Last time, I wrote about my first impressions of Belgian Beer World. This costly tourist attraction opened in 2023 right in the heart of Brussels, capital of beer country Belgium. It cost 90 million euros to renovate the old stock exchange building and set up the exhibit on the nation’s most popular drink. Most of this money was coughed up by the government, as the Belgian brewers themselves only contributed less than 6 million.[1]

Let’s just see how well this money was spent. After all, Belgian beer culture is on Unesco’s protected Cultural Heritage list, Belgium is home to the world’s biggest brewery, AB InBev. Belgium is rightly known for the great variety and quality of its beers, including a few respectable types that have been around for centuries, such as white beer, gueuze-lambic and Flemish old brown, and newer beers that found their way into drinkers’ hearts such as abbey beer, saison, Belgian strong pale ale, fruit beer and spéciale belge.

This should be a no-brainer, right? All this should logically result in a high-end top-quality visitor ‘experience’, not in the least because so much old and new material is available, and because so much wonderful history has been recorded, so many fantastic stories to tell? As might be expect from the united Belgian Brewers, who have a reputation to uphold? How difficult can it be to brew something worthwile out of that?

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Yesterday I met Belgian beer writer Luc de Raedemaeker, who proudly showed me his new ‘Belgian Beer book’, an enormous book with lots of nice photographs. I congratulated him on this remarkable effort, then I opened it and the first thing I read was: ‘Duke John of Brabant, also called Jan Primus…’ Noooo! Are people still repeating this nonsense? So for the last time, after I already told my Dutch-speaking readers: why John of Brabant wasn’t a beer god.

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You may have noticed him on the European mainland: the legendary beer king Gambrinus. Omnipresent in German pubs, Dutch beer labels, Czech advertising posters, and so on. A jolly bearded guy, crown on his head, beer in his hand. A ‘Santa Claus of beer’ if you like. But where does he come from? Was he once a real person, like duke John I of Brabant, as is often claimed?

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