Living the dream
Don’t think beer is sexy? Think again.
Robyn Gilmour
Saturday 19 October 2024
This article is from
Belgium
issue 110
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It’s easy to see how Belgium’s beer tradition and inheritance could feel stuffy — or worse, stifling — to those on the margins of it. Brothers Edouard and Charles Grison respect traditional Belgian beer, but coming from a background in homebrewing and interior design, they also wanted “to make a place where people can dream”. Today, Brasserie Surréaliste is based across the cellar and ground floor of an iconic old banana warehouse in central Brussels, and which now feels like a palatial, bohemian oasis thanks to Charles’ eye for vintage and antique furniture. The aesthetics and atmosphere of the bar are of utmost importance to Edouard and Charles, whose aspirations have always been for the brewpub to be an attractive environment to a variety of drinkers.
“We started with a lot of baggage,” says Edouard. “In France, there's basically no beer history. The US only really brewed lager in the past, so if you’re working within those markets you have more of a blank sheet. That’s not the case in Belgium, people are not going to forget the history and culture of beer here.”
Within Brussels alone, there are so many different kinds of people — and by extension, drinkers — from Dutch to French speakers, expats working for the European Commission, to tourists passing through.
“We knew from the start that we were going to have to be a bit broader than just craft beer,” he says. “The place is so big that if we were to only focus on one kind of beer we would be empty, so we offer wine and some traditional beers too. Belgium is not like the US, where people come from 100 kilometers away for a beer. Brussels is very cosmopolitan and so we have a very broad scene. We have to target basically everybody.”
Like the aesthetics of the venue, the quality of the brewpub’s offering was intended to cast another wide net, and connect with as many people as possible. “By the American definition, a craft brewery produces less than a million hectolitres a year, but here in Europe, that’s still enormous,” says Edouard. “On the other hand, you have breweries like Duvel, who could easily brew a million hectolitres a year, but are family owned and aren’t part of a big corporation. So for me, I think of a craft brewery as one that is owned by someone who will always put quality first.”
To reach this conclusion, Edouard spent many years immersing himself in small-batch beer; considering what it meant to be a local producer, an inclusive producer, to trade in international styles and engage with modern and traditional audiences alike. He’d started homebrewing in 2015, some four years before he and Charles solidified their plans to open a brewpub, at which point Brasserie Surréaliste began contract brewing.
“In Belgium, opening a sandwich shop is as complicated as opening a bar or a brewery,” says Edouard. “That isn’t to say that getting the license is easy, but rather that everything is equally as hard. In Belgium, there’s a lot of red tape and administration involved in everything. It took us two years to get the permit to operate a commercial space, but that would have been the same if we were a restaurant or cafe.”
As frustrating as it was to have to wait until 2021 for the paperwork that would allow the brewpub to open to the public, a delayed opening had some silver linings for Surréaliste. “We knew we didn't have the budget at the beginning, so we had to raise funds again and again,” he says. “We didn't have enough money to finish the remodel, so we were crowdfunding, crowd lending, you name it. It was a lot of work.”
PHOTO: Edouard and Charles, the founders
Of course, today Surréaliste is worth every drop of blood, sweat and tears spilt over it, and Edouard talks about the journey to opening with a cool, calm, and collected demeanor that portrays these challenges as hurdles, rather than a defeat. Powered by Edouard and Charles’ proclivity for adventure, Surréaliste seemed to stumble upon opportunities, none of which were more serendipitous than a chance encounter that put the nascent brewpub on the map.
One afternoon, at the height of the brewpub’s refit, Charles noticed a group of people hanging around on the street outside the venue, and eventually went out to speak with them, curious as to what was going on. They got chatting, Charles told them they were opening a brewpub, at which point the group asked if they could take a look inside. Charles graciously obliged even though, as Edouard puts it “the place was a real mess”. After a brief tour, the group introduced themselves as judges for the Brussels Beer Challenge.
“I had never participated in any of the big challenges before, so this was how we started to connect with them,” Edouard says. “Then last year, we submitted one beer, our Dance Rave Dance session IPA, which we brewed to celebrate the reopening of nightclubs after COVID, and we won best session IPA and Best Belgian Beer.” If this doesn’t tell you that Belgian beer is open to change, to nuance, to the surreal and unexpected, I don’t know what will.
Surréaliste’s journey is just getting started, and without a manual on how to engage young, old, modern and traditional drinkers alike, there will surely be more challenges, mistakes and learning on the job to come. For now though, Charles and Edouard are living the dream.
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