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.
Andreas Keul quit his technology job in the “big smoke” of Brussels city in 2009, and packed his bag for a three-month expedition to work on a milk farm in the Swiss Alps.
He worked 19 hour days herding cows up and down the steep, green hillsides of Alpe Aegina, and fully enjoyed reconnecting with nature in the village of Reckingen where he was staying. It was during this time in Switzerland where he learned all about the process of producing cheese.
Every Saturday as a young adult, Andreas had come home to witness his French roommate preparing a feast which filled the house with an abundance of different aromas. Now, in Switzerland, his curiosity for food intensified. No office buildings. No cell phone service. Total nature. Just a gratitude for liberating farm work and for the Swiss farming couple who had just introduced him to his life’s purpose of making cheese.
Five years after returning from his trip to Switzerland, Andreas opened his own business, Fromagerie le Valèt in the village of Waimes in Belgium’s Liège province. Not only does Andreas make a unique quality of cheese, but one of his cheeses is “affiné à la Gueuze Cantillon”—“refined with Cantillon Gueuze”.
To produce this cheese, Andreas pours the Gueuze over three wheels. The cheese is then soaked in the beer for 24 hours before going into the cellar for ripening. This gives the cheese a specific taste: some sweetness, with hints of the beer’s fermentation profile. The yeast on the crust gives it a delicious, potent smell and the cheese becomes a different colour, inside and out.
“It’s a big world of cheese,” says Andreas. “For one producer, their formula can be perfect, and for another [the same formula] could be a total disaster. My field of work is art. I am grateful everyday for my Switzerland experience, and that I get to surround myself with people I love, and have a career that completely fulfills me.”
For one producer, their formula can be perfect, and for another [the same formula] could be a total disaster.
—Andreas Keul
