Women of Brussels Beer // Marie Theurier, Brasserie La Jungle and La Source
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 illustrator Marie Theurier.
Like Helene Alderweireld and Morane Le Hiress before her, it took a move to Brussels for Marie Theurier to fulfil her creative ambitions and find her way into beer. Several years after moving from near Rennes in Brittany north to study in Brussels, she finds herself not only working behind the bar of one of the city’s pioneering brewery tap rooms but also designing intricate, organic-inspired artwork for the labels of one of Brussels’ newest breweries.
“I wanted to go to art school,” Theurier says by way of explanation for her move from France to Belgium. “I didn't want to stay in Rennes because I needed a change, but I didn't want to go to Paris [either].” Next on the list was Brussels, which had the twin advantage of already being home both to several of her friends and to an art school with a good reputation. La Cambre, the art school housed in the salubrious surroundings of the eponymous abbey in Brussels’ south-west, had a course on graphic design that piqued her interest. But a year after enrolling, Theurier couldn’t hack all the screen time she had to put in working on class projects on the school’s computers.
So she switched to something a little more hands-on and more analogue - gravure et image imprimée, printmaking. “Printmaking classes are really nice because you see a lot of different techniques,” Theurier says. “You can draw whatever you want and then print it the way you want it.” There might have been something about the more tactile nature of engravings and silk printing that leant itself better to the kinds of subjects Theurier was and remains drawn to in her art. “Mostly it's organics or things from nature” that she likes to illustrate - plants, dense imagined forests, agricultural produce.
Accidental networker
To make a little money on the side while she was still studying at La Cambre, Theurier started picking up shifts at the Contrebande bar, a 20 minute walk down the Elsensesteenweg on Place Fernand Cocq. Opened in 2016, Contrebande was part of a nascent trend in Brussels that was then just beginning to make its presence felt on the city’s bar scene. It put as much effort into a beer selection - featuring local breweries like Brussels Beer Project, Brasserie de La Senne, and La Source alongside national trailblazers like De Ranke and Lupulus - as it did its organic food menu, its craft coffee, and its artisanal soft drinks (i.e. Fritz Cola). It was at Contrebande where Theurier made first contact with Brussels’ beer scene. “It was a good apprenticeship, because I didn't know anything about beer” at the time, she says. “So I started to try all of the beers so I could at least recommend them to customers.” It was also a place regularly frequented by people working in some of the local breweries on tap, and became the palace where Theurier got to know brewers from La Source, L’Ermitage, and aspiring brewers Felix Damien and Christophe Bravin.
When she wasn’t working at the bar Theurier was wrapping up her studies, and when she wasn’t busy at work in La Cambre’s printworks she was flat out behind the bar at Contrebande. Until, that is, Spring 2020 and the arrival of Covid-19 in Brussels. “With Covid, they fired some of us,” Theurier says. Dealing with the practical and psychological consequences of the rolling lockdowns that followed in the wake of the pandemic were difficult enough, without having to worry about covering her rent. But Theurier needn’t have worried; her time spent inadvertently networking with the city’s new brewing generation paid off, and she soon found herself back in work. “That's when Nina [Carleer] and Mathieu [Huygens] called me to join La Source,” she says. “Okay. And at the same moment, I think I started also to make the labels for La Jungle.”
Welcome to the jungle
Brasserie La Jungle was the new brewery founded by her former drinking companions Damien and Bravin. Having brewed La Jungle’s first batches at Brasserie En Stoemelings in Laken, by the autumn of 2020 La Jungle had found a home across town in Anderlecht. Launching the brewery with a Saison and an Anglophile Golden Ale, La Jungle was preparing to launch a tart, low-alcohol bière de table in late-2020. They wanted this beer, the first in what they hoped would be a series of more niche, mixed fermentation beers, to stand apart visually from their more orthodox core range. Knowing Theurier from her time at Contrebande, and knowing she was an illustrator, they asked if she would be interested in designing the label. “It was a bit of my two careers reunited,” she says.
Her first commission from La Jungle was not one but three designs, or at least three variations on a common template. The design process with La Jungle, Theurier says, is an open one. They explained what kind of a beer it would be, what flavour characteristics it would have, and showed her one of her own illustrations and suggested they would like something in that vein, but nothing more precise than that. “They didn't have a strong idea” the first time around, she says. “They didn't really know what they wanted…for this kind of work, [that’s often] a good thing.” They were able to bat ideas back and forth, with Theurier coming up with design choices and putting them in front of the brewers for their consideration. “There’s always a discussion,” she says. The result of these discussions was the first bière de table label, featuring Theurier’s illustrations of leaves, water, and lemon rinds. Later, a raspberry-infused edition would join the range and a series of Saison Sauvage beers too - three mixed fermentation beers, each featuring a different fruit (white peach, red plums, and blood orange) and an accompanying Theurier drawing.
The artist’s hustle
As their working relationship has deepened, and Bravin and Damien have gotten more comfortable in their roles as brewers-cum-business owners, the design process has evolved in tandem. “It's becoming more precise…They want some sort of consistency” she says. “They know a bit more what they want and it's a bit more difficult for me! [But really] it 's easy to work with them - a good balance between direction and freedom.” Alongside her illustrations for La Jungle Theurier continues to work at La Source, helping to manage the bar and occasionally - very occasionally, she is keen to emphasise - helping out on a brew day. Away from the beer world, Theurier keeps herself busy producing calendars featuring illustrations of seasonal produce, gift cards, and in the future - if she can find a way of paying for it - she’d like to produce wallpaper and textiles with her designs.
She is also looking for an agent to help alleviate her of the burden of looking for illustration work while holding down two part-time jobs. “I have the time to make things, and the time to work, but I lack the time to be able to go out and find work,” she says. Hard as the grind of an artist’s life remains, there are always new beers to illustrate for La Jungle, and Theurier is settled in Brussels. “I do sometimes miss the fresh air,” she says, but there are no thoughts of quitting the city. “Not yet, anyway.”