1030 Café

Schaerbeek is becoming more and more interesting for beer lovers: last Saturday 1030 Café opened its doors, and more importantly, its taps! Behind those taps you’ll find the brothers Guillaume and Max.

We met with and talked to Guillaume before, when he was still working as a bartender at another bar in Brussels, so we already knew he was passionate about beer, and we couldn’t wait to see his and his brother’s bar!

This passion for beer translated perfectly into the beer menu of 1030 Café: not a single InBev beer in sight, but instead lots of local beers and beers from small brewers elsewhere in Belgium. On draught De la Senne‘s Zinnebir and Jambe-de-Bois, an the organic Silly Pils Bio for the lager lovers.
The draught menu then mentions a “Beer of the Moment”, a clever way to avoid committing to a specific beer for a whole month, or instead having to provide a new beer every week. Just to show how unpredictably short this ‘moment’ can be: the “Beer of the Moment” on opening night — ILLegaaL — sold out in under five hours!
There is a fifth beer pump, but no idea if it’s just a backup pump, for cool tap water, or if it serves another purpose.

Brasserie de Silly doesn’t just provide the draught lager for 1030 Café, but features heavily on the bottle list as well, with its Scotch Ale, La Divine, Blanche, and their new tripel SWAF. We wouldn’t mind seeing some of Silly‘s barrel aged scotch versions in 1030 Café sometime in the future!

On opening night there was a food truck to provide us with something to eat, but apart from that, there was no food or snacks on the menu yet. Eventually there will be hot meals available at 1030 Café, but at first there will just be the usual cheese and meat platters, and soup.
Even though we haven’t been able yet to taste anything, we fully expect the selection of food suppliers to be made with at least as much care and love as the beer selection.

An opening night probably isn’t the best representation of how a place is going to be on a normal night, but we’d say they’ve handled the huge crowd remarkably well, and the staff has shown it doesn’t buckle under pressure. We’ll be very happy to spend a couple of hours in the beautiful interior of 1030 Café again when it’s a tad bit calmer, especially knowing they’ll have to pick a new “Beer of the Moment” soon!

tl;dr

Beers

• 4 beers on draught
  • Zinnebir
  • Jambe-de-Bois
  • Silly Bio
  • A “Beer of the Moment”
• An InBev-free bottle list!

Bites

• None yet
• Soon:
  • Meat & cheese platters
  • Soup

[venue id= 57e2f7ea498e7aa076c7d950]

What have people been drinking here recently?