Thirst // This Must Be The Place

*With apologies to David Byrne

It doesn’t look like a brewery from the outside. It doesn’t look like much at all, in fact. There’s a big black iron door, the opening hours of a local organic market scrawled in white chalk on one side. A man loiters on the footpath, two cameras hanging from his neck like albatrosses. He shifts from one foot to another, now looking down at his phone, now looking away back up the street. The door’s been jammed open a little, and through the gap slips out the unmistakable tang of pulverised grains steeping in scalding water. The neighbourhood knows this smell well. Back when these streets echoed to the braying of passing donkeys the sweet smell of mashed barley blanketed the quartier, seeping into the redbrick and plaster of tenement row houses along the neighbourhood’s disorderly grid. But it’s been sixty years or more since a Schaarbeek brewmaster picked up a mash paddle. Until now. This must be the place.

Through the door and the air is denser, thick with sugar, and hot pipes glistening with condensate wind along chipped brick walls connecting up a neat row of virginal chrome tanks. In front of all this someone - the brewer - is busy arranging stubby cans of beer into cardboard boxes. “Are you open?” “Oui, bien sûr!” Blood rushes to my ears and the practised lines of French trip unconvincingly from my mouth. “Une caisse de vingt-quatre, s’il vous plaît.” A quick tap and a beep of my card and I’m back on the footpath outside cradling my 24 cans, blood and panic leaching from my cheeks. The cans thrash about in the bike’s cabin, agitated by pockmarked asphalt and bone shaking pavé as I pedal through the noordwijk and back home over the muddy canal. 

Later, when the cans have settled, I'll take one from the fridge and take a walk to the hills above the Ganshoren marshlands. I’ll find a bench in a little pocket park, underneath glowering plattenbauten towers burnt ochre by a fading evening sun. I’ll crack the can and let yellowish foam bubble and gurgle before taking a sup and drifting away. The pathetic dribble of the Senne becomes the wide trundle of the Spree. I’m on a busy square, sheltering from the sun under a baby blue parasol. Above me a train whistles through a vaulting wrought iron canopy above and solid teutonic redbrick. Later, there’ll be dinner at the ambassador’s residence and glad-handing plenipotentiaries. For now though, all there is is lungfuls of smoky Brandenburg air. The thrum of post-work passersby. And, perspiring on the blue and white checkerboard plastic tablecloth, a frothy, half litre of burnished orange beer waiting to be drunk.

Make it up as we go along

Feet on the ground

Head in the sky

It's ok I know nothing's wrong