Hello world!

Why Belgium?

When I was 9, my parents informed me and my brothers that we would be moving from our home in northern New Jersey to some weird country called “Belgium”. Many of my friends thought that “Belgium” sounded like somewhere far away and exotic, maybe near Philadelphia. I was furious. I did not want to leave my friends. There were many tears, lots of shouting, … change was a bad thing.

Eventually, Belgium, and Belgians, broke through my anger, I made new friends and when we reached the age of about 14, we began to explore. With the combination of excellent, affordable public transportation, and parents who were less than attentive by today’s standards, my friends and I found ourselves going beyond the “safe” main drags to the slightly more narrow, cobbled side streets where the little hole in the wall bars were. 

We found that Michelin starred restaurants occasionally had steps leading to upstairs rooms with long tables covered in brown paper where the food came from the same kitchens but was served family style at a fraction of the price of the white table cloth front rooms (sadly, this is no longer the case).

On Fridays, we were released from the confines of a fairly strict Catholic school (real Irish nuns with real rulers). We’d walk to the Waterloo train station, grab a cone of frites with wonderfully lemony mayonnaise from the trailer at the station door, and ride into Bruxelles. There we would sit around massive platters of moules gratinées or steak frites. On the rare occasions when the weather was nice, we’d go straight to the Grand Place and get croques monsieurs at the Golden Boot. Food was always accompanied by cheap beer: Jupiler, Maes Pils, or Stella (before InBev). After dinner it was into the night make the rounds of our favorite bars. This included some combination of Le Roy d’Espagne, Le Corbeau, Le Bourse, or Mike’s Bar Americain. We’d switch to the slower drinking, classic Belgian fare: Blondes, wits, lambics, krieks, framboises, dubbels, … . We often ended the night at a terrible little hole in the wall called Le Cerceuil (The Coffin) where we’d drink Mort Subite (uncarbonated lambic – literal translation: “Sudden Death”) out of skull mugs on tables that were sheets of glass on open coffins while funeral dirges played – perfect Catholic high school ambiance.

When we arrived back in Waterloo, we would buy crispy, sugary Liege gaufres (waffles) from the same trailer we’d bought frites from so many hours before. We’d munch on those as we walked home in the dark. No nutella, no fruit, no whipped cream, they were perfect the way they were.

By the time was getting ready to graduate from high school, Belgium was home. As I looked forward to college, I applied to the University of Liege and the Swiss Hotel Management School with the intention of going into either the restaurant or hotel industries. My parents were having none of that and I ended up at The American University in Washington, DC studying International Relations.

Fast forward 25 years and I found myself in San Diego developing a mobile marketing platform for restaurants and bars. After spending 4 years researching what hospitality owners needed to more effectively attract customers on mobile devices, my cofounder died suddenly and his wife closed the company. 

With a bunch of time on my hands I found myself staring at an unopened “personal brewery” my wife had bought me the previous Christmas. My first batch (blonde ale) was a bit of a bummer because it didn’t carbonate, but it tasted good and it inspired me to try something else. I began brewing pretty much what I thought my friends wanted to drink. Pale Ales, California Common, Bourbon barrel aged Stout, … and while it was fun, it was really just a way to save some money and entertain my friends.

In the summer of 2016, the school I attended had its 50th anniversary. We booked an AirBnB in Brussels and headed over for 10 days. We spent our days walking around Brussels and Waterloo and three things struck me: First, the fact that Belgium, where it rains 300+ days out of the year, had immense amounts of outdoor seating at its restaurants while in San Diego, where it rains 3 weeks out of the year if we’re lucky, restaurants are built right up to the edge of the street. Second, the variety of beers from small breweries I had never heard of in my favorite bars had increased exponentially. And, finally, I really, really missed Belgian food.

When we returned home, I got back to work as a marketing consultant working on a variety of projects from producing video testimonials for an Internet health social network to helping to launch a line of skincare products. But always brewing. With my love of Belgium renewed, I focused almost exclusively on Belgian styles. I dialed in a saison, a dubbel, a tripel, and a quad and started playing with less well known styles including several varieties of Patersbiers (beer monks usually reserved for their own consumption).

As I became more confident in my brewing, I started bringing beers to parties to share with people I didn’t know. There is an understandable moment of trepidation, even in a city with as many home brewers as San Diego, when confronted with a bottle with no label. Most people will just ask for a little taste to make sure you aren’t poisoning them. It was gratifying to have people take their tester sip, ask to have their glass filled, then come back for seconds and thirds. At the same time, I started having a slight problem in that I had now brewed many different batches of many different styles and while I had a relational database set up to help track the brewing information, it was getting challenging keeping track of what was in any given bottle. I decided to make some labels. 

I remembered that an inordinate percentage of the population chooses wine based solely on the fact that there is an animal on the label, so I decided to look up what animals were native to Belgium and assign each style an animal. As I was looking for interesting illustrations on the web, an artist friend who lives in Turkey put up one of her recent paintings of a monkey on Facebook and on a whim I shot her a message asking if she would be interested in helping me out. She thought it sounded like a fun idea and the next morning I had a lovely painting of the little owl in my inbox. Over the course of the next several months, she popped out a series of 8 paintings and we both joked that maybe someday I would open a brewery.

Once I had the labels on the bottles, a funny thing happened. People stopped worrying about the little taster sip and simply poured themselves a full glass. I could leave a six pack of 22 oz bombers in a cooler and when I came back, I would have to fish my empty bottles out of the recycling. 

More importantly, the comments went from “Wow! You actually made this yourself?” to “Where did you buy this?”. When people started coming up to me at parties and asking if I had any of “that owl beer from the last party”, the joke about opening a brewery seemed a little less like a joke. When the brewmaster from a well known San Diego microbrewery with a recent GABF Gold Medal under his belt sought me out at a barbecue because he had pulled my quad out of the cooler and wanted to tell me how good it was, a switch flipped.

My marketing brain kicked in and instead of just aimlessly sitting at the bar at happy hour sipping a beer and reading the news while my daughter was at ballet, I started keeping a running tally of what drinks people were ordering and the comments I heard people making to bartenders. Several things became clear: people from out of town and younger male customers asked for IPAs. Most of the locals, especially the women, would look at the beer lists, ask if the bar had something lighter or less bitter than the standard variety of IPAs on tap, and then order a cocktail or a glass of wine. 

After about a month of this, one of the owners asked what I was doing and when I explained my marketing study of beer trends and he asked if it wouldn’t be easier for me to just get an excel file that covered the last 6 months. Being a regular for a number of years has certain privileges beyond the occasional comped beer. Once I had that, I approached managers and owners of other places I frequented in the neighborhood and they were equally accommodating. Now I had raw, unvarnished data.

With this information in hand, I was able to identify an opening in the neighborhood that needed addressing: an elevated brewpub with great food in some idiom other than “New American”, at a price point slightly higher than the local pizza joint but below $30/entrée, and a beer selection not dominated by IPAs: a classic Belgian Brasserie.

Now, I had an idea. What I lacked was the knowledge of how to run a brewpub. This being San Diego, the capitol of craft beer (debatable, yes …), our local universities have craft brewing programs. I chose to enroll in the SDSU Craft Brewery Management program which is more business focused than the UCSD program which is more brewing science focused. As I write this, I am 3 classes away from completing the program.

However, as you can see by the date of this post, we are now firmly in pandemic times and school and the brasserie are on hold. But this has not been wasted time. I’m still brewing and I’m using this time to refine both brewing and food recipes as well as working on my business plan and talking with potential investors. This should put me in even better stead when we are eventually cleared to get back to something resembling normal life. Hopefully, that will come sooner rather than later and this dream will become a reality.