Object #36 - Moeder Lambic Serviette

21st century

Bar Life

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In this edition of the Brussels beer New Testament, the role of John the Baptist will be played by Frenchman Jean Hummler. Now, I can already hear dissenting voices suggesting other, more appropriate figures who foretold - and helped usher in - Brussels beer renaissance. Surely, someone might say, Yvan De Baets and Bernard Leboucq have as much a claim as Hummler, given their Brasserie de la Senne opened the same year Hummler and his business partners took control of the Chez Moeder Lambic beer café. 

But go back further than 2006, all the way to the 1980s, and another candidate emerges - the man who founded the original iteration of Moeder Lambic. Joël Pêcheur opened Chez Moeder Lambic on November 5, 1983. Within three years a Brussels beer café guidebook proclaimed it as having, with an 800-beers long menu featuring beers from China, Ireland, and Zaire, “the largest choice of beers in the whole of Brabant.” Shortly afterwards Pêcheur took this template, with its comic book reading nook, beer and onion soup, and “must drink” Blanche, and opened a second branch four kilometres away in Brussels’ university district.

Pêcheur’s conception of a beer bar focused on breadth, and a mid-1980s Moeder Lambic menu might have featured Hoegaarden and Peroni alongside the likes of Anchor, Budweiser, and Guinness. Later, having left Moeder Lambic in the mid-1990s, this was a formula Pêcheur would perfect at a more central location in Brussels, when he returned to the hospitality industry in 2003 to open the Delirium Tremens bar. 

By that time Moeder Lambic had changed too, gradually shifting away from a broad industrial menu towards something more independent-spirited beers from the likes of Brouwerij De Ranke. When Hummler and his business partners Andy Mengal and Nassim Dessicy took over the lease for Moeder Lambic in 2006, they were determined to continue on this path.

Theirs was a vision of a beer bar that didn’t try to cover all the bases but instead committed itself assertively - sometimes pugnaciously - to supporting small, local, and independent breweries producing characterful, quality beers. That meant, for example, calling on Jean Van Roy of Cantillon and asking him to provide a Kriek they could serve through a traditional beer machine. And it meant standing up to the legal department of Belgian brewery Duvel when it threatened, according to Hummler in an interview with the Belgian Smaak podcast recorded in 2017, to throttle their business if they didn’t maintain the business relationship of Moeder Lambic’s previous tenants. 

It was, in the Brussels of 2006, an unproven concept. But within three years they had opened their own second outlet in central Brussels and by Moeder Lambic’s 10th anniversary it - and de la Senne - had been joined in the city by a host of new breweries and beercentric bars that shared their commitment to localism and independence. In the second decade of the 21st century, it was not Pêcheur’s iteration of Moeder Lambic but Hummler’s that formed the ideological basis of Brussels’ nascent beer revival.