We talk lambic evangelisation in a country that still doesn’t really get it, his youthful escapades drinking crap beer with friends, how is approach to brewing has changed thanks to his relationships with winemakers and chefs, and how the brewery’s corridors ring hollow and lonely in the absence of American, Italian and other foreign accents.

I hope you enjoy.

Eagled eared listeners will have noticed that this week’s episode is arriving on a Friday and not the customary Wednesday. That’s because on on Wednesday I was busy with the launch of my new book!

Brussels Beer City: Stories from Brussels brewing past is now available. If you’re in Brussels you can get a copy at Waterstones, Malt Attacks, Fermenthings, and Dekkera. If you’re not you can order print and ebook copies on Amazon, and the list of stockists is being updated constantly, so check out beercity.brussels/book for more.

I was especially happy to have this week’s guest on the show.

Herlinde Demaerel is an illustrator and graphic design artist, from Belgium originally but now living in Greece. Herlinde is the superb artist behind the illustrations that accompany each episode of this podcast, so I was delighted to have her on to talk about her inspiration and her connection with Brussels.

In a converted petrol station, we talk about what prompted her to move from the Flemish countryside town of Hoegaarden - of the eponymous beer - what Brussels offers that a Greek island doesn’t, and vice versa, and where she draws inspiration for her illustrations and artwork - which you can find here!

Enjoy the episode.

Before I introduce today’s guest, a quick bit of housekeeping.

I’m delighted to say I’ve written a book. Or more specifically, published a collection of stories written for Brussels Beer City and Belgian Beer and Food Magazine, brought together for the first time under the title Brussels Beer City: Stories from Brussels Brewing Past.

It’s a collection that, for the first time in english, charts the rise and fall of Brussels as a brewing capital of Europe, and the people and families that were there to see it.

More excitingly I’ve teamed up with Brussels Beer Project for the book launch, brewing a very special beer to mark the occasion.

Both book and beer will be launched at the BBP brewery on October 7, with details to come on registration, etc. in the meantime, you can find out more about the book, and pre-order your e-book copy, at beercity.brussels/book.

And with that, let’s get onto our guest.

Frederik Willem Daem is a Brussels native, born and raised in Jette. Daem is a writer, novelist and musician. His first collection of short stories was published in 2015 and was awarded the Debuutprijs 2016.

His debut novel, Tekens van Leven, followed in 2020, and has since been shortlisted for De Bronzen Uil, the annual award for the best Dutch-language debut.

In the summer lull between Covid restrictions, I joined Frederik at one of his regular central Brussels haunts, where we talk the benefits of the anonymous city, the iconography that make up the archetypal city café and how one became a central character in his debut novel, the Brussels café regulars that populate the book, the peculiarities of Brussels, and how they protect it from metropolitan homogenisation, and building a real-life café from his imagination for the launch of his book.

Enjoy the episode.