Introducing the Brussels Beer City Podcast: Diaspora Season
Introducing season two of the Brussels Beer City Podcast: Diaspora
Listen to the trailer now, and subscribe on Spotify and Apple Podcasts
The Brussels Beer City Podcast: Diaspora Season is about Brussels’ immigrant communities and the places they love to drink. From ice cold Sagres with piglet sandwiches and pintjes in old bruine kroegen, to creamy pints, fried plantains, and more, the podcast will explore the drinking - and eating - cultures of just a small slice of Brussels’ diaspora communities, in the company of people who have come from all over the world to make their home here.
Launching July 7, on all good podcast platforms.
Not a paragraph I thought I’d ever write when, three years ago I published the final episode of what I expected to be the sole season of the Brussels Beer City podcast. Not because I didn’t enjoy making it. It was a simple concept, that first season: convince a Brussels resident to invite me for a beer at their favourite Brussels bar, where we’d talk about the significance of that place to them, and their love-hate relationship with the city. And it worked, more or less, until March 2020 and the arrival of Covid-19.
In fact, I still have vivid memories of sitting down for a lunchtime beer with writer Joost Vandecasteele in the Belle-Vue in Anderlecht on March 11, with case numbers increasing exponentially, and both of us joking that it could be the last time we would be able to meet someone outside of our family circle. Three days later Belgium submitted to the first of a series of lockdowns that rolled across the following two years and periodically closed down the country’s hospitality industry. It wasn’t a complete disaster; I’d cobbled together enough interviews before lockdown to stagger their release across the subsequent months. But by the end of the year, and after recording the final interview sitting at my desk and talking about a pub with someone through Zoom, the pandemic had worn down my resistance and I’d had enough.
Other projects came along and the podcast went into an extended period of hibernation. It was actually during research work on the “History of Brussels Beer in 50 Objects” series - and in particular Object 45, a Skol beer crown cork - that an idea for a season of the podcast first took root. Writing about the impact on the drinking and urban landscape of Brussels’ various diaspora communities made me realise how little of Brussels’ life I really knew about outside of my little beer corner.
The city has long exerted a strong gravitational pull on new arrivals to Belgium. In the white heat of the industrial revolution, Flemish farm labourers were lured to the city with promises of factory jobs. Later, their 20th century successors came from the southern mediterranean and Anatolia to build motorways and metrolines. They were followed in turn by bureaucrats populating Brussels’ European quarter, and the descendants of colonial central Africa seeking refuge from civil war.
Each wave of new arrivals has also brought with it new kinds of places to drink - Asturian cantinas, Roman trattorias, Turkish pide places, Irish pubs, and Congolese ngandas.
And I’ve never been to any of them, with one very obvious exception.
So consider this Diaspora Season a corrective, taking the original concept and tweaking ti slightly for a more in-depth look not only at individual experiences of Brussels from a diaspora perspective, but also a wider look at the places and ways of drinking (and eating) that these communities have brought with them.
Concretely, this means a podcast episode and accompanying blog article every few weeks. Some of these will hew close to the original one-on-one interview format, others taking a more sprawling view on a particular community’s drinking establishments, and a couple will incorporate some personal reflections on my own immigrant experience in Brussels. There will be beer, and bars - lots of bars - but there will be other places too. Restaurants, patisseries, community centres, and festivals.
In the company of guides from Brussels’ diaspora communities, this new season of the Brussels Beer city podcast will dig into the stories behind these community spaces, how they’ve adapted as the makeup of Brussels has changed, and what role they still have in the city as its demographics continue to evolve, and new communities are added to the mix.
Listen to the trailer now, and subscribe to the podcast on the usual platforms ahead of the first episode coming July 7.