On a mild Friday night in early May, Jenlain Delcourt flipped through a stack of records behind the taps at Gist , the Brussels bar he opened with his partner Jody Lecieux in December He was expecting a busy night and needed the right soundtrack - first Iggy Pop, then David Byrne and 80s-era Rolling Stones. Instead, this Friday night was all about hefty pint glasses and cask ale β more specifically, four lumbering metal casks that Delcourt had propped up at the end of the bar-top, next to a row of four swan neck handpumps.
Never mind like it, many casual beer drinkers in Brussels would have had only the faintest understanding of cask ale myself included. English brewing has been hugely influential in Belgian beer history and while many beer styles β pale ales and stouts in particular β successfully crossed the Channel, cask conditioning did not.
Conditioning and cellar management is a delicate process. Shoddy practices β leaving the beer on for too long, or failing to keep clean lines β can cause the beer to become, or taste, bad. Cask ale can be poured directly from the cask or through a beer engine or hand-pump, which delivers beer to glass without external gas or top pressure.
Unlike cask ale, hand-pumps do have history in Brussels. It was while working there that Delcourt and others, including Maxime Dumay of No Science, had their first encounters with beer served through a hand-pump. One day an Italian colleague convinced them that there were other beers better suited to this dispense method. Hand-pumps and locally produced cask ale were always part of his plans for Gist. But before they could get their hands on real casks to put through their newly-installed hand-pumps, Delcourt cast about for a beer with which he could replicate his Moeder Lambic light bulb moment.
Delcourt got on the phone to Molenbeek and informed De Baets of his idea. His response? He could barely recognise his own beer, but loved it all the same and declared that Gist should serve all its future kegs of Taras Boulba like this. A year or so later, it was a collaboration between de la Senne and London brewery Anspach and Hobday that prompted Delcourt to arrange their mini cask festival.
