Beer culture has evolved because of interaction. When people from different places spend time together, ideas cross-pollinate and new motivations blossom. Sometimes, that happens online, in groups or on forums. Other times, it’s face-to-face at arranged meetings. And most memorably, that interaction is the result of random encounters, unintended but unforgettable.
On a pre-COVID trip to Belgium, the head brewer at Belfast’s Boundary Brewing, Mark Shannon (pictured right), traveled to Brussels to pour at BXLBeerFest, one of the increasing number of beer festivals in the country which invite international breweries. It was Boundary’s first time pouring at a festival in Belgium.
Before returning home to Ireland, Shannon visited some breweries in Belgium’s Henegouwen province, including Brasserie de Silly, where he discussed Belgian Scotch Ale with owner Lionel Van der Haegen, and Brasserie de Blaugies, where brewer Pierre-Alex Carlier gave him a tour of the new brewhouse. Amidst the rolling hills and cobbled villages of the Henegouwen, Shannon spent a few days busting romantic myths about Belgian beer and generating a whole set of new ones.
Another Henegouwen brewery Shannon visited was Brasserie du Borinage, where he got chatting to brewer Antoine Malingret (pictured left) over a few bottles of his Boriner Weisse, a Berliner-Style Weisse dry hopped with Mandarina Bavaria and Hallertau Blanc. They compared notes on their kettle-souring techniques inside Borinage’s converted stonewall barn, which Malingret’s father once used for his farming activities.
The meeting didn’t change the way either Borinage or Boundary would run their businesses, or even how they would brew their beers. But seeing someone from a completely different place do the thing that you do, no matter how differently, can foreground the passion in them that you sometimes forget in yourself. When your eyes are mostly on your boots in the drains all day, encounters like this can help you look up.
Since that meeting, Antoine Malingret has become a father and Mark Shannon has had a second child. When the pandemic is over, they might meet on their travels again. They’ll have plenty to talk about. We all will.
