Announcing Brussels Beer City's 5th Birthday Collaboration Beers
Brussels Beer City turns five this weekend. We’re celebrating with a small festival with some friends - BierCult.
To mark both the blog’s fifth birthday and the opening of the BierCult Festival on July 14, Brussels Beer City has teamed up with five Brussels breweries and five people from Brussels’ beer community to brew five different collaboration beers. Find out more about the release event here.
The five people I’ve chosen to collaborate with are just a small sample of the people I’ve met and worked with over the five years of Brussels Beer City’s existence - friends and colleagues who have helped me along in my journey, or whose own stories I’ve featured in the pages of Brussels Beer City - brewers, activists, writers, and people who i would like to think are just good friends.
Each person got to pair up with the brewery they wanted to work with most, and what a line-up - we’ve got Brussels’ oldest non-Lambic brewery alongside one of the city’s youngest breweries that is barely open a couple of months. In between we’ve got breweries that, like Brussels Beer City, are also celebrating their 5th birthday this year, and together we’ve managed to produce a cross-section of different beers and beer styles that are illustrative of the diverse beer scene Brussels now has.
All the beers will be launched at the BierCult opening night event at Mazette in central Brussels on Thursday 14 July. They will then be available in tap rooms and bottle shops across the city (with one notable exception).
Santeï!
Brasserie de la Senne x Hélène Spitaels: Summer Crush
Nanobrasserie L’Ermitage x Colleen Rakowski: Brotherly Love
La Source Beer Co. x Rich Soriano: Hill of Tears
Brasserie de la Mule x Cédric Dautinger: Vienna Lager
Mazette Brussels x Yannick Schandené: Suur de Bruxelles, fleur de sureau edition
Brasserie de la Senne x Helène Spitaels: Summer Crush
As with everyone in the Brussels beer scene, Brasserie de la Senne and its founders Bernard Leboucq and Yvan De Baets have played an outsized influence on my beer and brewing “education”. I’ve previously written elsewhere about my love of their flagship Zinnebir, and 20 years after the first Zinnebir was bottled, the brewery continues to have a strong - and deserved - influence on Brussels’ beer trajectory. And I’m not alone in my reverence for de la Senne. Hélène Spitaels is a beer sommelier and brewery tour guide - as well as the author of one of the most-read articles in the history of Brussels Beer City.
For her beer, the choice was clear. “This is my second career. I am convinced that I would not be in this sector if I had not crossed paths more than 10 years ago with Bernard and Yvan,” Hélène says. “So it was an obvious choice for me to brew at Brasserie de la Senne. This beer is going to be a refreshing, light, not too bitter yet very De la Senne beer. Perfect for the summer. Enjoy it!” The beer of which she speaks is Summer Crush, a 3.5% Summer Session Ale, with oats and rye in the malt bill alongside floral and fragrant German noble hops.
Nanobrasserie L’Ermitage x Colleen Rakowski: Brotherly Love
L'Ermitage were one of the first breweries ever to feature on Brussels Beer City, when they announced the opening of their brewery in an abandoned cigarette factory in Anderlecht in 2017. In the interim five years, they've managed to cram the brewery and tap room full with an ever-increasing number of barrels, while expanding from their home to additional locations in St Gilles (a bar) and to just around the corner in Anderlecht (a wine shop). L'Ermitage's tap room has become a regular post-shift haunt for workers at Brasserie Cantillon, and their wine shop is directly across the street from the Lambic brewery. An easy commute for Cantillon's Colleen Rakowsi when it came to our collaboration. Colleen featured in Brussels Beer City’s series of articles for International Women's Day in 2020, and has worked at Cantillon for four years.
Our initial conversations with Nacim Menu from L'Ermitage revealed the brewery had two special barrels ageing in the back room of the wine shop. They were blond beers made with barley spelt and rye, and fermented with the ‘Philly Sour’ yeast strain in stainless steel. The beers were then aged for a year in separate Pinot Noir barrels from Burgundy, one of which also still contained wine lees. Brotherly Love is a perfect marriage, Colleen thought, of her Philly roots and Brussels history.
"Coming from just outside of Philly, I have a special place in my heart for the city and the beer scene there. Working in the Philly area beer scene brought me some of the greatest friendships and beer," she says. "The yeast used in this was developed in Philadelphia and it was so interesting to bring the two cities I love, Philly and Brussels, together."
La Source Beer Co. x Rich Soriano: Hill of Tears
If you've come to Brussels to experience the drinks and culture of the Zenne valley's Lambic brewers and you've not had a chance to share a beer with Rich Soriano, then you've missed out. I have spent an untold number of enjoyable hours in Rich's company, sometimes in dingy Brussels cafés, and other times in out of the way or unusual Lambic cafés dotted around the payottenland. Warning - a day of drinking with Rich might land you asleep in the back seat of a car, a little the worse for wear.
But for Rich's beer, we eschewed Lambic in favour of something a little closer to his American heritage. Teaming up with Mathieu Huygens of La Source Beer Co., Hill of Tears is an American IPA named for one of the oldest original Brussels settlements. It is, the brewery says, "a perfect cross-over between East Coast and West Coast" comprising a 100% barley malt bill and is fermented with fruity English yeast. In a nod to Rich's roots near the US-Mexican border, Hill of Tears is generously hopped with Talus, a daughter of Neomexicanus hops found growing wild in the dry mountain regions of New Mexico.
Brasserie de la Mule x Cédric Dautinger: Vienna Lager
It's a subject I've written about on Brussels Beer City at length, even stretching it out into a short monograph: the historical popularity in 19th and 20th century Brussels of German brewing and beer traditions. What I didn’t expect - few people did, I think - was that a brewery would open in Brussels in 2021 with a similar fixation on bottom-fermented beers from Brussels’ eastern neighbour. But that’s just what ex-de la Senne brewer Joël Galy did with a friend, opening Brasserie de la Mule in a disused tram shed in Schaarbeek. Galy does not live in Schaarbeek, but Cédric Dautinger does, and so his choice of brewery to collaborate with was an obvious one. Dautinger has been one of the pioneers of online beer reporting in Belgium over the past decade, through his platform Beer.be and his regular appearances on local radio.
While not (yet) featuring on the pages of Brussels Beer City, Cédric is contributing to the BierCult festivities, with back-to-back beer tastings on beer history on 16 and 17 July. "My first step for the Brussels Beer City collaboration was to choose a brewery,” Cédric says, “and as a proud ‘Schaerbeekois’, I did not hesitate to pick Brasserie de la Mule. Their focus on making classical German styles with a twist sounded perfect as well, because I have Austrian roots. Thus... we decided to do a Vienna Lager!" Brewed with a malt bill comprising 75% Vienna malt and 25% pilsner, the beer was made with a single decoction, and hopped with German Hallertau Blanc, and Saaz hops.
Mazette x Yannick Schandené: Suur de Bruxelles fleur de sureau edition
Yannick Schandené was the very first person to hire me to do a talk and a tasting on Brussels beer. Brussels beer history, in fact, at the first incarnation of Fermenthings - a project centred around everything related to fermentation and founded by Yannick, which has since moved location from the small shop in Jette at which I gave a powerpoint talk on Brussels beer history in 2018. Now, Yannick and Fermenthings are based at Be-Here in Laken, where the shop is stacked with books on koji, cider, pickling, and everything in between. Much more than a shop, however, Yannick has imagined Fermenthings as a fermentation lab and workshop space (as well as catering service).
When I first approached him about a birthday beer, his immediate choice of brewery to collaborate with was Mazette - which was slightly complicated, because in January 2022 they had not even brewed their first batch of beer. Mazette is a cooperative café-brewery based in Brussels’ Marollen neighbourhood and open since May, brewing solely for on-site consumption and with a focus on local ingredients.
For the Brussels Beer City birthday collaboration, Yannick and the brewers at Mazette have taken the brewery’s 5.6% Suur de Bruxelles wheat beer - fermented with the same sourdough started they use for the café’s in-house bakery, and made with Belgian grains and hops from Wallonia - and added elderflowers foraged in Anderlecht.
Mazette does not package their beers (hence the lack of label), so this edition of Suur de Bruxelles will only be available to drink at Mazette.