Women of Brussels Beer // Marta Resmini and Cleo Mombaers, Brasserie de la Senne
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 the two women who run sales for Brasserie de la Senne - Marta Resmini and Cleo Mombaers.
When Marta Resmini stepped out in 2015 as Brasserie de la Senne’s first sales and marketing representative, freshly minted business cards in her pocket, she didn’t get the reaction she was initially expecting. “I went to the first customer, to which I had to go with my business card,” she says. “He looked at my card and then paused for 5-10 seconds, and he was like, ‘Okay, so this is your phone number, what are you doing tonight?’ That was my first experience dealing out business cards.”
A lot has changed in the intervening five years. For one, Resmini gets fewer abortive pick-up attempts. She’s gained recognition as one of the most visible faces of the brewery, alongside Cleo Mombaers - her colleague in the sales and marketing team at de la Senne.
“I think working in this world, sometimes it sharpens my feeling of being a woman, and of compelled to actually defend the fact that we are not stupid dolls put there to please the customer”
Bribing with beer tiramisu
Resmini discovered Belgian beer while studying in her native Italy and drinking Chimay, Hommelbier and Westmalle at Italian craft beer bars. But it was time spent studying abroad in Leuven in 2008 when her interest in Belgian beer, and her desire to live in Belgium, crystallised. “I only lived in Leuven for less than a year. Leuven sucks,” Resmini says. Instead she chose to move to Brussels and it was there that Resmini's interest in beer properly took off. “I started discovering the existence of Brussels breweries,” she says. “Like Cantillon, which I hated in the beginning - sour beers, what is this stuff, it’s horrible to drink!”
Resmini also found Zinnebir, and she soon became a regular at the Brasserie de la Senne taproom in Molenbeek, hanging around long enough - and charming the staff with enough beer tiramisu - for one of the brewery’s owners, Bernard Leboucq, to offer her a job. At the time, she was deep into research for a PhD on power and resistance, democracy and power in contemporary democracy political theory, and Michel Foucault. “I started working at de la Senne while dreaming of finishing my thesis at night. Which never happened,” Resmini says. “But no regrets.”
A beer apprenticeship in Bierbeek
Mombaers took a less unconventional, if slightly more circuitous route to working at Brasserie de la Senne, working at several places before landing at the beer café In De Molen in Bierbeek, just outside of Leuven. Over the course of four years in Bierbeek, she honed her knowledge of Belgian beer, until she felt she had learned as much as she could. “I decided to do a Zythologie [beer sommelier] course…and at a certain point I decided I didn’t want to be in horeca anymore,” Mombaers says. “I did communications, I did film studies, and although I liked being behind the bar, I wanted to do something a little bit more.” So she struck out to find a job at a brewery, and ended up eventually at the Lupulus brewery, working on their sales for two and a half years.
“I started working at de la Senne while dreaming of finishing my thesis at night. Which never happened.”
It was through this position at Lupulus, criss-crossing Belgium selling beer, that she came into contact with Brasserie de la Senne and with Marta. “I knew the beers very well, I was always drinking Taras Boulba when I could,” Mombaers says. “So when a vacancy came up [in Brussels] I didn’t have to think long…I had already decided to move to Brussels so it was a puzzle that fit perfectly.”
“The importance of knowing your beer”
The pair have worked together since August 2018, acting as the go-betweens for the brewery and its clients, and representing the brewery at festivals and events. When Mombaers began working at Lupulus, she worried she would encounter the same kind of inappropriate behaviour Resmini had in her early days. “I thought it was going to be more difficult,” she says. “But if you, as a woman, knew your product, you were fine. If you wanted to be taken seriously, you had to show that you knew your beers.”
Neither women are particularly keen to explicitly pigeonhole themselves as “women in the beer industry”, but they have both experienced issues that they feel their male counterparts haven’t had to consider - assumptions made that they are window dressing hired by the brewery rather than integral parts of the business, inappropriate or unwanted physical behaviour from brewers or festival-goers, and condescension regarding their knowledge of beer and the industry. “I think working in this world, sometimes it sharpens my feeling of being a woman, and of compelled to actually defend the fact that we are not stupid dolls put there to please the customer,” Resmini says. “So there are still many things to change. In the beer world as in anywhere else.”
“if you, as a woman, knew your product, you were fine. If you wanted to be taken seriously, you had to show that you knew your beers.”
If you see something, say something
They have both remarked that it is a positive sign that there are many more women now working in the beer industry in Belgium. And that these women now have a responsibility to do their jobs well, but also to stand up for each other in the face of unacceptable behaviour. “But you never stop being aware, and being aware as women that means doing our jobs without self-caricaturing,” Resmini says. “But also it’s important that if there is something that goes on, and we don’t like it, to say it. I think there is a balance to be found there.”
In any case, these are not issues that either woman has had to deal with in Brasserie de la Senne. “Our bosses are incredibly progressive. And I know that Yvan [De Baets, co-founder of de la Senne] is super proud that there are 50% of women working at the brewery,” Mombaers says. “And as a woman if we were to encounter something like that, Yvan would be the first to defend us. He’s one of the biggest feminists I know!”
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 bars and their tap room is closed down, Brasserie de la Senne have recently launched an online shop where you can order beer and collect it at the new brewery building at Tour & Taxis. Details here.