Brussels Beer City Podcast Brussels Beer City

This is the Brussels Beer City Podcast.

This edition of the podcast is a brief interruption to our regular broadcast schedule, as we’re not talking diaspora bars this time around. Don’t worry though, normal servicel will resume soon.

Instead, this episode is a one-off, about a very particular kind of beer that’s just about to be launched in Brussels. To mark the launch of Brussels Beer Project’s Dansaert Gueuze, I sat down with five of the people involved in making this landmark beer.

Why is it a landmark beer? Well, to get the full story, you’ll have to listen to our conversation, which took place a few weeks ago in the cellars under BBP’s Dansaert brewery in central Brussels. But suffice it to say this much by way of introduction. Lambic is Brussels’ indigenous beer tradition, and having dominated Brussels’ brewing scene 120 years ago, by the beginning of the 21st century Brasserie Cantillon stood alone as the city’s only Lambic brewer. Until BBP announced their Dansaert Lambic programme and released their first blends in December 2021. For the intervening two years, Cantillon could continue to claim their place as the city’s only remaining Gueuze producer - Gueuze being a blend of variously-aged Lambics. And now, with the launch of BBP’s Dansaert Gueuze, there are two.

But as I said, I’ll let the brewers explain it all.

It’s an episode for the beer nerds among you, and it’ a little longer than the usual format. But even if your knowledge of Lambic beer and brewing is barely skin-deep, I think you’ll find something interesting in the story behind Brussels Beer Project’s Dansaert Gueuze.

So here’s me talking to Tiago Falcone, David Santos, Jordan Keeper, Sam Fleet, and Dimirti Van Roy of Brussels Beer Project. I hope you enjoy it.

Click here to read the accompanying article.

This is the Brussels Beer City Podcast Diaspora Season: Chapter 3 - Ciao, Belga!

For almost 150 years, Italians who’ve travelled north to Brussels in search of work and better life, have been feeding the appetites and slaking the thirsts of the city’s residents.

Brussels’ Italian quarter - in the tangle of streets between the botanical gardens and North station - may have long since disappeared, but the community has made a signifcant and lasting mark on Brussels’ culinary world. And, as new arrivals from Il Bel Paese keep making their transalpine migration, what an “Italian” café in Brussels is keeps evolving.

Click here to read the accompanying article.

This is the Brussels Beer City Podcast Diaspora Season: Chapter 2 - Big Trouble in Little Kortrijk?

For almost 40 years a small corner of central Brussels - comprising the Antoine Dansaertstraat, the Vlaamsesteenweg (the “Flemish Carriageway”) and the perpendicular streets that criss-cross them - with its bars and shops and cultural lodestones, has been a linguistic enclave for the city’s Dutch-speaking “diaspora”.

But the forces that made this neighbourhood a creative centre of Flemish life in Brussels look to be waning, and the Dansaertwijk’s grip on Brussels’ Dutch-speaking imagination might be loosening.

Click here to read the accompanying article.

This is the Brussels Beer City Podcast Diaspora Season: Chapter 1 - Ireland’s Unofficial Embassies.

The centrality of the pub to Irish social life - and by extension, the pint too - may be clichéd, but it’s not any less true. In fact, it might even be more true for Ireland’s emigrants.

In Brussels, though it may not hold the global allure it once did, the Irish pub remains a fixture of the Irish emigrant experience. Everyone’s got their favourite pub, and their own pub stories. Including the Irish ambassador.

Click here to read the accompanying article.

The Brussels Beer City Podcast: Diaspora Season is about Brussels’ immigrant communities and the places they love to drink.

From ice cold Sagres with piglet sandwiches and pintjes in bruine kroegen, to creamy pints, fried plantains, and more, the podcast will explore the drinking cultures of just a small slice of Brussels’ diaspora communities.

Read about the project here.

The Brussels Beer City Podcast: Diaspora Season is about Brussels’ immigrant communities and the places they love to drink. 

From ice cold Sagres with piglet sandwiches and pintjes in bruine kroegen, to creamy pints, fried plantains, and more, the podcast will explore the drinking cultures of just a small slice of Brussels’ diaspora communities.

75% of Brussels’ population have foreign roots, and the city has long exerted a strong gravitational pull on new arrivals to Belgium. In the white heat of the industrial revolution, Flemish farm labourers were lured to the city with promises of factory jobs. 

Later, their 20th century successors came from the southern mediterranean and Anatolia to build motorways and metrolines. They were followed in turn by bureaucrats populating Brussels’ European quarter, and the descendants of colonial central Africa seeking refuge from civil war. 

Each wave of new arrivals has also brought with it new kinds of places to drink - Asturian cantinas, Roman trattorias, Turkish Pide places, Irish pubs, and Congolese ngandas - to name just a few.

Over the course of this new season, and in a series of accompanying articles at beercity.brussels, the Brussels Beer City Podcast will dig into the stories of these community spaces, and talk about how a city’s drinking culture is more than just the sum of its breweries and craft beer bars. 

In the company of the people that know them best, the podcast will explore how these places came to be, how they’ve adapted as Brussels has changed, and what place they still have as the city’s demographics continue to evolve, and new communities are constantly added to the mix. 

The Brussels Beer City Podcast: Diaspora season, launching on all good podcast platforms July 7.

HOLD ON A SECOND, this isn’t the podcast you’re used to listening to, you’re probably thinking. And it’s not - it’s a wee trailer for our sister podcast, Cabin Fever, which has cooked up something special to celebrate a very peculiar Christmas.

Have a listen…

Didn’t Eoghan say the podcast was done when lockdown ended in the summer? Well, yes, I did, because I expected - or at least hoped - that there wouldn’t be a second lockdown.

But here we are.

And while Lockdown 1.0 gave us the Cabin Fever Podcast.

Lockdown 2.0 is going one better and giving us the Cabin Fever Belgian Christmas Bonanza - a livestreamed evening on Thursday December 3rd, where we can celebrate the holidays  together while enjoying a drink-along of a selection of Belgian Christmas beers!

In the company of some of the world's beer beer writers (and drinkers), we'll drink 4 beers, play Christmas-themed quizzes, sing carols, maybe some prize giveaways, and whatever else happens on an evening spent drinking 10%+ beers.

I’m delighted to have teamed up with London’s Hop Burns and Black, and Belgium’s Etre Gourmet on tasting packs for the event. In each of these we’ve put some superb Belgian Christmas beers, including these classics: 

St.Bernardus Christmas Ale

De Dolle Brouwers Stille Nacht

Brouwerij De Ranke Pere Noel

If you order with Etre Gourmet your 4th beer will be Brasserie de la Senne's Winter Mess

And if you order from Hop Burns and Black your 4th beer will be Anspach & Hobday's The Pfeffernüsse Stout

And if you can't get hold of them, get something local and independently-brewed wherever you find yourself!

We’ll be live on YouTube on December 3, so be sure to join. You can find the link to the youtube stream in the show notes, and more details will be coming across Brussels Beer City’s twitter, facebook and instagram.

So, stay tuned and see you on December 3rd!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LddGvzbexLg