EP048 | Tingles in the Jungle

Photos by Cliff Lucas This editorially independent podcast has been supported by VISITFLANDERS as part of the “Common Place” series of podcasts.  Bravin, Félix Damien, and Martin Pirenne started Brasserie La Jungle in March 2020. Today, Pirenne lives in Canada, emigrating to work at another brewery in Qubec.  This podcast is a conversation with Bravin and Damien, recorded in their brewery home at Studio Citygate, a complex of old textile warehouses in Brussels’ Anderlecht region. These warehouses were abandoned for decades but are today given over to creatives, entrepreneurs, and associations as part of an urban renewal project. It’s located a few hundred metres from the city’s Senne river to the east, and a few hundred metres from the Brussels-Charleroi canal to the west. Outside Studio Citygate are Moroccan bakeries, Romanian cafés, and traffic jams. Inside Studio Citygate, La Jungle’s tiny, windowless production space has for company a diverse range of neighbouring businesses: a skate park, a climbing hall, a music centre, a chocolatier, a jewellery designer, a blacksmith, a book binder, a ceramic potter, and a bicycle shop.  The brewery was named for the chaotic urban jungle that surrounds it; a chaos that its owners loved but from which they also aspired to be free. Their ambition was to to cohesively merge their widely diverging beer tastes—pastoral Belgian ales, and in particular Saison, traditional English styles, and mixed fermentation beers packed with fruit.  They’d do it against a challenging backdrop: these challenges include disinterest from Brussels drinkers in unfamiliar styles, rolling pandemic lock-downs (they opened a few days before the first COVID shutdown), the fracturing of their original triumvirate through emigration, today’s global energy crisis, and an increasingly cut-throat beer market.  In Belgian beer, it’s survival of the fittest: you live by the law of the jungle. Sit back, listen, and enjoy our conversation with Christophe Bravin and Félix Damien of Brasserie La Jungle. *