Eoghan Walsh - Brussels Beer City
My wife and I stand at Grand Place 10, in front of the Brewer’s House on a sunny Saturday morning in July. Around us, the tourists surround yellow umbrellas like moths to a flame, couples pose for selfies, and a drunk woman speaks loudly to herself on a nearby wooden bench. The statue of Karel van Lotharingen reigns above us. The statue is number eight in Eoghan Walsh’s The History of Brussels Beer in 50 Objects. He’s who we’re here for. Not Karel that is, but Eoghan.
As we wait for the On the Way to Brussels Beers walking tour to commence, we’ve struck up a conversation with a couple of guys from the northwest of England–Steve and Bob. The two, long time friends and beer lovers, have taken to Brussels for the weekend in search of, well, beer, and a bit of history. Bob says he’s been following the Brussels Beer City blog for sometime now, and only recently learned about the BierCult festival in which the walking tour is associated with.
My wife and I don’t know if we should expect Eoghan himself to lead the tour, but our hopes are quickly dashed when I receive a call from an unknown number, and learn the tour guide is running behind–it’s not Eoghan. Volunteering to inform the others waiting outside the Brewer’s House, it gives my wife and I a bit more time to get to know Steve and Bob. They tell us about their day prior in Bruges, as well as their visit to Cantillon to try the gueuze. We learn they, like us, have also signed up for the beer and cheese pairing following the walking tour.
When the tour guide arrives, she begins the tour by speaking on the history of Grand Place, the importance of the brewers guild. We’re then led throughout the center, stopping various relics and traces of Brussels brewing past. We stop at Le Falstaff to admire the interior; the former café Aux Armes des Brasseurs, now a Quick; and we’re given a brief history of the Wielemans and the Café Metropole.
Meandering through the crowded streets between stops, I speak with Steve about some of the spots they should hit if they’re looking to try some more contemporary beers in contrast to the history we’re learning on the tour. I tell him about some of the micro and nano breweries that have sprung up around Brussels in recent years–Surréaliste, La Source, l'Ermitage. I share some of my personal favorite must-try Belgian beers and craft beer bars. I admit I’m no expert, but Steve welcomes the opinion of a local–a title I’m hesitant to accept despite my lack of protest.
When the tour ends at the former site of Brasserie L'étoile, there’s still a good hour to kill before the pairing. Although Bob had expressed their interest in hitting the Monk Café this evening, my wife and I convince them, albeit with little objection, to grab a beer with us there before the pairing. We take a seat by the window and take turns going to the bar to order. One of the beers I’ve recommended to Steve is available in a bottle, and my recommendation is put to the test.
We sip our beers and talk about the fleeting rarity of meeting someone new out of chance, having a conversation with them, and enjoying one another’s company over a beer. I can’t think of the last time I’ve done just that. We chat about our work lives, our previous and upcoming travels, and of course beer. I also introduce Bob to Untappd, my social media guilty pleasure.
They pay for our beers, a gesture unwarranted. “We’re just happy to chat with a couple of locals who know where they’re going,” Steve says.
There’s that word again.
We finish our beers and walk the short distance to La Fruitière, where we join a small group of other BierCult festival goers. It’s there, for the first time I meet Eoghan. The encounter is brief, a short hello. I tell him it’s nice to finally meet him, and that I’ve been following Brussels Beer City now for some time.
As the pairing begins Eoghan ducks out. The day is full of events and he can’t be in two places at the same time.
Three pieces of cheese, paired with three of Eoghan’s collaboration beers–Summer Crush from Brasserie de la Senne, Brasserie de la Mule’s Vienna Lager, and Hill of Tears from La Source. Together we all put pieces of cheese in our mouths, chew them enough to release their flavors, sip our beers, and swish the two together.
- - -
Eoghan and I plan to meet at Le Coq, in the center of Brussels, not far from the Bourse. It’s a chilly Wednesday evening, and when I arrive nearly every table is full. I’ve shown up early and in doing so, I’m able to grab a table once it’s vacated. When he arrives, he’s got two phones and wears a hat matching my own. I order us a couple beers from the bar–both beers from Brasserie de la Senne–a Zinnibir for him, and a Bruxellensis for myself.
A self-described beer writer based in Brussels, originally from Ireland, Eoghan moved to Brussels in 2009 and launched the Brussels Beer City blog in July of 2017 and has been writing about Brussels and beer ever since. After completing a postgraduate degree in European studies, having always been interested in European politics, Eoghan moved, appropriately, to Brussels. He’s lived all over Brussels–in Schaerbeek, the center, and now in Koekelberg.
Brussels Beer City wasn’t the first blog Eoghan tried to get off the ground after moving to Brussels. He describes one from 2010, written during the blog-boom, as more personal. His second, Brussels Miscellany, was a blog about Brussels, which he struggled to narrow down in scope, writing posts about women in Brussels’ history and Magritte, amongst other things.
“Blogs are a bit like restaurants,” Eoghan muses, “they have a very high attrition rate. Most of them fail. Podcasts are the same. It’s very hard to keep going.”
After enrolling himself in a beer sommelier course in 2017, Eoghan jokes that he felt he had to justify the cost of the course, and thus Brussels Beer City was born. At this time, Eoghan found himself engrossed with all things beer. An avid reader, he was reading books on beer, watching numerous YouTube channels on beer, and of course, drinking beer. “Beer seemed like a good subject,” he says, “this would have been at my sort of peak interest in craft beer, or however you want to describe it.”
“Beer’s a good prism through which to look at all the other stuff,” he says. Where his first blogs had been much wider in scope, Brussels Beer City was much more focused.
When I ask him about his passion for writing he says he’s not sure if he’d call it a passion. “If I was being pretentious I’d call it a compulsion,” he says. “I do tend to get itchy if I’m not writing, but I also get itchy when I’m writing too.”
In 2017, Eoghan was also going through what he calls “a career crisis.” He was working press and communications for an NGO, writing most of the day, but as he describes, “It was interesting in 2013, it was interesting in 2014, in 2017 it was not interesting and I needed a creative outlet.”
It was at this time that the Brussels beer revival was really starting to pick up and, according to Eoghan, there was really only one other person writing about Belgian beer in English and his writing frequency was diminishing. “There was a gap in the market there, and there was a clear career trajectory, the steps, if I wanted to make a career out of it, were obvious.”
Eoghan describes the first couple months of Brussels Beer City as “terrible.” “There was a completely paralyzing fear of failure.”
“But you were just writing a blog,” I state, “what was there to be scared of?”
“That’s not how it works,” Eoghan says, “I had two blogs behind me at that point, which hadn't worked. I had a job I didn’t like. I had a 12-month old and a 2-year old at home. I was exhausted all the time. I was dealing with severe anxiety related issues at the time and it was awful. I wasn’t sure if I was going to do it until I did it, and when I did it, I didn’t think anything I was doing was any good. I still don’t.”
“But you’re wrong about that,” I tell him straight up.
“Yeah, okay, I know, but that’s not how it works.”
It wasn’t until after a year or so of writing that Eoghan began to feel like he was going somewhere. After a pair of English bloggers picked up one of Brussels Beer City’s posts for a weekly roundup, one of Eoghan’s first historical articles, he got the ego boost and the acknowledgement he had been searching for. It wasn’t long after, another of Eoghan’s historical articles was picked up by the now defunct Belgian Beer and Food magazine. Soon Eoghan was making pitches and pitching his own articles and ideas. “They were very polite rejections, the first time around,” he states, “quite rightly too.”
Soon he started to get commissioned and started to get people asking him to do things. “The idea in the beginning was an article every two weeks to give myself a deadline, because I know my own nature is [that] if i don’t have a deadline, if I don’t have a target, it’s not going to happen.” Eoghan feels now that ultimately the target of an article every two weeks was too much, “But I didn’t find that out for two years,” he laughs.
He recounts his first interview for Brussels Beer City in “Object #43 - Rue du Miroir 1” in A History of Brussels Beer in 100 Objects. The interview was with Denys Van Elewyck of Brasserie En Stoemelings, “to record En Stoemelings’ final days in the Marollen before they jumped the canal to a new, larger home in a semi-industrial complex adjacent to Tour and Taxis.” In the piece, he describes the interview as “sheepish.”
“It wasn’t very good,” he says about the interview process, “I wasn’t very good. I googled all the, you know, how to do an interview, how to be a good interviewer, and all that stuff.”
Eoghan does express that the main challenge he seems to face often is doing interviews in a second, or sometimes even third language.
Within a year and a half, Eoghan found himself published in the local Belgian media, and not long after, in November of 2018, Eoghan landed an article in The Irish Times, his country’s national newspaper. The article, entitled, “Damme, that’s good: the Irish brewer beating Belgium at its own game,” spotlighted Breandán Kearney, the Belgian Smaak podcast, and his home brewery Siphon.
“I wanted to be a professional, full-time, beer writer. I wanted to judge beer competitions. I wanted to write for people, obviously every writer wants to write a book, get published,” he says of his goals when starting Brussels Beer City. “I didn’t have a timeline on it. The sooner the better.”
“You know why children have such an easy time making friends?” M—, a mutual friend of my wife and I asked, “Because they just go up to someone and ask, ‘Can I be your friend?’ and that’s it. They don’t make what’s simple, complicated, and when it comes to rejection, there’s little or no concern–which is unlikely, even for adults.”
It's the SWAFFF Beer Festival, the first beer festival of the year, and my wife and I have invited along M— and her mother. As we spend the afternoon bouncing from tap to tap, trying beers of all varieties I can’t help but think of M—’s quip on friendship. I’ve met A—, her boyfriend, a few times, and each time we’ve connected over beer. A— has a knack for showing up for dinner parties bearing bottles or kriek, saisons, or the year’s Mega Blend gueuze; well thought out and greatly appreciated tokens of gratitude.
I knew right away we’d get along well, however, due to the relative freshness of their relationship, I don’t know if it’s appropriate to expand my friend circle by including A— in future plans without first getting M—’s blessing.
“Can I be beer friends with A—?,” I ask her with slight embarrassment.
“I’m sure he’d be okay with that,” she responds with a smile and laugh. “I’ll message him.”
I thank her. “It is not easy making friends as an adult, you know.”
“I know,” she says, pressing send on a WhatsApp message.
A little over a month later, I meet up with A— outside of Goudblommeke in Papier, one of Brussels’ oldest and most treasured cafés. As part of the BierCult Festival, Eoghan has organized a live recording of Breandán Kearney’s Belgian Smaak Podcast.
We get our tokens for a couple of Zinnebirs from Eoghan, who is manning the door, and take our seats. The lineup of guests–Yvan De Baets of Brasserie De La Senne; writer, activist, and historian, Joaquín de Santos Barbosa of Bruxelles Fabriques; and the former owner GIST café Jodi Lecieux, a place A— and I had recently been for the first time a week and a half prior–is interesting, as well as the topic: the uncertain future of Brussels’ beer cafés.
As we sip our Zinnebirs, waiting for the recording to begin, a guy around our age joins our conversation. He, P—, has just finished a postgraduate program in malting and brewing science. He tells us he’s been following Eoghan’s blog for a while, and has read both of his books. We chat briefly about Zinnebir, Belgian Smaak, and the eccentric café where the podcast is being held.
A— and I have planned to spend the rest of the day drinking. I’ve had a couple of spots in mind that I’d been wanting to hit, and A— is keen on the idea.
“Want to invite that guy along?” I ask A—, not remembering his name.
“Might as well,” A— agrees.
Our first stop is Mazette, one of the breweries that Eoghan worked with in crafting a collaborative beer for the festival. Unfortunately the beer isn’t on tap and unavailable. The three of us elect to go with a strawberry rhubarb Berliner Weisse. We talk about the craft beer revolution, AB InBev, Goose Island, and give one another book recommendations.
P— provides some scientific background on what we're drinking, why it tastes the way it does, and beer classifications. “Stop me if you already know this,” he says politely, afraid of rambling or boring his new audience with the specifics. Yet, as someone who doesn’t know much about the science behind beer and the malting and brewing process, P—’s knowledge is quite welcomed.
Of course Eoghan’s book comes up in conversation, and we chat a bit about Brasserie De La Mule, which lands at number #49 in A History of Brussels Beer in 100 Objects, and their Berliner Weisse. Neither A— nor P— have made it to De La Mule yet, despite both having tried a few of their beers.
Finishing our beers, P— is keen to continue with A— and I on our Saturday day drinking jaunt. L'Ermitage is next, hoping again to find the collaborative Brussels Beer City beer. As we navigate the streets of Marolles, nearing the ring of the pentagon, P— points out some of the architecture Eoghan wrote about in his first book, Brussels Beer City. I tell P— that my wife and I are doing a brewery architecture bike tour tomorrow as part of the festival, only to find out that P— himself has also registered for the same tour.
At L’Ermitage, we’re again disappointed not to find the Brussels Beer City collaboration. We’re 0-2 it seems for the day when it comes to collaboration beers, though admittedly, the day, however, has become less about the beers and more about the company.
I tell A— and P— that I have been in the planning stages of a writing project. A project where I write about the people in the Brussels food and beverage scene who are important to me on a personal level. I tell them I had my first interview last month and the prospective people I know I want to write about, but that I’m not sure when it will come to fruition.
“I’d love to write about Eoghan and Brussels Beer City,” I tell them, sipping my sour.
A— and I tell P— that we’re planning on meeting up with A—’s girlfriend and my wife for dinner before heading to British Beer Night at Dynamo later, but that if he’s got nothing going on he should join us. We part ways, and A— and I head to dinner.
“It’s not always easy to meet people,” I say.
At Dynamo, P— joins the four of us. He fits right in and conversation is far from taxing, but rather the contrary–natural and oddly familiar.
When the end of the night rolls around, my wife suggests A— and I swap WhatsApp info with P—.
“Maybe you guys could all grab a drink together sometime,” she prompts.
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During the pandemic Eoghan devised “A History of Brussels Beer in 50 Objects,” a weekly blog series where he wrote about the history of Brussels brewing using objects throughout the city. Using items such as a Skol bottle cap, a sketch for a Zinnebir label, a matchbox, and a pair of coolships, Eoghan recounts hundreds of years of Brussels brewing history. Where his first book was written about physical places, his second book embraced the things we fill those places with and the history that comes along with them.
The series ran for a year on Brussels Beer City from July 2021 to July of 2022 and then self-published in print form and launched at the blog’s five-year anniversary which would become the BierCult Festival. The four-day festival, touted as “A weekend of tasting, talks, and tours in locations across Brussels, celebrating Brussels, beer, and culture–art, food, history, and more,” hosted a plethora of events, from tours and tastings, to workshops on fermentation and beer releases.
In tandem with a book launch at Mazette, Eoghan also launched five birthday beers from five local breweries. “The five people I’ve chosen to collaborate with are just a small sample of the people I’ve met and worked with over the five years of Brussels Beer City’s existence - friends and colleagues who have helped me along in my journey, or whose own stories I’ve featured in the pages of Brussels Beer City - brewers, activists, writers, and people who i would like to think are just good friends,” Eoghan wrote on Brussels Beer City. Five years, five beers.
The collaboration process for the brewing started back in November of 2021, when Eoghan began reaching out to brewers he wanted to brew with. By spring, the beers were being brewed. There were photoshoots, shoveling spent grain, barrel tastings and blendings. “I only relaxed once the beer was in the fermenters,” Eoghan says, “then I knew it was going to happen.”
“It was fun,” he says about the process, “it was also, it was a way of me, in a self-aggrandizing sense, paying back the friendships that I’d built up, and also saying thank you to the breweries that had allowed me to interview them and cover them.”
“I mean, I think it’s also a way of them saying thank you to you, right?” I question, “Wouldn’t you agree?”
Eoghan hesitates, “I mean I’m sure you could look at it like that. I wouldn’t have thought of it like that.”
Some of the collaborative beers can still be found around Brussels in various bottle shops today. Eoghan says he also still has some in his basement. Others, following the festival, likely will never be available to drink again. “Maybe for the 10th anniversary we’ll do ten beers… or one beer with ten breweries,” he jokes.
In 2019 he took six month parental leave, and used this time to try and make it as the full time beer writer he aspired to become. He created a website and was starting to get work for consulting when the pandemic hit and changed everything. “I was basically, on the precipice of 2020, of not going back to work,” he tells me, “then the pandemic came along.” Eoghan says, “A steady income and a steady work/life balance overrode ideas to become a full time full time professional [writer].”
“It’s weird to say, like, five years, it’s a long time, it's a short time, depending on how you look at it,” he says, “but two of those years have been in the middle of a pandemic.”
Eoghan felt that he had to try. He had to give being a professional beer writer a shot, but says that he wasn’t so good at the administrative and financial aspect. “Grind culture is the worst aspect of modern life,” he says in regard to hustle. “Monetizing your hobby and the thing that you love, eventually becomes the thing that you hate.”
“If you want to be a professional beer writer, or in that world, you’re essentially a content creator. You have to be able to write, you have to be able to take photos that are good enough to be published online. Ideally you have to be good enough to stand in front of a camera and talk and if you can, do a podcast or some kind of audio work. You have to be on Facebook, you have to be on Twitter, you have to be on Instagram, you have to be on all those social media platforms,” he details. “You’re essentially a one-man, one-person media company.”
Eoghan doesn’t shy away from speaking on these struggles. He writes about, though admittedly in less detail than he’s shared with me, of this particular time in the opening to 50 Objects, he tweets about them on his personal twitter account, and he writes about them on Brussels Beer City:
I’m not sure if I know how to do this anymore. My head hurts. I’m eating poorly, and sleeping worse. Some days when I write it feels as if I’m typing on butter. Other days my fingers detach themselves from my nervous system and later I can’t recognise what they’ve written on the screen as my own. I’m desperately lonely. I’ve lost the ability to convince myself I enjoy my own company. I’m worn down and worn out. My neck hurts with worry and my diaphragm is warped from anxiety. I don’t know if I want to write about Brussels and beer anymore. I don’t know if I want to write anymore. I don’t know if I can write anymore. I’m terrified of failure.
I’m tired, and I’m lost.
he wrote just a week before our interview in a post titled “Lost.”
It would be a lie if I said I hadn’t seen this coming. As an avid follower of his blog, his writing, and moreso his twitter, it was clear following the festival that he had been struggling with many things, and during the interview, it’s apparent there’s the elephant in the room that is the recent ‘Lost’ post.
My first real genuine interaction with Eoghan comes the following day on the bike tour. The tour’s meeting point is in front of the MIMA, on a small pedestrian bridge that crosses the canal. As my wife and I ride up on rented yellow and silver Villos, we’re some of the first to arrive.
Eoghan recognizes me from the pairing and the podcast, as well as remembering my wife. I shake his hand and tell him it’s nice to finally meet him properly; that my wife and I are both looking forward to his tour.
I confess to him that, having only read his name online, I am unsure how to pronounce it, and thus, I’ve been simply referring to him as “Beer Guy” for the past year.
Eoghan tells us the tour will lead us up through Molenbeek, into Anderlecht, briefly into Forest, and that we should finish at the new BBP Sud.
“The ride should be pretty doable,” he says, noting our clunky Villos. “There’s only one bit of uphill that’s cobblestone that may be a bit difficult.”
Not long after, P— arrives on his bike, a model I can already tell is much more inclined to handle the route than what we’re riding.
The tour begins with a bit of history surrounding the building we are starting out in front of—the former home of Bel-Vue. Now a hotel, Eoghan recounts the history of the building as a bit of a preamble for the tour.
We continue to the area around Brussels-West Station and stop in front of the old Vandenheuvel Brewing. Eoghan explains the history surrounding the Expo ‘58 and the role Brasserie Vandenheuvel played and their Elka Pils. I snap a photo on my phone of the decaying building. VANDENH U , the building reads today.
So far the ride is fine. My wife and I are consistently at the tail end of the pack. P— rides along with us out of kindness I’m sure. As we pass through some of the busier intersections, the streets of Brussels’ outer communes don’t often feel too safe for a cyclist, let alone a group of cyclists. Eoghan’s knowledge of the city, the route, as well as knowing his unwavering support for improved bike infrastructure in Brussels makes the busy avenues and intersections feel a bit safer, even if it is in a Ratso Rizzo kind of way.
We continue through Berchem-Sainte-Agathe to the old Brasserie de la Couronne, where all brewing operations stopped in 1955. Eoghan has written about the location we are now in one of his Brussels Beer City posts entitled, “Scheming architects // A Taxonomy of Brussels Brewery Architecture,” where he writes with the intention of categorizing the architecture of rural, urban, and what he calls Usine-îlot, or factory island breweries.
We’re encouraged to catch our breath, and informed that the uphill bit with cobblestones is next. While all of the other seasoned cyclists, with their own bikes mind you, have little to no problem with the 100m stretch of washed out cobblestone and steady incline, my wife and I attempt to give it our all. After only a few meters, we decide that walking our bikes is probably best.
We cut through the open fields of Park Scheutbos, now in Anderlecht, through Park Scheutveld, and eventually arrive at the crumbling Brasserie Atlas. The large imposing, empty building, the name of the former brewery spelled out in white brick along the side. As we stop in front of the gate, it’s an opportunity to catch our breaths, and listen as Eoghan details the history he wrote about in Brussels Beer City.
“The story of Brasseries Atlas is the story of brewing in Brussels in the 20th century,” Eoghan writes in the chapter entitled “Surviving Brusselization.” He shows us pictures from an interior visit he was granted as we crowd around Eoghan’s phone. We follow his pointing finger as he instructs our eyes where to look. We laugh as we make Highlander references. The history and stories Eoghan brings with him are fascinating. Passing through the area, the building is unmissable, but the story of what was, what could be, and what would have been, is.
“That should about do it for the uphill bits,” Eoghan assures us. My wife is skeptical, as we’ve heard this line from Eoghan once or twice already on this tour. Our heavy, clunky Villos are not the most comfortable rides. “I know I’ve said that before,” he says, “but this time I’m sure.”
As we continue on our way to the next stop, Eoghan drops back from leading the path to the back, where my wife and I ride with P—. They chat about the Villos, the tour, and the history of the city.
Now a contemporary arts center, Wiels was once Brasserie Wielemans-Ceuppens. The multi-storey brewing tower, which Eoghan writes, “was the largest brewhouse in continental Europe when it was finished, housing two identical rows of four copper brewing vessels in parallel lines framed by double height glass curtain walls.” The story is an epic one. There are corporate villains, numerous players, political intrigue, and a grassroots campaign to save the building and the bruising vessels within.
The final stop on our Tour de Bruxelles is the new Brussels Beer Project Port Sud. We can see the brightly colored rainbow shed in the distance, as we ride along the canal. It’s an apropos place to end the bike tour. Having only opened a couple months prior, BBP Port Sud is perhaps Brussels' most notable addition to the brewing architectural landscape. The building's large, slanted roof covering, visible brewing vats, and concrete walls emit a sort of industrial aesthetic, yet one that doesn’t feel lifeless and bruting.
After a glass of BBP’s Grappa Lambic to quench our thirsts, we’re given a short tour of the facility. With shaky legs, we climb the stairs to the staggered platforms, peer into brewing vats, marvel at the machinery, and smell bags of stored grain. The group sits around on some wooden picnic tables enjoying the beer, and asking questions of Eoghan.
Before we head out for the day, we thank Eoghan for the tour, and apologize for lagging behind with our Villos. He’s glad we stuck it out, and so are we. I tell him how much we’ve enjoyed the events, how much I admire his work, and how much we enjoyed the stories along the way today. I’m not sure when I’ll actually see Eoghan around again, but I’m sure that with whatever's happening in Brussels beer he’ll be around.
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“I’d always wanted to do a beer and literature, like a beer and writing festival,” he tells me, “get some funding and get friends of mine from the UK, the US, and the rest of Europe to come and talk about beer.” He says as a freelancing beer writer, the financial and logistical nature of a festival like this wouldn’t have been possible. Although he does admit had he enlisted some public funding it might have been possible. Keeping logistics in mind, Eoghan chose to organize the BierCult Festival in the way he did because your traditional beer festival–a bunch of people in a space drinking beer–would have been much harder and more expensive to organize.
In all honesty though, this is why I loved the BierCult Festival as much as I did. As I sit here and type this article right now, I can think of at least ten beer or cider festivals in and around Brussels that follow this traditional style. It’s not that those festivals aren’t enjoyable, in some instances quite the contrary, but some can often come off as uninspired. To me, Brussels Beer City is the work of someone inspired to find a niche, to do something unique, and to share beer, and the love of beer and the brewing processes behind it, in a manner that piques interests, rouses imaginations, and inspires people to want to learn more. Thus, your run-of-the-mill beer festival event would never have been on-brand.
Throughout the two days of events I partook in, I learned more about the history of Brussels beer than I’d ever had before. I recount to Eoghan my personal experience with the festival, the events my wife and I went to, the fun we had together on the tours, the beers we enjoyed, and of course meeting Bob, Steve and P—. The relationships I made with them continue to this day, and will continue into the future. These are people, friends, who I wouldn't have, had it not been for Eoghan’s blog, his writing, and his festival.
Despite all this, the day following the festival Eoghan tweeted: “Let’s never do this again.” Further tweets only illuminated his growing dissatisfaction with Brussels Beer City. Some more transparent than others:
“Brussels Beer City will be quiet for a little while as I recover from the last project and think about the next one…”
“...I bought the fancy camera, and the fancy recording equipment, and maybe the writing didn’t suffer, but i certainly did…”
“Since the summer I’ve uninstalled and virtually given up on Instagram and Facebook, and am trying - unsuccessfully - to wean myself off [Twitter]. I occasionally consider reviving the podcast - because I did sort of enjoy it - but then admonish myself for such foolish thoughts”
“A month since publication and I can safely say the new book is a failure - from a sales/financial point of view at least, selling 82% fewer copies in the first month than the last book. Self-publishing is such a joy.”
Then, in early October, he posted ‘Lost’ on Brussels Beer City.
In ‘Lost,’ Eoghan writes about the festival, “It got me out of the house, forced me to go and meet friends and contacts, to be sociable. It was exhausting, and it was uncomfortable, but it was, for a time, invigorating.” He goes on further to write about the financial impact of the festival on him and again how he considers it a failure.
Although Eoghan admits the perspective of someone organizing the festival as opposed to someone who attends the festival is different, I ask him if he’s actually spoken to anyone who went to and attended as many events during the festival as I did.
“No,” he says matter-of-factly. “I probably should send a customer survey,” he says sarcastically.
For Eoghan, the festival and the sales of the book are closely tied. In many ways the festival was a way to sell books, and although he does say the book was a creative success, which it is, he also admits he ultimately has no experience in actual publishing.
“When you self-publish, it’s different,” he says. “You are the marketing department, you are the PR department, you are the writing department, you’re the agent.”
Eoghan isn’t interested anymore in being that content creator who’s full-frontal all over Instagram, plugging various brands, breweries, and products. He doesn't feel like that path is a possibility any longer. He does express his longing to restart his lockdown podcast, and tells me he’s always enjoyed taking photos.
When he started writing about Brussels beer, he wasn’t looking to create an empire, but he admits, “you start to get external validation, you win some awards, you feel a bit comfortable about it, then you hit a plateau and you have to start thinking about like…” he tails off, changing his thought, “It actually… you win those awards, you get sort of an ego boost and you think you can do anything with it, you can actually take it in the creative ways that you want to rather than writing content that you think will be interesting.”
He poses the questions, “Are you an entrepreneur or a writer? Are you an entrepreneur who writes, or are you a writer who has to be an entrepreneur to survive?”
“So,” I ask, “what are you?”
“I’m the second,” he says.
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It’s a Wednesday in September and STIB is striking. A—, P—, and myself sit outside around a wooden table in the chilly summer twilight at Brasserie De La Mule in Schaerbeek. We make our way through their German-inspired tap list: Hefe Weisse Naturtrüb, Berliner Weisse, Hopfen Weisse, Kölsch, Dunkel Weisse Naturtrüb.
We talk about work, our holidays passed, about life, and of course about beer. We talk a bit about the BierCult festival, BXL Beer Fest and BBP’s Wunderlust, sharing our favorite, and least favorite beers from each.
Although the beer festival season is coming to an end, there’s seemingly endless things to do when it comes to beer in this city. There’s Cantillon’s Zwanze Day, a worldwide release of an annual specially brewed lambic. There’s tap takeovers abound. There’s the newly opened CoHop in Etterbeek, a cooperative brewing space shared by four new breweries. There’s options, and now there’s friends to go with.
For a beer lover, this really is a beer city.
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I knew from even in the early planning stages for Bustlin’ Brussels that I wanted to write about Eoghan. His work had ultimately inspired me a lot to actually start and begin writing this series of articles, and then, to watch him slide into this despair and depressive state, following something I really truly enjoyed the hell out of, admittedly was, and is, difficult to watch. I felt, and still feel, like I need him to know how important what he is doing is–not only to me and the thousands of other readers, but for the history of this city, whether he wants to believe it or not. I want him to keep writing. I want him to be inspired. I want him to continue to organize cultural events and share this history of the city with the world. I don’t want him to give up.
But I get it.
Brussels Beer City may be silent for now, and it may be silent for a while–but that’s fine. What has been written will continue to inspire and enrich those who choose to dive into the archive.
Eoghan says he’s not hurting for ideas. The coming up with ideas part is easy. “It’s sitting down in front of your computer and doing it,” he says. “That’s the challenge, and it will always remain a challenge. The more you write, the more you read about writers, and the more you read about writing, the biggest skill you can have if you want to be a writer is endurance.”