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.
Dinka Sárközi is a detective for people’s palates. As a bartender in Ghent, her evenings would go as follows: people would take a seat at the bar, scan the 30+ taps, panic would set in, and then she would swoop over with her infectious smile, tattoos popping out of her t-shirt, and save the day. Although bartending allowed her to express her passion for Belgian beer, she had a fire burning inside of her to do something more. Dinka Sárközi dreamed of one day opening her own business in beer.
Dinka landed in Belgium ten years ago when a summer romance in Budapest prompted her to quit her job and move to a completely new country. When the relationship with her Belgian partner ended three weeks after the move across Europe, she found herself questioning life alone in a rain-drenched Ghent; an unfamiliar city where she struggled with the language and knew no-one. If it wasn’t for a long, midnight call to her mother back in Hungary which gave Dinka the courage to stay, she would have been on the next flight back to Budapest and never discovered her passion for Belgian beer.
She did discover it, and for the following few years, Dinka plunged herself into Belgium’s beer scene. She was dog grooming full time and volunteering at beer festivals on the side; festivals such as Billies, Swafff, and BXL (where her mother even joined her from Budapest). She found the role suited her extroverted personality. The more she volunteered, the more she learned about beer, and she came to know the brewers who to so many seemed like “rock stars”. At festivals, she would introduce herself as “Beer Freak Chick”, what she referred to as her “alter ego”. She then landed a bartending gig at the taproom of Dok Brewing Company in Ghent.
Bartending sparked ideas that would keep Dinka awake at night. Ideas about selling beer rather than serving beer. Beer that was “simply awesome”. She thought long and hard about how to make her own path in a very male-dominated industry, and after hours, weeks and months of research, she finally opened a tiny shop in October 2019 where she sold over 150 different craft beers brewed in Belgium as well as in Scandinavia and a whole host of other countries. The bottle shop would be called “Beer Freak Chick” after her alter ego, and was located at Dok-Zuid. She woke up everyday excited to go to work and to help people discover new beers.
“My favorite client is someone who tells me they don’t like beer,” says Dinka. “This is my favourite challenge. Almost always, they end up loving an extreme version of a beer. For example, if someone only likes port wine, I will give them an Imperial Stout with a fruity flavour and they love it. People need to understand beer’s taste expands much more than just being bitter.”
But then, COVID 19. Dinka’s little pride and joy, a shop open only a few months, was hit extremely hard. She hustled to try to keep the business alive, pivoting to a webshop and even offering a home delivery service where she would ride a bicycle dressed in a dinosaur costume to customers’ doorsteps. This worked for a few months and there was so much promise in the business, but as the lockdown dragged on and on, with no end in sight, it became impossible for the new business to gain momentum. When Belgium went into lockdown for a second time, and then a third, Dinka was forced to bring the enterprise to an end in the autumn of 2020.
“That little summer fling ten years ago completely changed my life,” explains Dinka. “When you are on the right path, opportunities just pop up and everything clicks. My business may have closed, but I know this will bring new opportunities and I will continue to make a difference in the beer world.”
My favourite client is someone who tells me they don’t like beer.
Dinka Sárközi
