Women of Brussels Beer // Marion Prevot, Brussels Beer Project and L'Ermitage
For the month of March, Brussels Beer City is celebrating and amplifying the voices of women work in beer in Brussels. From brewers to businesses owners, sales people and beer educators, each week we will highlight leading women in the sector - their stories, their views, and their experience as members of the city’s close-knit beer community. Today, it’s the turn of Marion Prevot - Montpellier born and bred, who came to Brussels for a Master’s degree but instead became Brussels Beer Project’s first female brewer.
Marion Prevot didn’t originally get a job at Brussels Beer Project (BBP) in order to brew beer, but that’s what a brewer is what she became there. A communications graduate from Montpellier who in 2017 came to Brussels initially to study languages and marketing, Prevot joined BBP in order to complete a vocational requirement for her degree. In her three month stint at the company, though, she found that she was spending more time on the brewhouse floor than behind her desk.
“A lot of the time I was downstairs in the production area with the guys, and I was starting to become really curious and interested in brewing.” Prevot says, realising pretty quickly that brewing was what she actually wanted to do. It was a chance to expand her knowledge in something she knew relatively little about, a channel to be creative and to make something tangible that she could see people enjoying, and gave her a chance to work with her hands and be physically active that a job sitting behind a computer never could.
Overcoming (national) stereotypes
In convincing the team at BBP’s central Brussel brewhouse to let her stay on a little and brew, Prevot became the first - and so far only - female member of the production team. It turned out her gender was less of an obstacle than she might first have worried. “First of all I’m French, [and only] second of all, I’m a woman,” Prevot says. “I’m not coming from a country where beer is part of the culture [compared to Belgium]. I had to prove that I am passionate and interested about beer for real, and not only wine and cheese!”
“I’m a bit stubborn so if it was here or anywhere else I would have tried until I got it”
In any case, Prevot says the BBP brewery team were very encouraging of her joining them. “People can think it’s a little macho,” she says of the brewhouse environment, “but they were super happy and supportive to see a girl there…they treated me as an equal, [and] the guys I was working with were super open and tolerant.” Prevot suggests they had little choice in the matter: “I’m a bit stubborn so if it was here or anywhere else I would have tried until I got it.”
“A pretty crazy year”
Prevot’s first exposure to beer came pulling pints (she has nothing good to say about the beer) in Montpellier, discovering more interesting beer on an extended trip to Australia and New Zealand before settling in Brussels. “I was drinking a lot of craft beer,” Prevot says, name-checking Australian breweries Little Creatures and James Squires. “And when I came back I was like, I liked as a hobby, but I never thought it could be my job.” More than just working in beer, it’s become an all-consuming passion for her, and while she worked off her internship at BBP, Prevot took on another job helming the L’Ermitage brewery tap room and simultaneously enrolling in brewing school. “It was a pretty crazy year,” she says.
The experience gave her an insight into the workings of two Brussels breweries with quite different public perceptions, and Prevot continues to work weekends behind the bar at L’Ermitage while she completes her studies in June 2020. Though she’s not had a chance to brew on L’Ermitage’s equipment, before she left BBP Prevot was able to brew her own beer, and she was given responsibility for recipe creation, the brewing, and shepherding the beer through fermentation and maturation. Wanting to make something seasonal with a slight twist, Prevot chose to brew a blood orange and hibiscus-infused IPA that was eventually released in late January 2020.
Brewing her first solo beer
Prevot was given free rein for the beer, leaning on the brewery team for the odd technical and production insight. “David [Santos, one of BBP’s brewers] had 80kg of hibiscus flowers, and said maybe we could use some,” she says. “I was not sure, it was my first beer, and I didn’t want to fuck it up. But I said, okay let’s do it. Because, I don’t know if I’m going to have this chance again to put hibiscus flowers in a beer so, fuck it, let’s try it!”
“I would like to have a brewery [some day], and hire women also…and be like, ‘We can brew beers also. We’re all women, but look what we can make.’ That would be a nice project.”
It is, for now, Prevot’s solitary beer at BBP, but she’s hopeful that once her studies are finished and BBP has opened their future purpose-built brewery in several years time, she may get an opportunity to go back. In the interim, she’s concentrating on her coursework, experimenting with homebrewing with friends, and looking for other opportunities to get more professional brewing experience locally.
Though the chill of a northern winter chaffs against her Mediterranean sensibilities, Brussels is Prevot’s home for the foreseeable future, and her goal is eventually put herself in a position to be able to open her own business. “I would like to have a brewery [some day], and hire women also…and be like, ‘We can brew beers also. We’re all women, but look what we can make.’ That would be a nice project.”