I was a Zinnebir Man // The Session #144
This piece is a contribution to the February 2025 edition of The Session , a monthly beer blogging project founded in 2007 by Jay Brooks.
I am a Zinnebir man. That I am a Zinnebir man is well documented, mostly by me. So when it came to answering the question posed by UK writers Boak and Bailey for this month’s edition of The Session - what is the best beer I can drink at home right now? - then the logical answer, the loyal answer, would be Brasserie de la Senne’s flagship. Even if I didn’t love the beer, the brewery is only five minutes from my front door and I can be sitting on my couch with a fresh bottle within twenty. And while the first beer that came to mind when I read their prompt earlier this month was a de la Senne beer, it wasn’t Zinnebir.
You see, the thing about Zinnebir, the thing I love about it and what for me tips the scales in its favour in the debate about whether it or Taras Boulba is the Brussels brewery’s best beer, is that it has depth. A heft to it, weight and a warming goodness that is down to more than just its 5.8% alcohol content. Only, that depth does have its downsides, downsides I’m becoming more familiar with as I get older. Much as I love it, I’m worried that I’m ageing out of the Zinnebir session; where once I might have been able to schull three or four pints of the stuff on a Thursday night and survive more or less unscathed on Friday morning, such is the decline in my alcohol tolerance these days that two 330ml bottles on a Tuesday night are liable to have me rubbing my temples in regret the next morning while making breakfast for the children.
It’s not just Zinnebir; I’m going to make an admission now that might be fatal to my reputation as a beer writer: I just don’t drink that much beer anymore. Certainly not as much as I would have when I first began writing about beer. There’s a couple of reasons for this. 2024 was a difficult year for my neurological health; I experienced an increased frequency of migraines, to the point where there were weeks when I suffered multiple and overlapping attacks. Now, as any migraine sufferer will know, alcohol is right up there as a potential attack trigger (alongside stress, sleep disruption, dehydration, chocolate, and the weather). Doctors also recommend avoiding alcohol after an attack’s initial onset. With my attacks coming every couple of days and the post-headache, prodromal phase lasting several days and sapping me of much enthusiasm for anything fun, there wasn’t much room for a beer. It was not, and still isn’t, clear to me if alcohol (or the associated dehydration) is a trigger for me, but in an effort to wrest some control over my neurological health I became watchful of my consumption of anything that might spark a relapse, including beer. I’ve written elsewhere about how, over Christmas, we drank more Kombucha at home than we did beer.
But even before these troubles my beer intake had been declining. In recent years I have come to accept that my gut has become progressively less tolerant of alcohol; a significant quantity of beer will leave me nursing an inflamed colon and all the associated gastro-intestinal horrors your imagination might conjure for days afterwards. During the pandemic I became uncomfortable with the extent to which my weight had ballooned, in part as a consequence of my freelance beer writing work, and underwent an extended period of weight loss to get it back under control. Again, my beer consumption took a hit, and when we emerged out the other end of the pandemic my week night drinking never recovered its pre-Covid levels. More existentially, I reached the “jaded” era of my beer journey, having lost my early enthusiasm for trying everything that’s out there, being less likely to attend the latest midweek beer release than I am to stock the fridge with a couple of old reliables. Add to this parental exhaustion and an age-related decline in my tolerance, and the result is increasingly rare appearances of Zinnebir in the family fridge.
So if the best beer I can drink at home isn’t Zinnebir, then what is it? Not Taras Boulba anyway, always a little too austere a beer for me, and at 4.5% liable to inflict commensurate damage to my gut-brain nexus. De la Senne have always acknowledged the influence on their brewing of England’s sessionable beer tradition; most of their output flirts around the 4-5% ABV range (which amounts to sessionable in Belgium), and in recent years they’ve dabbled in lower-strength beers like 2023’s 3.9% Crush, and 3.5% Summer Crush of the year before (a collaboration beer to celebrate this website’s fifth birthday). 2024’s Druid Lager took the alcohol down another couple of notches at 2.6% ABV, but like the other beers cited it was a one-off collaboration brewed for the early summer season.
But a month after its release, the brewery announced the arrival of Petit Boulba - Taras Boulba’s lighter sibling, described as both a Table Beer and a Light Hoppy Ale, and clocking in just under 3%. Such was the beer’s success that by the end of the summer it had been incorporated into de la Senne’s permanent range. I like to think I played a very (very) small part in that. It was the perfect summer drink. Everywhere I saw it I drank it. In the tap room on Saturday lunchtimes with the kids in tow, on the tap room terrace on long July midweek evenings, big frosty pints of it from dimpled de la Senne jugs during late-night sessions at Booze ‘n Blues.
It has the same distinctively floral and herbal-bitter aroma as its bigger brother, the same light palate and lingering mineral bite. But where the stronger beer is stereophonic, adding a touch of bready sweetness and the merest hint of stone fruitiness to its citric and grassy base, Petit Boulba is the same beer in mono. Less assertive, more ephemeral, and a touch more rustic, it comes and goes quickly. It is not a beer to mull over or deconstruct; it’s a beer to order another when you’re half way down your first, to drink your glass empty before the beads of condensation make it all the way down the side. A properly pintable beer, still a rare enough beast in these parts, and the apotheosis of Brasserie de la Senne’s English obsession. Even as other Brussels breweries barrel ahead with NA versions of their flagships, this is likely the closest Brasserie de la Senne will come to a non-alcoholic beer - a more sober de la Senne for a more sober world, and the perfect summer beer for someone trying to moderate their debauchery.
2025 has, so far, not been like 2024. It was the last week of February before I experienced my first migraine of the year. My suspicion of alcohol has waned and my resolve to avoid it has slackened. There has been more beer in the house, and more beer drunk on school nights too. Not much Zinnebir, for now, but plenty of Petit Boulba - the best beer I can drink at home right now.