Artisan Spotlight: Danielle French of Brasserie Cantillon

Sep 24

Danielle is one of my closest friends from our Master’s program in Italy. She lived around the corner from me and is the neighbor I mentioned in the Osteria del Boccondivino story who joined for my first dinner in Bra :) I often think of her as the poster child for our school because she had a non-food background, discovered her love of beer in a class with our passionate and jovial teacher Prof Marconi whose love for beer is infectious, and is working at a revered brewery (there are only 2 of its kind left in the world)! Cantillon was founded in 1900 in Brussels, Belgium and is a fourth generation family owned brewery following traditional practices to produce lambic beers only, which means it’s a spontaneous fermentation process using wild yeasts and bacteria that grow in the local region. You maybe surprised by the gorgeous pictures of fresh fruit like apricots and cherries, but they are well known for producing exceptional, one of a kind fruit-flavored beers. It was love at first sip in our beer tasting class for Danielle. Coupled with her penchant for science, it’s no surprise that she is bravely forging her way in the beer world. I can attest first hand that this is a special human in an equally special brewery….enjoy getting to know Danielle as she shares behind the scenes captures with exclusive ASMR videos! And comment below with any ideas you have to solve the horrible reselling issue!

Where did you grow up?

I was born in Boulder, CO, then we moved to a small town in Michigan where we stayed until I was 7, and then we moved to St. Louis, MO where I grew up.

Hold up, your last name is French AND you majored in French/are fluent?!?

Haha yes, but they are unrelated! I’m not sure what first got me interested in learning French in particular (apart from the jokes around my last name 😉), but languages have fascinated me since I was kid. I started French when I was in high school and I’ve stayed with it ever since.

You’ve lived abroad most of your adult life (France, Italy, Belgium)...what’s that like?

It’s weird. Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like if I had never left, but the idea of never leaving also seems very strange. There are times when I feel more like a stranger at home in St. Louis than I do here in my now-home of Brussels, but there are also times when I go back home and it is just sooo easy to slide back into my old high-school era routine that it’s like I never left at all.

How’d you get into beer?

I got into beer during our time at UNISG. I come from a beer-loving family, my grandpa and uncles dragged us to Anheuser-Busch for tours when we were younger, but 11-year-old me was not really impressed. Don’t get me wrong, the facility is very impressive, but the giant industrial complex that is AB didn’t really spark a lot of curiosity for me. I certainly didn’t imagine myself working somewhere like that, and I still don’t to be honest. It was really our course (especially the tasting) with Prof. Marconi that did it for me. Obviously the Gueuze (Tilquin) we had was what sealed the deal. I was hooked. After that I started reading pretty much anything I could, tasting as many beers as I could get my hands on in Bra and eventually researching possibilities for internships.

Tell us about Cantillon..what makes it so special?

Cantillon is special for so many reasons, starting with the family themselves. Talk about passion... I really respect their dedication to their craft. When Cantillon says they’re a family business, they mean it. Everything is managed by the family still to this day, and they represent four out of nine full-time employees. Apart from the people, the product obviously! Beer is typically something that’s produced under very strict, human-controlled conditions, and that’s not the case for us. In comparison to other breweries it’s actually really hard to think of Cantillon as a brewery at all.

Is it true that in it’s 120 year history, the only change to the beer was the shift to organic ingredients in 1999?

To my knowledge the recipe for the Lambic is still the same recipe that Jean’s grandfather started with in the 30’s. Even though the brewery opened in 1900, the Cantillon family started as blenders. For the uninitiated, this means they didn’t brew the Lambic beer themselves, rather they bought freshly brewed beer (or wort) from other breweries and then brought it to their facility for fermentation and barrel aging, eventually blending different ages of Lambic to make Gueuze or adding fruit, like cherries, to make different fruited Lambics. It was the second generation of the family that bought the first brewing kettles and really put everything in motion.

What is your role at Cantillon?

Where do I even begin haha…I wear a lot of different hats. I don’t have an official title, no one outside of the family does. I split my time between the museum (tours in English/French/sometimes Italian if I’m feeling brave that day + bar duties + to-go sales) and production. I’d say the split is probably ⅔ to ⅓ during “normal” times, but it’s become closer to 50/50 since Covid for obvious reasons… much less tourists these days! I also do the translations for all of our social media posts, manage the Instagram account, etc. During the lock-down here in Brussels when we did on-line sales for home delivery, I organized the delivery logistics, which was something I’d never done before and was strangely satisfying.

What’s your favorite aspect of working at a brewery?

Apart from the enormous privilege of being able to drink a lot of truly exceptional beer, my favorite part of my job is the hands-on work, even if at times it’s just brute, manual labor. The older I get, the more satisfaction I get out of just making something or fixing something with my own two hands. It’s such an amazing feeling to have a tangible, finished product at the end the day that (hopefully!) brings joy to others.

Least favorite?

Not knowing if any of the friendships or connections I make with colleagues in the industry, visitors or customers are actually genuine. Because of Cantillon’s cult-status in the beer world, I’m rarely sure if the conversation I’m having with someone is authentic, or if they're just trying to get time with Jean or “special” bottles that they can resell on-line or whatever else it may be that they want. I’ll give you an example: this week I found out that one of our local regulars, who I was always absolutely convinced was one of the “good ones”, is actually an online reseller. Resellers are a HUGE problem at Cantillon - we have very limited stock, so what these people do is they buy as much as they can themselves, they send countless other people in to buy for them as well -family, friends, friends of their family, people they’ve recruited off Facebook or sometimes literally in the street - and then they resell it to people for 10-20x the price they paid for it (plus shipping!!!). That they don’t even include shipping most of the time blows my mind. We make a concerted effort to price our beers as reasonably as possible so that as many people as possible are able to enjoy them, and not just hedge-fund managers with $1,000 laying around to throw away on a single 750ml bottle. Also, to add insult to injury - in this case in a very literal sense - because the nature of our work is extremely physical (two of my colleagues have 5 hernias between them), it is just maddening when these guys just come in, tap their credit card, and then reap the grossly-inflated profit that we’ve broken our backs for. Not to mention the insult to the family, who went through huge financial struggle from the 60’s up until the early 2000’s to keep the brewery open, and who could easily just pull a Willy Wonka one day, close the brewery to the public, eliminate the issue of the black-market and make their beer an ultra-luxury product only for the super rich. But they don’t, because they’re committed to sharing their tradition.

Jean-Pierre at the bar contemplating our new reality

How has COVID affected the brewery?

Because of the restrictions on tourism, things have changed pretty radically. We’re used to welcoming people from all over the world every day, but now we’re seeing a much more localized tourism. I think it’s really been an eye-opener to see how our little local brewery is actually incredibly dependant on a globalized economy. It has also unfortunately thrown resellers and mules, which used to be a minority, sharply into the majority of our clients these days. Depending on what we have available to-go, sometimes as much as 80% of people I see in a given day just shove their phone into my face and say “I want this.” And because there’s money involved, people can get very nasty very quickly if they can’t get something they want. It’s disheartening.

Where can we buy Cantillon?

You can buy Cantillon from the brewery itself in Brussels if you’re able, and we have a list on our website (that is in no way exhaustive) of distributors/retailers around the world. I know that saying “Just come to the brewery!” is too simplistic, not all of us have the time, finances or ability to travel abroad, even without a pandemic thrown in the mix, but if you can, and when you can, go for it. It’s really the best way to get the whole experience. During all this craziness it is more important than ever to support small, locally owned shops than big chains. I would like to point out that people selling second hand are also undercutting people who have legitimate businesses. Please buy from the legitimate businesses!

How do we support Cantillon?

Given the circumstances, we’re actually doing okay. Sales are down a bit of course, but we’ll be fine. We’ve been through worse and we’ll get through this too. When and if you’re able, come to the brewery for a visit and a drink at the bar. In the meantime, if you’d like to support the museum, sign up to become a member! Members receive an exclusive quarterly newsletter written by Jean-Pierre himself and priority tickets for special events like Quintessence. Otherwise, the best thing you can do is support your local economy - restaurants, bars, breweries, markets, farmers etc. How depressing would it be if/when we emerge from all of this, if the only businesses still open in a post-COVID world were multi-national chains? Small businesses are what breathes life into our cities and towns, and there’s no replacing that.

Have you ever gotten a non-beer person into beer?

I would like to think so! The most important people have been my family. I was a little nervous about bringing bottles for my family to taste the first time. My path has not been a traditional one, let’s say, and with the exception of my parents, my family is quite conservative. They’ve always supported me, but they’ve also never been shy about telling me what they think of the validity of my life choices… like studying foreign languages instead of business and moving to Europe. So I had this fear that they would taste it and hate it, that they wouldn’t get it, and then it would become something else in my life I would have to justify… buuut they loved it! Nath (Lambic with rhubarb) was their favorite. It ended up becoming something that we could all bond over, and I think it helped them understand me better as well.

Your favorite beers at the moment?

My current (non-Cantillon) favorites are: Zenne Pils from Brasserie de la Senne, XX Bitter from De Ranke, and Noire du Midi from our neighbors at L’Ermitage.