A History of Brussels Beer in 50 Objects // #12 Bierkruk, 1765

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Object #12 - Bierkruk, 1765

18th century

City Life

As 1799 ticked over into 1800, Brussels was stepping out from the old world and into a new one. The ancièn regime of the Austrian Hapsburgs had been swept away by a whirlwind of revolutionary troops from France. The Zenne river, on the banks of which Bruocsella was born 800 years previously, was no longer all-powerful. Its marshy floodplain was drained and put to productive use, sowed with crops and set aside as drying fields for the tanners and cloth merchants.

Centuries of tinkering with the river’s flow and course had resulted in a patchwork inner city of islands and bridges, with mills built on the river’s edge to harness its meagre energy. Already by mid-millennium the river was usurped as Brussels’ connection to the outside world by the digging of a canal to Willebroek, stretching from the city’s fish market to the outer reaches of Antwerp and eventually to the lucrative maritime trade on the North Sea coast.

Even before French troops entered the city in 1795 Brussels’ political power was at a low ebb, it apogee as the imperial capital of Charles V’s globe spanning empire long past. The Coudenberg palace, where Keizer Karel abdicated in 1556, was reduced to an ashy ruin in 1731. Charles’ Spanish inheritors had also vanished, ceding Brussels to their Austrian Hapsburg cousins and ushering in a short century of enlightened absolutist rule directed remotely from the Hofburg in Vienna.

Brussels remained beholden to the demands of its sclerotic artisan guilds, constantly fighting the attempts by Austrian governors to introduce modernising economic reforms. The city remained an important transit point on regional trade routes, for example receiving wine from France to the west, and shipping it on eastward to The Netherlands and Germany to the east.

Lace and porcelain makers continued to ply their wares with the favour of the court, alongside more everyday activities like brewing, tanning, textiles, soapmaking, sugar and salt refineries, paper factories clogging the city streets and fouling the Zenne. Turn of the century beer drinkers in the Heideken or any other of the city’s many taverns and cabarets would have been intimately familiar with the output of the latter. Just like Charles himself, who gave pride of place to his four-handled beer mug, the earthenware tankard was the drinking vessel of choice for the Bruxellois. Brussels’ faïence factories concentrated on the production of utilitarian ceramics for an emerging bourgeois clientèle.

Some, like this 1765 bierkruk, were brightly-couloured with floral motifs. Others featured pastoral drinking scenes, and yet more were more sober, more Teutonic in their design.

There would be more political upheaval to come, as the end of the Napoleonic Wars 15 years into the new 19th century brought Brussels under the control of a new set of sober Dutch sovereigns. Presumably they too, like their predecessors, were ready with their own ceramic beer mugs, eager to fill them with Lambic, Faro, Uytzet, Peeterman, Hoegaerds, Diestse, and whatever other beers Brussels’ 19th century taverns were ready to provide.