Beerstorming

Beerstorming is most definitely a brewery: al the necessary equipment and ingredients are there. However, their main goal is not to sell beer — although they do serve and sell beer, rest assured — but they’re all “about creativity in brewing, about being a part of an experience, about tastes, memories and stories you can share over a beer.”
It might sound like a lot of marketing speak, but I guess that is inevitable if one isn’t trying to sell just a product, but an experience.
Currently, the following experiences are on the menu:

• The Tasting Experience
• The Brewing Experience
• The Private Brewery Experience

Every couple of months, every beer made by the participants of those “brewing experiences”, will compete for votes and subsequently be subjected to the judgement of a jury. The winning beer will be brewed again, and then will be sold in shops and served in bars eventually.

For the brewing experiences, you’ll have to make reservations through their website, but if you just want to taste the latest beers that have been made there, from Wednesday to Saturday, from 13h00 to 18h00 the brewery is open for the “Tasting Experience”. This € 25 formula includes four (20 cl) glasses of beer and a growler filled with the beer of your choice to take home.

Just interested in a couple of drinks?
No problem, beers are served by the glass as well, and it is also possible to buy some bottles to take home.

The 1.89 l growler Beerstorming uses, is exactly the same type as the one used by beer store Malt Attacks, and both will happily fill each other’s growler. The filling method is slightly different though: Malt Attacks uses one of those big PEGAS CrafTap counter-pressure fillers you’ll see in a lot of bottle shops abroad as well, Beerstorming fills their growlers with the much simpler and more compact BeerGun.
We still have to find out if growlers filled this way will keep equally well, but seeing that Beerstorming fills all their bottles with the that device, we don’t expect it to be a problem.

We actually visited during one of their ‘open brews’. This means there isn’t a group brewing at the time, but you can see the brewers themselves at work. It made us curious though, to participate in one of those brewing experiences ourselves!

So what about the beer? Well, we went home with a growler of their first winning beer, GMGK, so obviously we quite liked that one, some other of their beers we liked as well, but some others less so. But I suppose that’s only logical if you let people without any experience — the experience participants of course, not the brewers — decide which ingredients to use for ‘their’ brew. Surely we can do better? We might have to prove that someday…

By its nature — not being a bar or restaurant, but not a normal brewery either — Beerstorming is not a place where you’re likely to spend an evening sipping a beer. Unless you’ve booked a brewing experience here of course, but then you’ll probably be too busy for that as well. But if you happen to be in the neighbourhood in the afternoon, why not come and taste what has been brewing at Beerstorming recently?

  

tl;dr

Beers

• 4 taps with their beers in the front room, but there seem to be more taps hidden in the back
  (€ 2 for 20 cl)
• Bottles for sale with their beers, current and older
  (€ 3 for 33 cl / € 4 for 50 cl)
• Growler fills
  (€ 10 for 1.89 l, € 10 for the bottle)

Bites

• Dinner and tapas are included in the ‘brewing experiences’, but otherwise, there’s no food

 

Beerstorming
Alsembergsesteenweg 75 Chaussée d'Alsemberg
1060 Sint-Gillis
+32 472 89 74 01
http://www.beerstorming.net
beerstorming

 

What have people been drinking here recently?