Book Review: Eoghan Walsh’s Brussels Beer City
Brussels Beer City
Eoghan Walsh
96 pages, $12
Disclosure: Eoghan met me for a lovely evening in pre-Covid Brussels a bit more than a year ago, and I follow him at his blog. He also sent me a copy of this book.
Brussels Beer City is pitched as a book about brewing history, and I suppose that’s roughly accurate. The chapters each feature a ghost of Brussels, a lost brewery sometimes visible in remaining buildings, sometimes as no more than a whisper on the lips of the aged. By the time you finish it, however, you see that was in some ways a feint.
The book is really about a city, as told from the windw of the brewhouse. In this story, villains appear in the form of architects and bureaucrats bent on scrubbing the city of character in the service of bland commerce. In one pointed example near the end, Eoghan reports the latest emblandening, highlighting what was lost in his lament.
“A down-at-heel community of poverty, lasciviousness and foreign workers was emptied and replaced by empty, windblown boulevards flanked by identikit post-war apartment blocks. Virtually all of the tenement housing, cafés, cinemas, and sex shops that gave the neighborhood life vanished in the space of a decade.”
First of all, I must observe that if Eoghan thinks Brussels is bland, I take it he’s never been to Phoenix. But leave that aside. Any other writer might see in Brussels a lively, living city in which an ancient building abuts a 60s brutalist nightmare—epochs of change and growth.
As the passage above attests, that’s not what Eoghan observes. He’s chosen breweries as a lens to refract history through a working-class viewpoint. He’s interested in side of the city people actually inhabit, where life happens in the streets and pubs. Breweries once crowded along the Senne, he writes in the first chapter, dumping enough effluent in its waters to choke it to death. This is the real heritage, the one that comes bottom up, not imposed by planners in offices. He’s writing about brewers who built empires, but even when the company at hand has become a towering industrial success, Eoghan seems to keep his eye on the “industrial” part of the story. He wants you to smell the brewery and surrounding city, smoke, wort, and all.
What emerges is a vivid sense of place. I don’t know if other Brusseleers would agree with the vision Eoghan has of the city—but that’s beside the point. The book is engaging because it has this distinctive point of view. Eoghan is Irish and moved to Belgium in 2009, where he’s lived since. The particularity of Brussels captivates him. Beyond this book, he hosts various “Brussels Beer City” ventures—the blog and a podcast, in addition to the book—all interrogating the nature of his adopted city. It’s not surprising an immigrant has taken on this task. Natives don’t always notice the idiosyncrasies of their home towns the way immigrants do.
The whole project sparks a sense of curiosity. It would be fantastic to see other writers use brewing history as a lens to describe their own home towns. Even in young Portland, a forest of fir trees in the 1840s, the ghosts whisper from as early as the 1850s. Brewing is ubiquitous. It’s earthy. But it also intersects with geography, personality, industry—everything that makes up a town. By selecting breweries, Eoghan has fitted history with a lens that reveals a city’s distinctiveness, exposing its personality along with its chronology. It’s a great way to get past what the tourist board tells you.