In 2023 Sofie Vanrafelghem published her magnum opus.
Vanrafelghem, a beer sommelier, teacher, and writer, has spent more than a decade working in and writing about Belgian beer and café culture. In that time, she was appointed an honorary Knight of the Brewer’s Paddle, named Belgium’s beer personality of the year, and served as a culinary ambassador of Flanders. She’s written beer guides and cookbooks, compendiums on the best beer cafés in Flanders, and innumerable beer-centric columns in national newspapers. Vanrafelghem wasn’t born into a beer-loving family, but with the zeal of a latter-day convert has made it her mission to preach the good word of Belgian brewing wherever she can.
In 2023 Vanrafelghem produced what—thus far, at least—is the culmination of this decade-long proselytizing: Het Groot Café Boek België (“The Great Café Book of Belgium”), an 800-page, 400-entry guide to the very best beer bars in Belgium. It is a book several years, thousands of kilometers, and one pandemic in the making, an ode as much to the people who run Belgium’s cherished beer cafés as it is to the country’s brewers. In it, Vanrafelghem surveys Belgium’s diverse contemporary bar scene, from the traditional tourist haunts of the nation’s medieval center, to industrial estate taprooms in Flanders and rural monastic hideaways; she even schlepped out to an innocuous motorway service station in deepest Wallonia, on the tip-off of a beer friend, only to discover a fully-functioning bar in the backroom serving local beer.
She has become one of Belgium’s most visible beer personalities, all the while dealing with the reality of being a high-profile woman in Belgium’s male-dominated beer community. Vanrafelghem has expended significant energy—energy, she would probably prefer to spend elsewhere—pushing back against pernicious and deeply embedded sexism in the Belgian beer industry, speaking out about the denigrating and sexist behavior she has experienced from industry peers, and advocating for more visibility for her female colleagues.
And still that wasn’t enough for her in 2023. Just as the buzz around the launch of “Het Groot Café Boek België” was subsiding, Vanrafelghem was already doing publicity for her second book of 2023—narrowing her focus to Brussels and Wallonia. Because her mission to spread the good word about Belgian beer is a lifelong endeavor.
Words,Eoghan Walsh