#67 - The Zinnebir Index

Does gentrification ride a foamy pale horse?

I’m writer Eoghan Walsh and this is my weekly free-to-subscribe Brussels Notes newsletter. This week, we’re talking midweek beers, and the strange reveries they can induce in a person who’s out of practice drinking on a Wednesday…

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This week’s newsletter was supposed to be a quiet meditation on why I associate September with death, how I came to end up in Brussels, and why the narrative I have spun about that decision is not quite correct. There is a near-finished draft sitting accusingly in my Google Drive right now to more or less that effect. I was due to finish writing it up and sanding down some of its rougher edges yesterday evening. But I ended up not doing that and instead went out and got just a little bit drunk on Zinnebir (for the record, it now only takes three Zinnebirs after 9pm to achieve this).

Midweek drinking is not something I do very often any more, thanks to parenthood and fears that alcohol could be a trigger for my chronic migraine problems of recent months. But last night I and two friends had a very good reason for going out on a Wednesday: a new bar has opened in our neighbourhood in the past month or so, a bar that does a relatively unusual thing for this corner of Brussels: it sells good, local beer. We all three live within a kilometre or two of the end of Brussels’ 2 and 6 metro lines, which terminate at the Simonis metro station in Koekelberg. Alongside the metro, the station serves as a terminus for a couple of tram lines and a good few buses, and the square above the metro terminus is busy with commuters in transit. 

But otherwise it is a bit of a dead zone; the bars that are mingled in with a Chinese restaurant, a takeaway pasta restaurant and two kebab shops, are functional places that mostly serve the early morning and later-afternoon needs of the construction workers that make up the majority of the area’s working class population. They serve reasonably cheap beer to large groups of men happy to sit outside and drink it with a cigarette after work, or with a coffee if it’s early in the morning. They aren’t places to linger, but they offer what they offer and seem to do well enough out of that without having to look beyond their formula. A little further along from the square are a couple of bars run by Albanian entrepreneurs that are popular with Koekelberg’s Romanian community (there is a Romanian delicatessen between them), and across the street from them are usually a fleet of Ukrainian-registered white vans with groups of off-the-clock men huddled around the cabin drinking cans of Romanian lager and pissing up against the trees in adjacent Parc Elisabeth.

If you want to drink a good beer, something that tastes nice and probably comes with the price tag to match, you will have to look elsewhere - down the hill towards the canal and the Du du Brabant café, or up the hill to one of the surviving backstreet bars in Jette and Ganshoren. So when a new bar opened on that same strip of street across from the park, there was some anticipatory excitement in the neighbourhood that here, finally, was someone taking a gamble. Walking past one day in August while workmen were still busy inside and before the bar had opened, I’d seen through the window an illuminated tap handle for Brussels Beer Project’s Delta IPA. Here we go, I thought. Messages were exchanged in a whatsapp group, and a date was found in our diaries for an expedition to confirm whether this presence of draught Delta was an anomaly or was reflective of a more adventurous beer menu.

Enter the Zinnebir (or three). But not just Zinnebir, but bottles of IPA from Tipsy Tribes brewery, a tiny outfit brewing 200m from the bar’s front door, other Brussels Beer Project beers, and even Orval. The beer menu was clearly having an effect, because the terrace when we arrived was already occupied by two separate groups of Dutch-speakers - a sign as sure as anything in this part of Brussels that a business has made an impression on the collective consciousness of the creative middle-class (for want of a better description). Clearly they - and we - had been starved of good beer for so long that we could not hold ourselves back from descending on this new venture as soon as it opened. In fact, around our table there was a consensus that we needed to drink as much as we could and return as frequently as our respective calendars allowed to reinforce to the bar’s owners that yes, they had made the right decision in putting these beers on, and yes, that there is a market at Simonis who will come to your bar and drink you out of Zinnebir. Especially if you are the only place in the municipality that sells it. Because up until this new bar opened, Koekelberg was a Zinnebir-free zone. 

This was a fact I discovered in passing over the summer, when a friend expressed their intention to drink a Zinnebir in each of Brussels’ 19 communes and asked me if I could identify any suitable locations in north-west Brussels. Which wasn’t a problem in Jette, Ganshoren or even St-Agatha Berchem, but was, it turned out, in Koekelberg. There was, as best as we could make out, no bar within the commune’s borders, which sold Brasserie de la Senne’s flagship beer (or any of its beers for that matter) - and I am for the purposes of this argument excluding the ice cream shop that does stock their beers, because it’s an ice cream shop and not a pub. Part of this we put down to the quirks of the commune's geography; it is small (only 1.18 km2), doesn’t really have a defined commercial or nightlife centre, or a large student population that might support good beer pubs in the same way the university hospital does for neighbouring Jette. But I think there is something else going on too. Koekelberg has, thus far at least, been relatively resistant to the kind of gentrification that brings in its wake the kinds of cafés that would consider it a badge of honour to serve marked-up beers from local breweries. Again, part of that is geography; it’s on the “wrong” side of the canal and just outside of downtown’s sphere of influence; a lot of people have never heard of it (I frequently have to explain to colleagues where exactly it is), and it remains - particularly the lower part of the commune that borders Molenbeek) a poor, densely populated area with poor-quality housing and young families.

That resistance is waning, though, and has been for some time. I and my drinking companions are evidence enough of that - we all moved into the area in the past decade, attracted by the Dutch-language schools, the park, the proximity to town and the motorway, and the relatively low house prices compared to areas across the canal on the other side of the city. It’s hard to get a grasp on how much inroads gentrification has really made at Simonis and elsewhere in the commune - like most of Brussels lately, things feel a little run-down. But maybe the appearance of Zinnebir on bar menus is a good cipher. Researchers have, after all, used the prevalence of coffee shops and chicken shops to map gentrification in London to map demographic changes. Why couldn’t we develop some kind of Zinnebir Index to chart the penetration of Brussels’ number one beer across the city and what correlation it has with the spread of gentrification. Maybe this appearance of Zinnebir at the end of my street is a shooting star, a Haley’s Comet. Or maybe it is an augury of changing times. I for one am willing and able to sign up for the field work to find out.

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