Women of Brussels Beer // Emily Keeler, Brussels Beer Project
For the month of March, Brussels Beer City is celebrating and amplifying the voices of women work in beer in Brussels. From brewers to businesses owners, sales people and beer educators, each week we will highlight leading women in the sector - their stories, their views, and their experience as members of the city’s close-knit beer community. Today, for the final article in the series, it’s the turn of Emily Keeler of Brussels Beer Project
Emily Keeler has a confession to make. For a Canadian who completed her brewing apprenticeship in the breweries of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, it might be no big deal. But for someone who’s been working in Belgian beer for almost two years, it’s not an admission she divulges easily. “I’m not a huge fan of the Belgian style [of brewing, especially] when it comes to the trappists. Too heavy, too sweet for me. I massively appreciate the tradition of it, but I'm still trying to get used to the taste!”
Keeler has been a fundamental part of the new team hired to run Brussels Beer Project’s (BBP) brand new brewery at Port Sud in Anderlecht, a team which since she arrived in November 2021 has barely had chance to take a breather as they worked to get the brewery up to speed and bring all of BBP’s beer in-house for the first time in the business’s history. So she probably deserves some slack, with travel into the country’s beer culture limited until recently by long shifts at the brewery. Which is, for her, a pity, because it was travel that got her into beer and brewing in the first place.
From Nova Scotia to London, and back again
It was during her undergraduate studies at the University of Acadia in the Nova Scotian town of Wolfsville when Keeler first began to take an interest in beer. In between studying for a degree in psychology with a minor in music - before beer, she was seriously considering a career in music therapy - she would trawl the international section of the town’s beer shops, looking for something different to drink. By the time Keeler graduated, her interest in beer had grown to the point where she thought it might be worthwhile taking a course to see if this spark of interest had the potential to be more than just a hobby. At the same time she was mulling this over her brother was living and studying in London, which was, coincidentally, home to the Institute of Brewers and Distillers (IBD) - which happened to run training courses for aspirant and newly-employed brewers. Keeler packed her bags, flew back across the Atlantic, and took up residence in her brother’s kitchen. “I think it was mostly an excuse to travel,” she says of her decision to swap Canada for England.
Most of her classmates at the IBD were already working in the industry, but Keeler was unfazed. “I was open to learning pretty much anything. I can't even remember if I had done any reading or any research before I went into it, but it seemed pretty intuitive. I didn't find it super difficult.” Classes were every couple of weeks, and in between she was obliged to undertake a work placement at a brewery - in her case The Bull near her brother’s apartment in Archway - and spent the rest of the time travelling across London in search of new beers and breweries. It was 2014, and craft beer in London was booming - The Kernel, Camden Town, and Beavertown were all on Keeler’s itinerary.
Before she had left for London, Keeler had pestered a local brewery back in Nova Scotia to commit to taking her on in an entry-level position if she passed the IBD course. So when she returned to Canada a job was waiting for her working in the cellar of Paddy’s brewpub in Wolfsville. 18 months later she was gone again, this time to the bright lights of big city Halifax, Nova Scotia’s capital and home to Unfiltered Brewing. It was a pivotal moment in her embryonic brewing career. “I think by then I was still looking for a lot of direction, and I felt that at Paddy’s I didn't really get a grip on the fundamentals,” Keeler says. “I thought I could come in at a different level [at Unfiltered] and get a different [brewing] foundation. And I did get that. I was able to basically come in and be at an assistant level [while] also doing most of the brewing.” It was an intense rhythm and she was progressively given more independence and autonomy in the brewhouse, but after a couple of years, Keeler began getting itchy feet again and felt it might be time for another move.
Travel bug strikes again
“I've always liked to work and I really enjoy manual labour,” she says. “[But] it's really easy to get yourself burnt out…I needed some time off, I think. But I left on good terms.” Some consultancy work followed before another stint at another, larger regional brewery. Nine Locks - also in Halifax but boasting a more automated brewhouse, better employee perks, and better pay than her previous jobs - was where Keeler mastered the piece of equipment that would eventually help secure her the move to Belgium. “We got a centrifuge, and I was trained on how to operate it…[but] I was [also] incessantly searching for jobs abroad.” she missed travel, and hoped her brewing experience would be her ticket out of Canada. “It was Covid time, too,” she says. “And I was getting a little antsy.” One of those applications landed at BBP, who were just then building out the team for their new purpose-built brewery next to Brussels’ canal. A couple of interviews, some visa wrangling and several flights later and Keeler and her partner Kaitlin arrived in Brussels in November 2021.
The transition was a difficult one, with the Covid regulations in place at the time of their arrival were tough to deal with and making it harder to find a place to live and complete the necessary bureaucratic processes. Those first early months at the brewery, as they worked round the clock to have it up and running for the beginning of 2022, left little time for her to explore the city. But still able to form some first impressions, not least in the contrasts between Brussels’ beer scene and the one back home. “I kind of thought that there would be more breweries here!” Keeler says, having left Nova Scotia that had experienced an explosion in the number of breweries since she’d graduated. “I find the drinking culture [here] really interesting too. It's so intense. Beer is everywhere. On the street. In the movie theatres. [In Canada] you can't do that. You'll get a several hundred dollar fine if you have open liquor!”
Bedding in in Brussels
At BBP she was hired as a junior brewer, before switching to manage getting their centrifuge bedded in and spending time in the brewhouse and on the packaging floor where she is now the packaging lead for the brewery. “We're definitely getting into a good groove at work,” she says, a little over a year after the first beers started being piped into the brewery’s large fermentation tanks. “It's been a lot better this past couple of months.” The multicultural make-up of BBP’s team has helped too, with many of them in the same boat when it came to getting used to living in Brussels. And now the brewery is functioning there’s been more time for her to indulge in some travel, with trips east to Cologne and south to the French alps where her brother is now living.
More time to focus on getting Kaitlin back over on a more permanent basis, as she had to return to Canada while they sorted a visa for her. “It's a long and difficult process,” Keeler says. “It's been a year now…Some people say it'll be six months, others say 15. It's kind of hard to get a grip on what's going on.” More time too to explore Belgian beer culture in her downtime, with trips to Antwerp and out into the provinces. She’s still not an avowed fan of Belgium’s big-hitting abbey beer - “a little too clovey for me!” - but closer to her new home, Keeler is the latest in a long line of foreign brewers who have fallen irredeemably for Brussels’ unorthodox local beer tradition “I love the Lambic beer here,” she says. “Love it.”