Zennegat 13

Photos and words by Cliff Lucas.
Edited by Breandán Kearney.

Café Society is a photographic series which celebrates the spaces at the heart of Belgian beer culture. See more here.

Having worked in the film industry for nearly three decades, Jan Dellaert now walks just a few hundred meters from his houseboat to a canal-side café he has run for the past 11 years. The interior walls of Zennegat 13 are covered in enamel beer signs and white ink markings where guests have written the names of their hometowns. The café is located at the confluence of the Senne River, the Dijle River, and the Leuven-Dijle Canal—a small basin that was once home to a handful of bars popular with the hippie crowds in the 1970s and where the players of two competing Mechelen football clubs shared beers in the 1980s (according to Dellaert, local politicians would frequent the cafés here with their mistresses, knowing they were far enough out of the city to avoid scrutiny). Now, of all those cafés, only Zennegat 13 remains. The canal, just outside the café’s front door, was constructed in the early 1750s under the commission of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, a descendent in the dynasty of Emperor Charles V. Inside Zennegat 13, a small fireplace keeps the few interior tables warm during the winter months and three shelves of dusty beer bottles are labeled with handwritten signs by way of a menu. Jan recommends starting with a Gouden Carolus Tripel, a strong blonde ale brewed locally by Mechelen brewery Brouwerij Het Anker, its glass adorned with a golden emblem of a horse-mounted knight—Emperor Charles V.