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.
When Jef Pirens was young, beer was just a crate of Jupiler that he consumed to get drunk with his friends. Then, on a winter evening in his late teenage years, Jef walked into ‘t Brugs Beertje, a café in Bruges that offered over 300 different styles of beer. The beer menu was divided into categories by region, immediately intriguing Jef. Before the night ended, he bought a few bottles of beer to take home with him to remember his discovery.
“I always liked stuff,” says Jef, who nows owns and runs brewpub D’Oude Maalderij in the West Flemish town of Izegem. “Not expensive stuff, but things to collect for memories. I wanted to take the bottles home because it was a piece of history and I loved how the labels looked.”
Jef’s fascination with beer escalated quickly. More pubs. More beer bottles to add to his home collection. Jef and his friends eventually began experimenting with brewing their own beer, hosting tastings for friends and family to showcase the different flavours they were producing. But when his friends began to lose interest, Jef doubled down, attending beer festivals regularly, providing tastings in his home, and brewing more often. When he began leaving his weekday job early so that he could brew, he realised his passion was no longer just a hobby.
“I never decided it,” says Jef. “It snuck up on me. I thought maybe ‘this hobby’ needed to be my full-time job. I was already building the business without realising. I was just doing what I loved.”
Officially opening in 2015, D’Oude Maalderij is a brewpub-meets-workspace-meets-home that Jef runs with his girlfriend, Liesbet. When you walk into the pub, you are completely blindsided by a barrage of vintage enamel signs, furniture, games, puzzles, old meters, and other things he has rescued from flea markets and thrift stores. It’s a building filled with a thousand pieces that have nothing to do with each other, but each has its own story that coalesce to tell us about the things that Jef values.
“The pieces I collect are things from a time when people had time to make something beautiful, not just functional,” says Jef.
In the right-hand corner of his bar, for example, is “Magic: the Gathering”, a card game in which wizards cast spells, summon creatures, and exploit magic objects to defeat their opponents. Several names in the game inspired D’Oude Maalderij’s “Monster Series”, illustrated with detailed graphics of sea creatures by his artist friend in Spain, Antonio Brava, and consisting of 14% ABV barleywines aged on a variety of different barrels.
Stepping into D’Oude Maalderij is like stepping into a museum of everything Jef enjoys in his life. “I became tired quite soon of all the different jobs I had,” says Jef. “But with beer, you can never get tired of it because you can never drink it all, brew it all, and know it all. The information is endless.”
Jef is often found standing behind the bar, arm tattoos on display, hair slicked back, talking casually to customers against a background soundtrack of blues and jazz. His main goal was to create an atmosphere that made other people feel good, while staying true to who he is. In doing so, he’s creating memories for everyone who visits.
The pieces I collect are things from a time when people had time to make something beautiful, not just functional.
Jef Pirens
