Getting lost in Brussels and Berlin

Faces and misdemeanours noted

It is a week since I returned from seven days in Berlin and Brussels, part of which involved investigating various pubs and bars and studying the beers that I ordered (I also walked around a lot, letting myself get lost, indulged in the life of a flâneur and naturally fell in love). Lots of pub and bar voices were listened to, the words mostly not understood, though I did see some friends as well; behaviours were watched, gestures and exchanges examined, faces and misdemeanours noted. 

In Brussels, at Billie, once known as Monk, I sat at a window in a corner looking onto the busy pedestrianised street. I saw pinched faces, sated satyr-like eyebrows, soft doughy features, vaguely attentive, pursed lips, the blandness that came from being glued to a phone; some passed sucking on cigarettes with their cheeks on the cusp of being as hollowed out as a cave on the Moon; there were also smiling eyes, wide smiles, laughter lines, furrowed brows, the mask of concentration, while a stream of cigarette smoke, wraith-like, funnelled out of the side mouth of a bespectacled middle aged man who hadn’t shaved for several days; another man, with slumped shoulders, a bullet head, raised eyebrows, teeth exposed in a generous smile, passed by, arms swinging side by side, metronomic in their posture. 

A stream of humanity and I turned my attention to the inside of the pub. I watched an elongated grey-haired man come through the door into Billie and wonder if I had seen him here before and actually engaged in a one-sided conversation with him. That was two years ago and I wasn’t sure and I didn’t want to talk with him again if it was him. He was in a long coat, dirty sneakers on his feet, wearing small glasses, and his left hand he held a white paper bag, which suggested that he’d been to a pharmacy. When he entered he looked about with sullen eyes, and then hugged the bar tender, whose hair was dyed black. She shot him a quizzical glance as it looked as if he was telling her some story, with the animation of the damned. A glass of wine later, he was off to a table towards the back of the bar, a copy of the day’s newspaper with him, surreptitious in his design. 

Sitting in a pub like this enabled me to sieve my thoughts, to dredge through them, to dig into the midden of my mind. As the pub became busier, conversation whirled all about and the smell of the cured meat hanging on its own gallows at the back of the bar spread like the fumes in a pagan temple, and people-watching provided its own entertainment, as Billie enabled me to deal with the introspection I felt on this day as well as an inspection of how I felt about life in general. A pub like this was a sort of church in which conversation was a kind of prayer and reflection on the way I lived my life. The pub was my church, and occasionally it had been my confessional box, not that I have ever been in one in my life. But it was not any old pub that could give that background to this kind of introspection — they had to be free of distractions unless I wanted those distractions. 

Another place, this one in Berlin, in the shadow of the TV Tower at  Alexanderplatz, Biermeisterei by Lemke, which combined the booziness of a bar with the rigour of a restaurant. The outside area had patches of gravel, wooden tables and benches, hanging plants on a network of trellises, an old red tractor plonked on an island of gravel, an aged water fountain at the entrance and weathered whisky barrels arranged in a set of four, reminiscent of a compact union set. All of this seemed to me briefly to give the outside space a semi-rural vibe until an S-Bahn train rumbled by on an arched embankment to the left and the illusion was dissolved. 

The passing rumble, low thunder in the distance, of passing trains. 

Inside there was wooden furniture, solid slabs of what look like several planks of oak joined together; the flooring was wooden but the floor around the bar was concrete, a smooth, implacable surface of baby-faced innocence. Edison lights hung down like the teardrops that accompanied the end of the craft beer dream. There was a brewery downstairs, which produced beer for this establishment alone, the main Lemke facility was not far away; I was briefly shown the minor brewery, passing through the silent kitchen (food service started later), to see a place where lagering tanks were bunk-bedded on each other. Other details: at the far end of the bar there was a row of 12 barrels, where beers slept the sleep of the just in whisky barrels. The brewery’s Berliner Weiss was clean and tart, dry and refreshing, with a tangy hint of cider on the nose. The Helles was clean and dry, bittersweet and full bodied, and it started to rain outside and I needed to be elsewhere to meet a brewer. 

Travel, we are told, broadens the mind, and who I am to argue with that, though in my experience when it comes to beer and pubs it enables us to inhabit a world that we cannot get by buying beer online and sipping it in front of a Zoomed-in screen. We need to go to bars and pubs, big and small, to live, if only for a short time, in someone else’s life, for that way we can truly become a pilgrim of beer.