My first encounter with Zinnebir was inauspicious.

It was in late 2010, at an interminable networking event for young lobbyists hosted at the dingy, half-heartedly themed London Calling. In a scrum of unfamiliar faces and seeking respite, I found myself at the bar ordering the beer with the vaguely local name—Zinnebir, from a brewery called Brasserie de la Senne.

I was new to beer and new to Brussels then, knowing little of both. I didn’t know much about Zinnebir, beyond the fun name that referenced Brussels’ Senne river, and the pleasing alcohol tingle it delivered. I didn’t know that it was brewed by Brasserie de la Senne in their then-new brewery in Brussels, opened in 2010 in a converted bread factory. Or that this brewery was the fruition of a plan hatched eight years previously, by a social worker and a homebrewer, to give Brussels a beer of its own. And I certainly didn’t know that the beer in my hand would revitalise brewing in Brussels after a torrid half-century of decline, building not only a brewery but rebuilding a whole cottage industry.

Still, the beer made an impression, and in the intervening ten years, I’ve come to know Zinnebir and the city that birthed it intimately. And in that time, that beer I drank in that dingy bar has grown to become epochal; the most consequential brewed in Brussels in the 21st century and deserving of its place in the Belgian beer canon. When it comes to Brussels, there is BZ and AZ: Before Zinnebir and After Zinnebir.

That’s a lot of hyperbole to hang around the neck of a fermented beverage, but Zinnebir can carry the weight.

The beer’s backstory is a well-trodden tale. Yvan De Baets (the social worker and beer fanatic) and Bernard Leboucq (the homebrewer) met in 2002, the former taking a shine to the experiments of the latter. Together, they agreed to homebrew a beer for the city’s annual Zinneke parade, a celebration of Brussels’ cosmopolitanism.

That beer was Zinnebir, taking its name both from the parade and, like the brewery that followed, from the River Senne that ran through—and now, after late-19th city burghers buried it in underground sewers after designating it a public health hazard, under—Brussels. Zinnebir has evolved in the intervening years as raw ingredients have changed, and as Yvan and Bernard tweaked the balance between fruity, spicy esters, malt sweetness, and hop bitterness to their satisfaction. It has become less malt-forward, drier, hoppier and more bitter, but it remains a beer with the same purpose as Yvan originally intended—precision-engineered for drinking at volume.

Zinnebir comes burnished orange in the glass, topped (if poured correctly) by an artless whipped meringue foam. From this comes aromas of zesty citrus and a little pear drop, leavened with slight bready notes alongside characteristic Belgian clove-y spiciness. A gulp of Zinnebir will have all of this alongside a grassy bitterness imparted from German and Slovenian noble hops selected during visits to the hop farms by Yvan each autumn.

For Joe Stange, managing editor of Craft Beer and Brewing and co-author of The Good Beer Guide Belgium, Yvan and his brewers make Zinnebir “sing of hops... The profile is incredibly floral, herbal, zesty, and spicy—taking all the best stuff from the best noble hops and cranking it up higher than most brewers are willing to try.”

Zinnebir has a good body—not hefty or syrupy, but not too light either. This is all rounded out by assertive but not abrasive bitterness. The kind that Brussels’ hard water is so good at underwriting. As Jenlain Delcourt, co-owner of Brussels bar Gist and a regular collaborator with Brasserie de la Senne remembers from his first-ever Zinnebir experience 15 long years ago, this is a “fucking bitter” beer. But not just bitter.

“Balance is the key to Zinnebir,” Jenlain says, holding court on a baking hot summer day at the de la Senne taproom, which finally opened in June 2020. “Because it is a hoppy beer, but it’s also a malty beer,” he says. “The typical flavour of the de la Senne house yeast is balanced by this dryness and is balanced with the maltiness. Everything balances every other thing. And I think that’s why it’s so popular.”

In short, Zinnebir possesses, in the best tradition of Belgian beers, doordrinkbaarheid—drinkability. But as Yvan would tell you, “A lot of people think that the secret of beer is the recipe. That’s pure bullshit.” And Zinnebir’s importance goes beyond what’s in the glass.

““A lot of people think that the secret of beer is the recipe. That’s pure bullshit.””

— Yvan De Baets, Brasserie de la Senne

At 5.8% ABV this isn’t a light beer, but compared to the gay abandon of Belgium’s abbey-style beers, Zinnebir is a model of restraint; a modernist reaction to the over-exuberant opulence of the orthodox Belgian brewing vernacular. But Zinnebir wasn’t the first Belgian beer to eschew syrupy-sweet blondes for something more austerely bitter and confrontational. Guido Devos and Nino Bacelle got there first with Brouwerij De Ranke’s proto-Belgian IPA XX Bitter in 1994. But where De Ranke loaned the name for their beer from old English naming traditions, de la Senne went one further with Zinnebir.

Yvan, who in de la Senne’s early years regularly brewed on De Ranke’s kit, is both a brewing historian and has a well-publicised love for traditional English beer styles. In fact, in late-2018 Yvan went so far as to make a cask version of Zinnebir with Jenlain to celebrate Gist’s first birthday, albeit with the original sacrosanct recipe tweaked to accommodate the specific nature of cask conditioning. Jenlain describes the resulting beer as Zinnebir, but different. “Everything you could expect from a Zinnebir—maltiness, yeast, hoppiness, the dryness, but in a different way,” he says. “Like taking a square and crushing to make a lozenge... It blew my mind.”

With Yvan’s anglophile tendencies, Zinnebir could only ever have been a Belgian Pale Ale. Belgian brewers created the style, also known as Spéciale Belge, in the early 1900s as a local attempt to claw back market share from the ruinously popular imported English Pale Ales. De la Senne took this style, exemplified by malty, unexceptional beers like Palm Spéciale and De Koninck’s Bolleke, and brought it back to the drier, more bitter roots from which these beers had strayed, and which Yvan remembered fondly from his youth.

They have been tweaking this formula ever since, and now the resemblance between a Zinnebir and a Palm is hard to spot. “Belgian Pale Ale” is still printed on Zinnebir’s label. But there are other, more prominent words: “The Brussels People’s Ale.”

Lambic fiends might cry foul at this claim. After all, spontaneously fermented Lambic predates the Belgian Pale Ale by at least a couple of centuries, their manner of production is native to Brussels, and Brasserie Cantillon, the city’s last remaining Lambic brewery was here long before de la Senne. But, Cantillon’s beers, excellent as they are, are too academic, too esoteric—and too expensive—to penetrate as far as Zinnebir.

Go into any Brussels bar, and if they have a de la Senne beer, odds are it is Zinnebir. “It’s hard to overstate what an improvement that is—just being able to walk into just about any decent place in Brussels and count on a fresh glass of Zinnebir,” says Joe, who wrote the book (Around Brussels in 80 Beers) on Brussels’ cafés. He lived in Brussels long before the rise of Brasserie de la Senne, and in the years since he moved away from the city, Zinnebir continues to draw him back, so he can for at least a week or two “live with it on a near-daily basis.”

The beer remains de la Senne’s bestseller in Brussels, and Brussels remains the brewery’s primary market. The city and the beer are inseparable. “We ought to communicate the experience of draught Zinnebir in Brussels with the same tones of reverence that many people reserve for drinking Guinness in Dublin, Pilsner Urquell in a Czech tank-beer pub, or Pliny the Elder on the West Coast,” Joe says.

Zinnebir paved the way not only for de la Senne to open their first brewery in a Molenbeek bread factory. It (and its successors) underwrote a move in 2019 into a state-of-the-art facility, full of gleaming German engineering. Zinnebir’s popularity fundamentally reshaped Brussels in its image for a new generation of brewers. Here was proof that after over fifty years of decline, brewing could once again be successful in Brussels, and with flavourful, idiosyncratic beers.

De la Senne’s arrival took the number of Brussels breweries from one to two. By 2020, that number has grown to 13. None of these breweries—the likes of No Science, L’Ermitage, or La Source are could be said to be really following in Cantillon’s footsteps. It is the de la Senne model, and their bitter, dry, doordrinkbaar beers, which they emulate explicitly or unconsciously.

Now, some of you might object. “But Zinnebir isn’t even de la Senne’s best beer,” you’ll say. That, in fact, this title should go to Taras Boulba. Zinnebir’s lighter and younger sibling (by a year) has the more iconic artwork, the transliteration of Gogol’s short story from the Russian steppe to Brussels carnival. And, maybe, Taras is the apex of Yvan’s evocation and adaptation of the English sessionable tradition, and his love for beers like Harvey’s Sussex Best. Pithy in its grapefruit bitterness, endlessly drinkable with a light but not thin body and bitter finish lingering just long enough and no further, with the same fruity, spicy expression as Zinnebir only with the dials turned down a little lower.

But here’s the thing: without Zinnebir, there wouldn’t be any Taras Boulba. The younger beer was only brewed as a necessity, when, sweating after a day’s work stooped low over steaming brewing vessels in their cramped brewery, Yvan and Bernard needed a thirst-quencher with less of a boozy kick than Zinnebir.

Brussels is depicted on Zinnebir’s label as a placid, if abstract skyline by the green river Senne, an optimistic sun shining in the background, But Brussels isn’t placid. It’s chaotic. The cars, the people, the politics, the jumbled up streetscape forcing flamboyant baroque and neo-gothic architecture to cohabit with brutalism’s worst excesses; all of it designed to discombobulate.

It’s no wonder then that locals steer away from the ornate excesses of the Trappist breweries that beguile tourists as much as Brussels’ overwhelming Grand Place square, in favour of something altogether calmer. Taras Boulba hews close to the rectilinear clarity of a building of the scale of Brussels’ Mont des Arts, “drier, more austere,” according to Joe. Taras is straight lines and sharp edges, unabashedly confronting your assumptions about Belgian beer.

Zinnebir never quite goes full Le Corbusier, opting instead to be a more sensuous, more humane, more playful beer. If Zinnebir echoes something of Brussels’ skyline, then it’s the work of the city’s home-grown high priest of art nouveau, visionary architect Victor Horta. Unesco described Horta’s buildings—famed for their sinewy ironwork and evocation of the forms and patterns of nature—as “the brilliant joining of… curved lines of decoration with the structure of the building.” You could almost say the same about Zinnebir.

Maybe this is just splitting hairs. Maybe I’m little-changed from that doltish lobbyist of 2010. Zinnebir and Taras Boulba are after all both supremely well-executed beers deserving of their reputations. But taste is subjective, and for me, Zinnebir tastes of all the best places in Brussels. Sitting on a summer terrace under the oak trees of the Elisabeth park, the children running wild and me lightly soused. Or in winter, curling stiffened fingers around a freshly poured fluffy head peaking out above the rim of an elongated de la Senne chalice, sitting and waiting for a drinking companion on a tobacco-smoked banquette.

Zinnebir is a beer for living in, a comforting, orderly, and warming retreat from the chaotic maelstrom that is Brussels. I couldn’t think of a better place to spend my time.