Women of Brussels Beer // Morane Le Hiress, Janine
For the month of March, Brussels Beer City is celebrating and amplifying the voices of women work in beer in Brussels. From brewers to businesses owners, sales people and beer educators, each week we will highlight leading women in the sector - their stories, their views, and their experience as members of the city’s close-knit beer community. Today it’s the turn of Morane Le Hiress, the Parisian-born, post-doctoral researcher in biology, and co-founder and head brewer of Brussels’ Janine Boulangerie-Brasserie.
In 2019, Morane Le Hiress had a dilemma. A biologist by training, she studied integrative biology and physiology (among other subjects) at university in Paris before securing a PhD for research in the field of pulmonary hypertension. Her post-doctoral research - into heart failure and cardiomyopathy - was coming to an end, and she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to continue down the pharmaceutical rabbit hole. For her birthday that year Le Hiress had received as a present a four-hour course in brewing. “That's where I really started to understand, to know how beer was brewed,” she says, adding that there were some complementarities between her work in the lab and in the brewery. “So I started to make my little beer at home, to take an interest in this community.”
Gradually, her interest in brewing had grown enough to suggest it might be a viable - or at least interesting - career alternative. “In brewing, I saw I could be involved in the production of a beer from A to Z,” Le Hiress says, whereas in the pharmaceutical supply chain she would only ever be responsible for a small aspect of a much bigger and longer process. “Brewing also looked more concrete. We brew, and I can already have the result in my hand a month later.” She also thought that if she did plump for beer over biology, she wasn’t abandoning her scientific background completely. “I had a foundation in my knowledge of biology I could use to come up with recipes as well. So a switch to brewing didn’t seem bad at all,” she says.
Baking and Brewing
Still based in Paris - where she was born, and where she lived with her partner Maxime Delubac - Le Hiress decided to swap biology for beer and took advantage of unemployment support from the French government to enrol in a 15-day intensive brewing theory course followed by internships at several French breweries. If she was going to switch careers, she wanted to take it seriously. She wasn’t alone in this. At the same time, her partner was doing the same, not in brewing but in baking. The two of them sat down over their dinner table to see what, if anything, they might be able to do together with their respective new careers. “Maxime, who had started working in a bakery, was outraged to see all the loaves thrown away” at the end of the working day, she says. An idea formed, and Le Hiress started experimenting with brewing with leftover bread on her homebrew kit.
Delubac’s brother Bertrand was already living in Brussels at that point, and told them that if they wanted to get a project off the ground, the Belgian capital would be a great place to try. So in September 2020 they made the short journey north to join him, and arrived in Brussels with a clear idea of what they wanted to do, and a name for this new project. Janine Boulangerie-Brasserie - named after the Delubac’s grandmother - would be, as the name suggested, a brewery-bakery combo, with the brewery using leftover bread from the bakery in its beers, and the bakery using the spent grain and yeast from the brewery in its bread. Janine was founded with the idea to help reduce food waste, but Le Hiress also approached this self-imposed restriction as a challenge to her as a brewer to be able to “brew something that looks like a normal beer, like a classic beer, but that’s made with bread,” she says.
Brewing with bread was not an original concept; Brussels Beer Project had been brewing their Babylone beer with leftover supermarket bread for several years, and in England Toast Ale had been doing something similar since 2016. But integrating the brewery and bakery sides of this kind of initiative was a first for Brussels. Once settled in in Brussels, Le Hiress began a short stint working at the L'Annexe brewery in St Gilles, where she pitched the idea of brewing the idea behind Janine. The two owners of L’Annexe - Grégoire Berthon et Max Lagrillière - were only too happy to let her loose on their equipment. “They were curious to see how you could brew in a different way,” she says, and the pair were able to help her wrangle their brewhouse and source leftover bread for Janine’s first test batches. Not long afterwards, in October 2021, Le Hiress and the Delubac brothers launched the first Janine beer - Rock’n’Carole, a 6% ABV “American Bread Ale''. Other beers followed, including a New England IPA called Ka sa yé?, and in September 2021 the bakery wing of the business opened in the Altitude 100 neighbourhood in Vorst.
A Cooperative Approach
It was during her time brewing at L’Annex when Le Hiress was approached by another beer producer working on someone else’s equipment. Thomas Detourbe launched his Brasserie Witloof brand in 2016 and had been brewing since then at Wallonian brewery Brasserie Valduc. In late-2021 Detourbe put out a call for collaborators. He was looking for businesses like his, people making beers on someone else’s equipment who wanted a brewery of their own but were put off by the cost and the uncertainty. Detourbe’s proposed solution to this problem was the creation of a cooperative brewery, where the cost of rent, raw materials, and equipment was mutualised. Together with Detourbe’s Brasserie Witloof and businesses DrinkThatBeer and Brasserie 1B2T Le Hiress signed Janine up as a founding member of CoHop, the Brussels Cooperative Brewpub.
“We thought together about the project a lot, and when it started to look viable, we went looking for a location,” Le Hiress says. They found one in a building complex in Etterbeek, on the former grounds of a military arsenal and next to the Dutch-language Free University of Brussels. Production started in May 2022, with each cooperative member allocated three fermenters, with another three given over to making beers under CoHop’s own brand that would be brewed by Le Hiress and her colleagues on a rotational basis. Everything else - the brewhouse, the canning line and keg washer - is shared. “We plan ahead, one month to the next and we say here is who needs to brew and who needs to condition,” she says. “It’s really a cooperative, and the goal is to support the breweries in their work.” Janine have stuck to their circularity principles; each of their beers, which now include a roasted hazelnut Porter and a Kveik IPA, is made with at least 15% leftover bread from their bakery, with spent grain going in the other direction. “It’s a proper synergy,” Le Hiress says.
An on-site bar followed in September 2022, and beyond neighbours complaining about noise from concerts hosted at the brewery, and the rising cost of electricity, heat and malt, Le Hiress is satisfied with the progress they have made since their arrival in Brussels almost three years ago. And there is no talk about moving back to Paris any time soon. “It’s completely different here [in Brussels],” she says. “Paris is much more competitive. The rents are much higher and it’s more complicated to find a location, so when you start a brewery in Paris you really have to push. It’s about survival.” Add to this what Le Hiress considers is Belgium’s more deeply rooted beer culture and Brussels was a logical hometown for her and for Janine. Without those Parisian complications she can get with what she enjoys most about brewing - tasting new styles and trying out new recipes. Or, as La Hiress says, “hold steady, and just keep going.”