Introducing the Brussels Beer City Podcast: Diaspora Season

The Brussels Beer City Podcast: Diaspora Season is about Brussels’ immigrant communities and the places they love to drink. 

From ice cold Sagres with piglet sandwiches and pintjes in bruine kroegen, to creamy pints, fried plantains, and more, the podcast will explore the drinking cultures of just a small slice of Brussels’ diaspora communities.

75% of Brussels’ population have foreign roots, and the city has long exerted a strong gravitational pull on new arrivals to Belgium. In the white heat of the industrial revolution, Flemish farm labourers were lured to the city with promises of factory jobs. 

Later, their 20th century successors came from the southern mediterranean and Anatolia to build motorways and metrolines. They were followed in turn by bureaucrats populating Brussels’ European quarter, and the descendants of colonial central Africa seeking refuge from civil war. 

Each wave of new arrivals has also brought with it new kinds of places to drink - Asturian cantinas, Roman trattorias, Turkish Pide places, Irish pubs, and Congolese ngandas - to name just a few.

Over the course of this new season, and in a series of accompanying articles at beercity.brussels, the Brussels Beer City Podcast will dig into the stories of these community spaces, and talk about how a city’s drinking culture is more than just the sum of its breweries and craft beer bars. 

In the company of the people that know them best, the podcast will explore how these places came to be, how they’ve adapted as Brussels has changed, and what place they still have as the city’s demographics continue to evolve, and new communities are constantly added to the mix. 

The Brussels Beer City Podcast: Diaspora season, launching on all good podcast platforms July 7.