For the month of March (and the first couple of days of April), Brussels Beer City is celebrating and amplifying the voices of women work in beer in Brussels. From brewers to businesses owners, sales people and beer educators, each week we will highlight leading women in the sector - their stories, their views, and their experience as members of the city’s close-knit beer community. Today, it’s the final article and the turn of two women working at Brussels’ last remaining lambic brewery - Colleen Rakowski and Danielle French of Brasserie Cantillon.

Danielle French and Colleen Rakowski had inauspicious beer beginnings. 

From Anheuseur Busch to brewing at Cantillon

For French - predictably for someone raised in St Louis - her formative brewing memory came aged 11 or 12 (she can’t quite recall) on a tour around the home of the King of Beers, Anheuseur Busch. “I remember being overwhelmed by the sheer size of all the equipment, but there wasn’t really any magic for me,” French says. “I certainly didn’t say to myself, ‘This is what I want to do when I grow up!’”

Colleen Rakowski’s introduction came a little later. A Pennsylvania native, Rakowski spent time in France as an au pair before returning home in 2014. A chance meeting with John Stemler, owner of Free Will Brewing Co. outside Philadelphia, led to her running the brewery’s social media, but Rakowski’s curiosity about what the brewery actually did had her straying from her desk. “You can only do social media for so long,” Rakowski says. “So I would go and ask the brewers, ‘Can I help you guys?’” She eventually found herself sitting in the brewery’s taproom early on a Sunday morning, red notebook in hand and ready to learn. “I started writing things down…I didn’t know what an IPA was, didn’t know what a Kölsch was,” Rakowski says. “It was really intimidating. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, or where I wanted to be in beer. I just knew I liked the company and I wanted to see it grow.”

As unpromising as these starts were, the pair are now firmly embedded in Brussels’ brewing scene as members of the team at Brasserie Cantillon, familiar faces to visitors to the Anderlecht brewery - French since December 2017, and Rakowsi since 2018. The pair took different routes to end up working together at Cantillon but transformational educational experiences lie at the centre of their journeys to Brussels. 

The value of a Pink Boots Society scholarship

Rakowski had been working at Free Will for two years as Lead Cellar Worker monitoring fermentation, dry hopping, and filtering when in November 2016 she secured a scholarship from the Pink Boots Society - the non-profit organisation with international membership which supports women working in the brewing profession - to attend a brewing course at UC Davis in California. “To win the scholarship totally changed my career,” she says, adding that now she had the confidence to go back to the brewery and demand more involvement and more say in the operation of the brewhouse and barrel programme. She became more involved in Free Will’s work with wild and mixed fermentation beers - the brewery has won medals for its “Belgian-style Lambic” - and when she found herself standing in the office of Cantillon owner Jean Van Roy in 2017 asking him to take her on as an intern, she was dumbfounded at him agreeing. 

French’s turn towards beer came studying at Pollenzo’s University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy. “We had a section dedicated to beer,” French says. “It just totally opened up a new world for me. Our professor, Mirco Marconi, was so knowledgeable and his passion for his craft was contagious. I was hooked.” Through him, French secured an introduction with Van Roy at Italy’s Arrogant Sour festival in 2017, convincing the Belgian to take her on as an intern for that summer. “I spent three months in Brussels working between Cantillon and Brasserie de la Senne,” she says, “and by the time my internship was coming to an end I knew I’d found my place.”

French and Rakowski parlayed their internships into full-time positions but ask them what exactly their jobs are, and they will explain that it doesn’t really work that way. “No one outside the family at Cantillon really has a specific job title other than "ouvrier brassicole" or just simply  “employee”,” says French. She works mainly on the museum side of the brewery while also helping with brewing. Rakowski on the other hand works on brewing, but even then it’s a question of what needs to be done, rather than any specific position. “It’s much more that we meet in the morning and go around the group saying, ‘You go do this, you go do that,’” Rakowski says. “Sometimes we blend…Sometimes you help, Jean will taste and you get to help him…You’ll filter. You bottle. Whoever needs help and whoever is free.” 

Brew day pastries

Early on, this unstructured approach to brewing unnerved Rakowski, who was used to a work environment in the US with a clearer delineation of roles and responsibilities. But she has learned to appreciate it. “I like that it’s not rigid here [at Cantillon]. In the US…our culture is all work all day,” she says. “At 10am on brew days, for example, we stop and drink a glass of wort and we eat pastries. You just have to forget everything you know and really go back [to the beginning] and try to figure it out.”

That looser approach does have its benefits. “No two days are ever the same, which can be chaotic at times but also keeps things exciting,” French says. And they are prepared to relearn how to brew because of the esteem in which they hold the rest of the Cantillon team. “The great thing about Cantillon is that we’re all equally respected,” Rakowski adds, emphasising that there is no distinction made between the men and the women on the production team - if you want to work at the brewery, then you have to do be able to do the same heavy lifting - literal and figurative - as everyone else.

Both women are well settled in Brussels, though for Rakowski it took a little time before the city felt like a home to her. “Getting on the plane to Brussels was the most exhilarating and most terrifying moment of my life,” she says. “I had no backing, I had Cantillon, but I had no safety net, I didn’t know anyone. And, for the first few months, it sucked.” But she began to make friends, overcame initial uncertainty about her place at Cantillon, and towards the end of 2019 Rakowski was able to say she was comfortable in her new surroundings. 

Pale, male and stale

French has always been drawn to Brussels’ open culture, even if the city’s brewing community has progress to make. “[It’s] definitely still very male and white,” she says. “I’ve seen some change from when I first started, but it is slow - I think we have a lot of work to do when it comes to opening beer up to our fellow humans who are not cisgender white dudes. I strive to make sure every visitor, but especially visitors that fall outside this descriptor, feel welcome at Cantillon. I hope that every person who walks through our doors feels like it’s a place for them.”

French and Rakowski have their fair share of war stories at Cantillon and previously at Free Will back in the US, from people making hurtful gendered assumptions of their role in the business, to condescending “lambic bros” and visitors asking them for “girly beers”. “It’s hard sometimes not to feel jaded, and at times it can even be infuriating, but I try to not let it get to me,” French says. “When someone tells me I can’t do something because I’m a woman, it just makes me all the more determined to prove them wrong.” 

They are wise to the importance of strong role models to undermine deep-seated prejudices. Rakowski is an active member of the Benelux chapter of the Pink Boots Society and remains closely involved with the Philadelphia chapter as an official liaison. 

And for French, visibility for the work she, Rakowski and others do is vital to disabusing certain drinkers of their antediluvian attitudes: “I hope that when visitors see women working in the brewery, especially a brewery like Cantillon where the work is very physically intense, it shows them that we are more than up to the task.”

POSTSCRIPT: This interview took place in late-January, long before any of us had an inkling what was to come as a consequence of the spread of Covid-19. While the brewery and tap room is closed to visitors, Brasserie Cantillon have recently launched an online shop where you can order beer for delivery to the 19 Brussels communes. Details here.