What could be more authentically working class than an entire neighbourhood named after a beer? Seefhoek has kept its gritty character against the forces of gentrification decades after Seef, its iconic foaming raison d’etre, was consigned to oblivion.
Like the 100 or more Antwerp breweries that once made it or a similar beer. The recipe apparently lost. Few folk alive who could even recall its actual taste. Enter the self-styled Indiana Jones of fermentation reclamation – one Johan Van Dyck.
On our recent trip to the Flemish city we never made it to Seehoek, described by one guide as a labyrinthine enclave. For generations a redoubt for the Roma people, it’s a cultural melting pot with over 100 nationalities represented. Next visit we’ll check it out.
Instead, this time, 2.5km to the north on Eilandje, a former dockland site, we sought out Antwerpse Brouw Compagnie (Antwerp Brewing Company) and the visionary brewer who brought the eponymous Seef back to life. It’s an amazing story. Told, as it should be, across an enjoyable tasting flight in the taproom. Our slight unease about making it back to Brussels for the flight home assuaged by the quality of the ABC beer range.
For too long De Koninck held the monopoly as the Antwerp brew, with its characteristic bolleke glass. Nowadays it comes under the umbrella of Duvel Moortgat, where Johan used to be marketing director before quitting to set up his own brewery on the back of three years of Seef research.
His true brewing idol, though, is there for all to see on a display in the taproom – the legendary Pierre Celis, a milkman who single-handedly revived Belgium’s traditional witbier (cloudy white beer) style in the Sixties, naming it after his village, Hoegaarden. He later moved to Colorado to help kick-start the American craft beer movement. Johan brewed under Pierre before his death in 2011.
There are similarities in the rebirth of Seef. The 6,5 per cent Belgian blonde we taste has similar hints of coriander, maybe clove, and a (lighter) cloudiness but other attributes that are all its own. Some spice, floral hoppiness and a hint of banana and tropical fruits. Is this how it tasted originally in its 19th century heyday with different yeasts? The buckwheat base remains the same, rather than the barley of its rivals.
Seef dates back to the 1700s. It is easy to forget that the distinctive amber ale that is De Koninck’s signature brew only rose to prominence in the 1930s. By then the First World War and the conquering Germans’ thirst for Pils and pillaging of brewing equipment had killed off Seef production. Any scientific records seemingly vanished also.
Which left Antwerp native Johan, who had stumbled upon Seef – the ‘Champagne of the Working Class – in a book about Antwerp’s important brewing history, with a mammoth task on his hands. Cue tracking down descendants of families who owned breweries before the War.
Eventually, Eureka, the Holy Grail. He found an 90-year-old brewer who had saved his original hand-written Seef recipe. Johan’s Indiana Jones-like persistence had paid off.
Now came the leap of faith to be able to replicate it with modern equipment. In one interview he recalls: “I had two major challenges. The first was yeast – I did know what characteristics were needed for the correct fermentation and aromas, but the exact yeast was obviously not included in the recipe. The second was the process: the recipe I found was a practical description from the late 1800s. As a brewer I needed the actual values of temperature, the speed at which the brewhouse heats the mash, etc., because all of this impacts flavours and aromas.”
To his rescue came the University of Leuwen’s faculty of brewing chemists, who held in their vaults the historical Antwerp yeast used in 1900s beer-making. It gave him the green light in 2011 to start his first brewing trials on an old colleague’s equipment. The result soon began to win multiple awards, eventually encouraging Johan and his partner Karen Follens to crowdfund today’s brewery and taproom just a 10 minute walk from the rusty red bastion of reinvented Antwerp, MAS (Museum aan de Stroom). Well worth a visit for its exhibitions, not just the stupendous views.
We loved the unique Seef (which Johan has trademarked), but it it is only part of an impressive beer roster encompassing a Radio Minerva, a 7 per cent Tripel created to champion an endangered local radio station, Lucie, a tea-infused 8 per cent blond, and the very quaffable, tropical Eilandje. But the stand-out was the Bootjes Bier, a tribute to the historic Red Star Line. Its museum in the original HQ is just a short walk away and vividly evokes the part their liners played in transatlantic emigration.
Refined with ginger and coriander, this complex Flemish red ale is very Belgian; a fresh hop pale Johan poured from the tank felt very American Craft. Antwerp has always faced out to neew worlds.
Antwerpse Brouw Compagnie, Indiëstraat 21, 2000 Antwerpen, Belgium. Some pictures courtesy of the brewery
