Women of Brussels Beer // Jody Lecieux, Gist
For the month of March, 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 turn of Jody Lecieuxx - Lille born, and a graduate o the Moeder Lambic craft beer finishing school, Lecieux has for the past two year run one of Brussels’ best new bars - Gist.
Jody Lecieux was always going to end up running her own bar. That much is obvious. And for a little over two years that’s what she has been doing at Gist, together with her partner Jenlain Delcourt.
Born and raised in the northern French city of Lille, Lecieux spent her childhood Sundays in local bars, surrounded by aunts, uncles and cousins. “That was really fun,” Lecieux says. “Us cousins would just play kicker [table football] and pinball, and have coins to buy some Coca Cola.”
A Taras Boulba transformation
A more formal career in the world of beer and bars - and her discovery of craft and artisan beer - came a little later, after Lecieux returned to Lille from a period abroad working in Ottawa. She needed to pay her bills, and so got herself a job at La Capsule, what was then a relatively new - and rare - craft beer bar in the city.
It was a formative experience for Lecieux, and she dived right into the Franco-Belgian beer scene. La Capsule had close connections to Brussels’ Moeder Lambic bars, and Lecieux still recalls the first time she tasted one of Brussels’ iconic beers, one which significantly influenced the kinds of beer she would later champion at Gist.
“I remember my first Taras Boulba ever,” Lecieux says. “You know how you remember a once in a lifetime experience. I like dryness, straight beers…[and] I’m still into clean, nice beers - all this marshmallow imperial stouts or whatever, I’m not really a big fan.”
“You can make the best beer in the world, but if you’re an asshole your beer is never going to end up in my menu. Ever.”
As well as exploring what the contemporary Belgian beer scene had to offer, the cultural interchange between La Capsule and Moeder Lambic also introduced Lecieux to Delcourt, and soon enough she moved to Brussels and began working at Moeder Lambic’s original location in St. Gilles while he continued working at the city centre Fontainas bar. And there they stayed for 18 months.
Don’t be an asshole
“We learned a lot at Moeder lambic,” Lecieux says of her time there. “It was a really nice school for two to work cleanly with beers, for respecting the product, and for learning the technical aspects of how to manage beers.” Even more, Lecieux says it was a great way to meet brewers from around the world, which came in handy when the pair decided to branch out on their own. “Since I was a teenager I wanted to be on my own,” Lecieux says. “So it was agreed from the beginning that it [Moeder Lambic] would be the last stop before our own place.” Opening their own bat was also a chance to put into practice another lesson the pair had learned while working for someone else. “We want[ed] to create our own thing, to not compromise, be free to do whatever we want, and be free to work with the people we want to work with,’ Lecieux says.
And this has been a guiding principle for her and Delcourt since they opened Gist in December 2017. It has informed the beers they choose to serve, and the brewers with whom they choose to collaborate. “We have a really straight idea of what we want and what we don’t want,” Lecieux says. First, they need to know the brewer, and ideally have visited their brewery. “One of the reasons we are independent is because we don’t want to work with assholes,” she explains. “You can make the best beer in the world, but if you’re an asshole your beer is never going to end up in my menu. Ever.”
For Gist, compromise is crucial
Second, Lecieux and Delcourt want to make sure that Gist offers a balance of stability and novelty to its customers - some of whom are regulars happy with repeat orders of Saison Dupont, while others are looking to be more adventurous. And finally, her and Delcourt have to agree on the beer before they decide to buy it - and that’s not always a given. “We have absolutely not at all the same taste in beers,” Lecieux says, explaining that if one of them is a big fan of a style but the other is not, so long as they can both agree that the beer has been well-executed and comes from a brewer they both respect then they are willing to compromise.
“I think people don’t make that mistake any more. I’m more confident, and my friends tell me this, people can see you’re the boss.”
In the bar’s early days, though, new customers made retrograde assumptions about Lecieux’s position at Gist. “The first year we opened here people thought I was his [Delcourt’s] employee,” Lecieux says. “It was really harsh for the ego…because I know exactly the same things as him.”
A year into running Gist, and those assumptions ebbed away, and Lecieux grew in confidence and into her role behind the bar. “We [her and Delcourt] are 50-50,” she says. “We are exactly the same partners, we have the same weight in decisions, and exactly the same impact in our business.
“I think people don’t make that mistake any more. I’m more confident, and my friends tell me this, people can see you’re the boss.”
POSTSCRIPT: This interview took place in early February, long before either myself or Jody had an inkling what was to come as a consequence of the spread of Covid-19. The conversation led into excited talk about the plans she and Jenlain had for Gist in 2020 - who they were collaborating with for new cask-conditioned exclusives for the bar, events they had planned, Jenlain’s foray into DJing.
But right now, none of this is happening, and the future for them, and everyone else working in hospitality is more uncertain than at any time in living memory. I look forward to sharing a triumphant pint with Jody and Jenlain when Gist reopens, and I hope you will join me.