Words and photos by Ashley Joanna
Edited by Breandán Kearney
Humans of Belgian Beer is a series of photographic portraits which celebrate a people and their culture.
While attending Psychology classes at University in Brussels, Cedric Jamar landed a job as a waiter in a pub on Brussels’ Grand Place to help pay for his schooling. Before he started, his opinion of beer was negative. He thought it made people unhealthy, loud, and lazy. But being a bartender forced him to learn about the 200 or so different beers on the menu he was serving and he found it fascinating that people could be so creative using only the four same ingredients.
After University, Cedric began working as a psychotherapist with refugees and homeless people in a health house near South Station in the city. Psychotherapy is the use of psychological methods in regular personal interaction to help a person change behaviour, increase happiness, and overcome problems. Cedric used talk therapy to treat people in the health house for emotional problems and mental illnesses. In the meantime, he continued to learn more about the Belgian beer scene. He read countless books, attended lectures, and travelled to visit breweries in Italy, the US, Switzerland, Spain, and Germany to learn about their processes. Soon, Cedric was looking for ways to take the information he had learned about beer and communicate it to others.
“As a psychotherapist, I give people the tools and information to get them to where they need to be,” says Cedric. “I began to think to myself, can I also use this approach with beer?”
Cedric spent a long weekend talking through ideas with his girlfriend, Delphine, and came up with a beer business called “Agalmalt”. Agalmalt offers tours and tastings to individuals, beer team-building and entertainment events to companies, and consultancy, training, and education services to the hospitality trade. The name stems from a mysterious precious gem of Ancient Greek philosophy and it was also Cedric’s often-used handle on social media. Cedric describes himself as the translator between beer producers, resellers, and customers.
Cedric creates a space in both sectors where people can be completely open. Whether he is speaking with refugees or business owners in the beer world, the common thread in his activities is working with people to find tools which make it possible for them to change their behaviour. “My main goal in life is to help people,” says Cedric.
I went from being terrified of giving beer tours in front of twenty people to giving tastings in front of a few hundred people.
Cedric Jamar
