In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…
By Marcel Krueger:
I love beer. This may sound shallow, but I guess every one of us has one of those "Save the Earth, it is the only planet with ...." items. For some it might be chocolate, for others avocados or Polish pierogi. Mine is beer, all types and colours, preferably not mass-produced. So it might not come as a surprise that I have visited the European beer nation par excellence, Belgium, often and with immense pleasure.
When it comes to brewing and culture around beer, there is no place like the slightly surrealist multinational Kingdom of Belgium with its three official languages and distinct Flemish and Wallonia identities. This small country of 11 million inhabitants and a size of 30,000 square kilometres has around 230 breweries that produce an impressive array of different beers including pale lager and ales, amber ales, lambic beers, pilsner, Trappist beers, bock, wheat beers, porters and stouts. Each brewery, often in operation for hundreds of years, comes with a distinct labelling and its own glass for the beer, like the gnomes on the labels of Brasserie d'Achouffe in the Ardennes, the distinct Art Deco lettering of the Rodenbach Brewery in Flanders and the strange small wooden gallows for the round-bottomed, hourglass-shaped receptacles for the Kwak ale brewed by the Bosteels Brewery near Brussels. On average, Belgians drink 84 liters of beer each year, which is shockingly down from around 200 liters per capita in 1900. Maybe the water quality has improved in the last 120 years. And that Belgium's other nutritional staples include artisan chocolate and the best chips in Europe I shall only mention in passing here.
Fittingly, when living in Cologne, my wife and I lived in the Belgian Quarter, a lovely though gentrified neighbourhood with many 19th Gründerzeit houses lining the leafy streets and a cafe or restaurant never far. Just around the corner from our house was (and still is) the small cornership named Brunne vun Kölle (literally the ‘Fountain of Cologne’) which stocked many rare and delicious Belgian beers, especially my favourite type, the dark and sweet dubbel Trappist ale - which is these days also brewed by places not associated with the Order of Reformed Cistercians of Our Lady of La Trappe, as the Trappist order is officially called. So, after a long and exhausting day in the home office, I would often use the opportunity to stretch my legs on the approximately 450 meters that separated my house from the Brunne, and return with two or three bottles of Westmalle Dubbel or Waterloo Double Dark, brewed near Napoleon's last battlefield and with three sabre-wielding British dragoons on the label, for an appropriate apéro. It is a bit sad that, despite the excellent beers available in Ireland where I now live, Belgian beers are hard to come by here in Dundalk. Our only well-stocked independent off license closed at the end of 2018, and the only other place in town that sells Belgian beers is my local pub, the Spirit Store by the harbour - which these days is also sadly closed due to a certain global pandemic.
A fine beer deserves a fine establishment to drink it in. While the Spirit Store is surely one of those and just around the corner from my house, right now I cannot imagine anything more pleasant than a nice Belgian alehouse to drink my Belgian ales in. I have two contestants for this. One is the Café Vlissinghe in Bruges, a tavern from 1515 that is still open to this day and with its dark wooden ceiling, bullseye window panes and massive, 17th-century fireplace is the perfect place to sit in an order a dark and sweet beer on a cold and rainy day. It can truly feel as if either D'Artgnan and Aramis or Capitan Alatriste will be entering the tavern any minute, shake off the Flanders rain from their coats and plunk their booted feet down in front to the fire.
The other, and for the sake of this piece the one I will have my drink in today, is La Fleur en Papier doré or Het Goudblommeke van Papier. This lovely small bar, of which the name translates to The Flower made from Gold Foil, is a fittingly dark and quiet place to have a beer in peace, despite its appearance on Tripadvisor (4.5 out of 5 stars) and Lonely Planet. It sits on the slightly sloping Rue des Alexiens, halfway between Brussels Midi station and the Grand Place in the center of Brussels, a street that used to run along the medieval city wall and the Droogeheergracht dry ditch, but of that medieval glory nothing remains today. The buildings here are all 1980s and 90s concrete and glass, so the pub building with its dark wooden window frames and floral metal ornaments on the facade already stands out. Once you enter, past a sign that reads ‘Ceci n’est pas un musée’, this is not a museum, you enter two dark and crammed rooms filled with chintz, framed and bleached-out black-and-white photographs, Art Deco graffiti on the walls.
There are simple wooden tables and chairs abraded by thousands of behinds over the years on the tiled floor, and that perfect pub smell of decades of spilled beer mixing with cleaning detergents and dishwater and a slight undertone of cigarette smoke, even though no one smoked in here for twenty years, fills the air. But when you observe the photographs and images on the walls closer, you'll see that these are not only the stereotypical things you might find in any old pub across Europe like pictures of long-dead soldiers, framed proverbs or small flags, no, some of the slogans seem to have been drawn on the walls on purpose and some of the images portray the bar and former patrons. This is because La Fleur en Papier doré was one of the main hangouts of the surrealist artist movement of the 1920s. World-famous painter René Magritte used to drink here, as did composer André Souris and poet Louis Scutenaire. Other former patrons include cartoonist Hergé (who allegedly loved sweet gueuze beer) and Belgian chanson crooner Jacques Brel, and all left the mark on the place, in ink or spirit. There is a slightly more bright backroom in a more modern annexe with framed cartoons on the wall, and a small theatre space on the first floor. La Fleur to this day contributes to the creative scene of Brussels.
But I'm not here for theatre. Instead I will firmly and comfortably wiggle my behind into one of the old chairs of this lovely anachronism that is really not an anachronism at all, and order a cold and dark Westmalle Dubbel, brought to my table in its trademark chalice and with plenty of delicious foam. If the barkeep asks before if I want the 'yeast in' that has accumulated at the bottom of the bottle I'll answer yes, and might even order one of the staples of Belgium bar food, spaghetti Bolognese (I really couldn't explain why this dish has become so popular in bars here, so you better not ask).
I'll take a sip, smack my lips and lean back.
***
Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.
