The first article published on Brussels Beer City went on July 19 2017. It feels fitting on the blog’s third birthday to make an announcement - Brussels Beer City: Stories from Brussels’ Brewing Past, a collection of articles on the history of Brussels breweries published on this website and for Belgian Beer and Food Magazine, is available for e-book pre-order now, ahead of its launch (alongside a paperback version) in September 2020. The book is not strictly a narrative given its anthological nature, but across nine stories it will give an insight into some of the city’s overlooked beer and brewing heritage. 

From the Forest brewery Congolese freedom fighter Patrice Lumumba once worked for as a salesman, to the race against time to rescue Brussels’ rich industrial heritage from the maws of rapacious developers, and the see-sawing fortunes of the city’s artisan brewers, the collection surveys a tumultuous century of brewing in Belgium’s capital. 

You can pre-order Brussels Beer City now on Amazon, but ahead of the launch in September (alongside a paperback version), here’s a sneak peek at the introduction, to whet your appetite. In the meantime, check in regularly for more updates on the exciting launch plans we have in the works. Santeï!

A tumultuous past – charting the history of brewing in Brussels through its vanished breweries

Number 10 on Brussels’ Grand Place has a good claim to being the heart of brewing in Brussels. The building, after all, is called the Maison des Brasseurs and it is home to the Belgian brewers federation, a dinky little beer museum, and once housed a working brewery in its cellars. It’s a ruse though; the brewers only moved in as late as 1951. To find the real heart and soul of brewing in the city you need to go in search of the River Senne. 

There is still one place in the centre of Brussels where you can find the river. On Place St Gery, behind a forbidding metal gate is a small courtyard. At the base of the courtyard a lugubrious stream has cut out a small rectangle in between the surrounding buildings. This is the Senne, a pathetic sight now, but this stream is central to the story of brewing in Brussels. It was here that Brussels’ medieval brewing tradition emerged, as breweries crowded around the river, siphoning its water to clean their breweries and using it to send beer to the outside world. 

In the 19th century, when its occupants had soiled the river beyond repair, these breweries migrated to the rest of the city to build brewing dynasties that came to dominate Brussels. Throughout a tumultuous 20th century, they always returned to the source for inspiration. As brewing returns to Brussels after a too-long absence, it is worth looking back at this history to understand why brewing in Brussels looks the way it does in 2018.

A Guilded Age

Guilds and powerful brewing families dominated brewing in Brussels until the early 19th century. In early modern Brussels, beer was sold out of the back of the brewery, and beers were named for the amount they cost or the colour – Braspenning, Roetbier, Waeghbaert. Napoleon disbanded the guilds in the early 1800s, but it took a surging population – which grew from 100,000 in 1830 to 180,000 in 1875 – for new breweries to emerge. 

By the 1870s centrifugal forces – overpopulation, pollution, and monumental public works that buried the Senne and reshaped completely inner city Brussels – were pushing breweries out of St Gery to the west of the city. More ambitious brewers looked further afield to the outer boroughs of Molenbeek, Anderlecht, Forest and Koekelberg where land was plentiful and transport connections much better. 

By 1900 the city was entering a brewing golden age. The number of breweries had doubled, production began shifting from traditional lambic to bottom-fermented lager beers, and national brands began to emerge. Then came the one-two punch of successive world wars. The Great War erased half of Belgium’s breweries, and Brussels did not escape the carnage. Breweries that survived post-Armistice Day emerged into an industry split into industrial giants – this was the era of Wielemans Ceuppens, Vandenheuvel, Leopold, and others – and a declining artisanal tradition. 

Enter Schlitz, Watneys and Heineken

What the First World War started, the Second World War accelerated. Post-1945 consolidation was the order of the day, as big breweries swallowed up smaller ones; more than thirty breweries closed down between 1950 and 1960. Once the city’s breweries had devoured themselves, outsiders moved in to buy up what was left – first Artois and Haacht, and later Heineken, Watneys, and Schlitz.

Even in these dark days brewers still returned to their ancestral neighbourhood, trading gossip and beer over rickety wooden tables in the cafes close to St Gery that now stood where the Senne once ran. But their time was nearing its end. When the lights went out at Wielemans Ceuppens – the largest brewery in Europe when it was built in the 1930s – in September 1988 the era of Brussels as a reference point for Belgian brewing was done. Only one brewery survived the killing fields of the 1970s and 1980s: Brasserie Cantillon.

Cantillon remained alone as a commercial brewery for nearly two decades, aside from a misadventure at a brewpub in Uccle in the early 2000s. It was not until Brasserie de la Senne opened their brewery in Molenbeek in 2010 that Cantillon had company. The River Senne was there again, in de la Senne’s name and branding. In the intervening eight years a trickle became a veritable flood, as new breweries – L’Ermitage, En Stoemelings, Brussels Beer Project, and others – have opened, often sticking close to Brussels’ traditional brewing neighbourhoods on either side of the canal. 

Brussels in 2018 is alive with beer, and even St Gery is getting in on the act. The city’s old stock market building, one street over from the St Gery market hall, will be transformed into the “Belgian Beer Temple” to tell the story of Belgian beer. A small brewing kit has even been installed in the St Gery market, brewing beer there for the first time in at least seventy years. 

To understand how Brussels got here, you need to understand the rich history of 150 years of brewing history, through the breweries that made it. And that is what this book sets out to do, telling the stories of the breweries that have defined Brussels – from the family businesses to the industrial giants, the local craftsmen and the foreign interlopers, the characters, the beers, and everything in between.