I'm Glad - The Session 2025
This piece is a contribution to the January 2025 edition of The Session, a monthly beer blogging project founded in 2007 by Jay Brooks.
Around the middle of the last decade, if you came across an article about the burgeoning Brussels beer scene, or a podcast interview with one of the city’s brewery owners, then you could be fairly confident that one issue would turn up over the course of the conversation or the profile piece. Where do you stand on contract brewing? Or, more specifically, on which side do you stand in Brussels on the split between those who say that you can only call your beer a Brussels beer if it’s made here, and those who argue that this mode of thinking is outdated in the contemporary beer industry. Are you on the side of the artisans or the side of the marketeers? Are you on Team de la Senne or Team Brussels Beer Project?
For those of us living in the city and seeing every day the other, more interesting storylines of a beer scene in full bloom, it got tiring to see this issue surface again and again.
What is the best thing to happen in good beer since 2018? In Brussels? We’re not having those kinds of conversations anymore.
To give some context as to why this was such a hot-button issue, here is a short and incomplete précis. In 2010 Brasserie de la Senne finally opened the Brussels brewery they had been building towards since its co-owners started homebrewing together in the early 2000s. In those interim years they had brewed de la Senne beers in other people’s brewhouses, always doing the actual brewing themselves until co-founders Yvan De Baets and Bernard Leboucq had raised enough capital and found a suitable site in Molenbeek to set up shop.
Three years later, Brussels Beer Project (BBP) launched their first “crowd-sourced” beer, called Delta and made in faraway Limburg by a brewery set up to make beer for other people. In Belgium this sort of business is called a “beer firm” or contract brewery, and there were two things in this business model that grated on owners of more orthodox breweries like de la Senne: that these people were marketers with no skin in the game - they did not invest in expensive brewing equipment, and avoided the associated financial risks - and they were claiming connections with a place their beer was not made in.
The conflict in Brussels fed into a longer-running sore in the Belgian beer world about the perceived threat these beer firms were having on the industry, and the importance of being transparent about your business model to drinkers. It came to a head in 2014 when the owners of Brasserie de la Senne and 14 other brewers wrote an open letter against the practice of contract brewing, arguing that the name of the brewery that actually made the beer should feature prominently on the label. The fight even made it to the pages of the Wall Street Journal in January 2015, with a quote from Yvan De Baets which fairly summed up the ideological division: “They don’t get their hands dirty, they don’t have pain in their backs, the only thing those guys do in a workday is sit in front of a computer.”
And so a line was drawn and factions established. Why was it such an important argument for the then-fledgling Brussels beer scene? Precisely because it was so new and so small. There were only two breweries making beer in Brussels in 2014: de la Senne and Cantillon, both of which proudly, dogmatically, on the side of the artisans. Many people who worked in the city’s small community of beer bars had close connections with both, and shared their ideological leanings on this topic and on many others. It didn’t help that both of BBP’s founders did indeed have marketing backgrounds, and roots elsewhere - compared to the born-and-bred Brusselaars on the other side of the aisle. It crystallised too in a tangible and easy-to-understand way a wider debate Brussels was having with itself at the time about the relationship between the city’s “traditional” residents - the workers and the grafters - and the gentrifiers, the out-of-towners, people with creative and social capital keen to disrupt the established order.
10 years later and Brussels’ conversation about gentrification rages on, but all the heat has been taken out of the conflict between the city's breweries. And here’s why.
For one thing, the battle against the contract brewers has basically been lost. People just don’t care, and the ones who are willing to keep fighting for transparency are cranks like me. The Brussels beer scene has changed enormously too. From those two breweries in 2010, the number increased steadily through the decade and into the 2020s, and the city now numbers over 20. This has had a couple of knock-on effects. Several of the new arrivals - breweries like La Source, for example - will have trodden the same path as BBP, brewing elsewhere and building up brand recognition before opening their own facility and taking some or all of their production in-house.
The direct influence of the city’s brewing “godfathers” (though they would hate that term, it fits because in the early days of Brussels’ brewing renaissance they were extremely supportive of new brewers coming through) has waned too as brewery owners have emerged that have not apprenticed in the de la Senne school, or have limited personal connection with that generation - not just new branches of the family tree, but whole new trunks, with their own concerns and hang-ups.
As part of this wave of new brewery openings, Brussels Beer Project opened their first production facility in 2015 with a small brewhouse and taproom on Rue Dansaert. Seven years later fulfilled their ambition of taking all production (besides their non-alcoholic range) in-house with the construction of the BBP Port Sud facility alongside the canal in Anderlecht. This has taken some of the venom out of the beef between what are now Brussels’ two largest and most visible breweries; many of the new hires who came from all over the world to work at Port Sud would have had no idea of the conflict’s existence.
And in an upending of the established order, and a reflection of the economic challenges many of the city’s breweries have faced in recent years, a good number of them are now moonlighting as contract breweries themselves. Brasserie En Stoemelings, who sublet their kit to up-and-comers before selling it in 2024, are now having their beers brewed at Brasserie de la Mule across the canal in Schaarbeek. Brasserie La Jungle are doing likewise, junking their tiny brewkit to make room for more wooden barrels, and making the beer elsewhere in town. Brasserie Illegaal in Vorst brews a whole host of different beer firms renting out their equipment, and even Brasserie de la Senne makes a beer for the 100Pap civil society group (though that is not exactly comparable as it’s a non-profit endeavour).
The hot war between Brussels’ two biggest breweries has, at least to this outsider, cooled too - though there is still a lingering resentment, not to say loathing, in some parts that will probably never dissipate fully. A first sign of this was the appearance of both BBP and Brasserie de la Senne on the same bill of the BXLBeerFest in 2017, which festival co-founder Kevin Desmet said was a non-negotiable for the beer festival. The pandemic, the effects of which were life-threatening for many of these businesses, had a role to play in ushering in this cold war era, too. Breweries were experiencing the same set of challenges - the majority of them still being reliant on sales to bars and cafés which were shut for protracted periods of social lockdown from 2020 to 2022 - and there were efforts to band together in solidarity.
That meant overcoming deeply-ingrained animosities, and the role of George Mitchell in this peace process was played by, among others, En Stoemelings’ co-founder Sam Languy. His attitude was basically (and I’m paraphrasing here) “cop the fuck on, get over yourselves, and work together because we’re all grown-ups and our livelihoods depend on it.” In May 2020, all of the city’s then-active breweries joined together to launch a "Support your local breweries" t-shirt, with a portion of the profits going to support the local hospitality industry. I think that was the first time I had ever seen BBP and Brasserie de la Senne side-by-side. It may also have been the last.
Look, I was a partisan in this war, and I picked my side early on. But that was in the first flush of my engagement with the beer world, and we all are a little rash when we’re young. I’ve since mellowed in my views, for many of the reasons outlined above. I still hate with a fiery passion the parasitical marketing companies who’ve gotten involved in beer in recent years, when beer was hot, churning out bland marketing gimmicks in search of a quick return before moving onto the next hype - something we’re already seeing as the number of Belgian beer firms declines.
I have thoughts about the business models of some of the large, export-led contract breweries that have emerged around the country in recent years, never mind their quality control standards. But in Brussels, we’re no longer talking about contract brewing the way we once did, for better or ill. It longer dominates the conversation around the craft brewery kitchen table the way it once did, and the schism it brought about has more or less become background noise. I know there are probably BBP brewers still a little timid to cross the threshold of de la Senne’s taproom at Tour & Taxis, and BBP might still be subject by some to accusations of being gentrification’s outriders. But journalists are no longer asking about the issue in interviews. Why would they; there are so much more interesting - not to say, pressing - issues to be discussed.
And for that, I’m glad.