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 it’s the turn of Hélèlene Alderweireld, of Hoppyz Zythologie and Once in Brussels.

The way Hélèlene Alderweireld tells it she always wanted to be a teacher, it just took her a little time to find the right classroom. When she was growing up in a small Wallonian village, Alderweireld would help out as a teenager at the local summer camps. She had come out of university at Louvain-la-Neuve with a degree in economics and a teaching qualification, but standing at the head of a classroom full of children was never on the cards for her. “It's really tough with teenagers,” she says. Getting a job in the financial sector, she was given the opportunity to give training seminars, and even allowed her to try out teaching part-time. But it never properly scratched her pedagogical itch. It was only when a confluence of personal and professional upheavals forced her to reconsider her career options that it struck her that her growing interest in beer might actually make for a good channel for her educational instinct. 

Alderweireld spent her youth in Mariembourg, a “super quiet village” as she describes it, in the province of Namur, but she knew early on that she wanted out as soon as she could. “I was quite bored during my teenage years,” she says. “My parents were not travelling much [and] we were not going on holidays. I really like to meet people, to be near noise or movement, just to hear fife. I really need that.” Not finding that in her hometown, she moved to Brussels first for two years of university and then to Louvain-La-Neuve for another four, emerging out the other end with twin qualifications in economics and management, and teaching. She flirted with the idea of going to teach economics herself, but instead went job hunting and landed one at the first bank that interviewed her. She would stay there, working in project management, IT and other areas, for another 14 years.

Birthday beers

In 2013 Alderweireld and her then-partner were on holidays in the south of Belgium. “My ex-boyfriend was a fan of special beer, though his knowledge was not huge,” she says. But it was big enough that they usually sought out nearby breweries when they were travelling. It happened that this time they were in the vicinity of the annual opening days of Brasserie Sainte-Hélène in Florenville. If that wasn’t serendipitous enough to get Alderweireld to visit, the day of the event was also her birthday. They couldn’t not go and have a look. “That was the moment that it switched for me,” she says. “ It was a really amazing evening.” Alongside the hosts were representatives from breweries across the region, including Philippe and Catherine Minne of Brasserie de Bastogne (now Minne), and Millevertus. What struck Alderweireld most about the evening was the quality of the beers being poured or the company they kept. “We did the visit with Eddy [Pourtois, founder of the brewery], and he was just so passionate and proud of his beers, that it sparked something in me.”

More breweries and more tastings followed, as did a break-up. Looking for a new personal challenge, Alderweireld decided to enrol in an 18-month Zythologie course in Charleroi in 2017 to deepen her knowledge and expertise in what was still then her hobby. “During this training, my coup de coeur was really on the pairings,” she says. “I had never really given the idea of beer and food pairings much thought before, but during the course I was able to discover how interesting and very pleasant it could be.” If the evening in Florenville was the spark that launched her exploration of beer, this was “the flash” that set on the path down the road to becoming a beer educator. Because it wasn’t long before she was combining her newfound skills and her interest in teaching to start giving beer pairing sessions of her own. 

Burnout

With the support of one of her teachers at Charleroi, Alderweireld began picking up tasting gigs for small groups and bachelorette weekends. Beer was, for the moment, a side job for her, but one that was growing just as things were souring in her professional life. An internal transfer at the bank hadn’t delivered the job satisfaction Alderweireld had hoped for. “And then I had a burnout,” she says. “One day I just decided, “today I go home and I don't go back anymore. And I never went back. I slept for six months.”

Coming out the other end of those difficult six months, she decided he had to cut ties with the bank altogether and start thinking about what she was going to do next. Whatever it was, it was likely to feature beer, and a lifeline came from an old friend of hers she’d met during the course in Charleroi. Beer sommelier Benjamin Caubet was at the time giving a class on beer and zythology at IFCO, an institute for professional training in wine, spirits and beer in Paris. They were looking to expand their beer offer, and Caubet tapped up Alderweireld to help develop the curriculum. “It was a little bit too early because I was still coming out of my burnout,” she says, but she threw herself into the work, Caubet having delegated to her the history portions of the course. “He preferred the styles and sensory analysis. [But] I became a fan of the history, because when I started to read, I couldn’t stop.” 

The first year was complicated by the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic, but after a couple of semesters teaching via Zoom she is back in the classroom in Paris and as of this year in IFCO’s outpost in Bordeaux too. With the pandemic receding, Alderweireld’s taken on more work, shuttling between Brussels and Paris, organising the occasional tasting under her Hoppyz Zythologie banner, and acting as a brewery guide at Brasserie de la Senne. The latter has brought her into the orbit of Yvan de Baets and his team, an experience Alderweireld compares to on-the-job training. “I really enjoy it when I can go during the week, and they are brewing,” she says. “If I have a question about this or that, I can ask Yvan and he is always super open.”

Beer education

Her beer education has continued too, as both a student and a teacher. To deepen her understanding of some of the more esoteric aspects of brewing science, and help her confidence in talking about brewing to groups at de la Senne and in Paris, Alderweireld took a brewing course at the industrial biochemistry department of Brussels’ Institut Meurice in 2022. 25 years after first moving to Brussels she is now teaching here too, having convinced the EFP training centre in Uccle to put on a French-language zythology course for aspiring brewers (and sommeliers). Despite the difficulty she had in convincing them such a course was needed, Alderweireld says it’s come not a moment too soon. “So many people that start a brewery, they know how to brew but that's it,” she says. “If you want to be successful, have good marketing, then you need to have stories, and you need to know about the styles you’re brewing.”

That urge to transfer knowledge, to educate, has always been “ a small part somewhere along the road of my career,” she says. After leaving the bank and it becoming clear to her that the subject she most wanted to teach and talk about was beer, it wasn’t clear to some of her friends and family that this was a viable career path. “When I started to share that I'm going to make a living with beer education, people would say, ‘Yes, but  Hélèlene it's not possible. You cannot make a salary only with that.’,” she says.

“So I will try to prove that they are wrong. I'm not there yet, but I'm sure it's possible.”