Mechelen: Het Anker Brewery and Classic Belgian Beer Cafes

An entry from my beer notebook describes a day trip from Brussels in June 2019: “By shortly after noon, I had found my way to Het Anker, the ‘real’ reason for my visit to Mechelen. I love how beer, breweries, and their history get me out to places I wouldn’t otherwise visit!”

When you think about all those dazzling Belgian cities like Bruges, Antwerp, or Ghent, Mechelen probably isn’t the first place you’d think of visiting on a trip to Belgium. But with its magnificent St. Rumbold Cathedral, historic béguinage quarters, and vibrant squares, Mechelen is well worth the 30-minute train ride from Brussels.

Mechelen is also home to a dense concentration of classic beer cafes that exude a time-worn charm you just won’t find in many of today’s sleek but curiously anodyne establishments. And if that’s not enough, it’s also home to Het Anker, brewers of Gouden Carolus, a range of weighty beers named after Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

Het Anker Brewery

One of the most pleasant routes to Het Anker winds through the side streets of the old béguinage, a neighbourhood quarter that once housed lay women (béguines) who didn’t take vows. Het Anker began life in 1471 at the center of this béguinage. In return for catering to the infirm, Charles the Bold exempted the béguines from paying taxes on the beer brewed for their hospital.

The brewery was one of the few religiously affiliated European breweries that survived the wave of Napoleonic secularization. Apparently Napoleon preferred the charitable works performed by these lay religious women to the prayer performed by cloistered nuns and monks. The brewery finally passed into secular hands in 1872 when Louis Van Breedam acquired the it, renaming it Het Anker in 1904. The brewery has remained in the family ever since.

Het Anker Tour

Het Anker’s informative brewery tour is a cut above most brewery tours — plenty of history, a splendid view from the copper-kettle brewhouse over the rooftops of the city, and two beers at the end to replenish your energy.

You’ll learn about how German occupying forces stationed in Mechelen during WWI requisitioned all the copper and other metal they could find to support their war effort. Het Anker pulled through the combined disruption of the First and Second World Wars, but most of Mechelen’s twelve breweries didn’t fare as well during the interwar and immediate postwar period. Today, only Het Anker remains.

You’ll also learn about how, in a nod to postwar tastes, Het Anker brewed oceans of pilsner before returning to traditional Belgian styles in 1963 with its precursor of today’s Gouden Carolus line of strong beers. Nowadays Het Anker distills whisky as well, some of which makes it into their Gouden Carolus beers.

Het Anker Beers

Het Anker’s beers are all top notch, but my personal faves of the half-dozen or so beers I sampled during my visit were the Tripel served at the end of the tour, the Gouden Carolus Ambrio, and the luscious Whiskey-Infused Cuvée van de Keizer.

Gouden Carolus Tripel (9%): An elegant and subtly spiced beer with aromas of pear, chamomile, coriander, and a hint of cumin. Full bodied yet still thirst quenching, which makes this beer dangerous. (Two Tankards)

Gouden Carolus Ambrio (8%): They call it an amber, but it goes in the direction of a Dubbel. Mild rum-raisin, caramel, orange zest, dates, and baking spice. (One Tankard)

Whiskey-infused Cuvée van de Keizer (11.7%): A mélange of dates, figs, rum-soaked raisins, plum and dark cherry, toasted orange zest, and even a background slate note, all mingling with an undertone of whiskey in this dark amber/mahogany beer. The chocolate notes really shine, combining Spanish fig and chocolate cake with chocolate chip cookie dough and Black Forest cherry cake. The beer’s full bodied and creamy but not overly rich, with a beguiling baking spice character, perfumed hops, and a warming, peppery prickle. (Three Tankards)

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De Gouden Vis

It began to rain softly after I left Het Anker. By the time I reached the Vismarkt just south of the Grote Markt, the windows of establishments lining the square were beginning to steam up. One ornately decorated window caught my eye with its finely wrought art-nouveau trim and lettering: De Gouden Vis.

It’s 5:00 pm and I just manage to snag the last table amid a collection of furniture that looks like it came from a surreal bazaar selling a mix of marble-top tables from Parisian bistros and bric-a-brac from a garage sale.

A classic among classics, De Gouden Vis radiates the kind of casually composed charm that makes Belgian drinking establishments so compelling. Eclectic is an understatement. The café has everything from Corinthian capitals crowning a row of columns to a rickety outdoor terrace overlooking the river. Beer posters from the 1930s adorn the walls, and tiled flooring gives way to wood floors worn down by the multitude.

For those wondering about the beer, De Gouden Vis has something for everyone, including the usual Trappist suspects and a smattering of gueuzes for the wild crowd.

Café Hanekeef

Hanekeef, the city’s oldest pub, lies to the east of the center and in the shadow of one of Mechelen’s many churches. The dark-paneled space is long and rectangular, with not much room left over between the low-slung beamed ceiling and traditional patterned tile floors once the place fills up — which it does every evening with people stopping in for a drink on their way home from work. Likeness of roosters are everywhere you look — figurines on the ledges, prints on the walls, and even a colourful bas-relief on a door at the back.

Not long after I find a spot near the back of the café, a middle-aged gent asks if he can pull up a chair, then apologizes for taking out his book. No worries. Books are good. Our beers arrive, we exchange pleasantries, and he asks if I know about the history of the place. I don’t, so he explains. The server fills in a few details when he returns with the next round of beers.

Apparently the building started life as a chicken farmers’ market. Cages for the cockerels used in cockfighting were stored here. Hence all the rooster motifs. No one seems to know when the place became a beer café, but the server noted that it has existed in its current form since the 1950s. Back then, these “brown cafes” were the center of social life in the city, not unlike the pub in Britain or the Wirtshaus in Central Europe.

The beer list is par for the course in Belgium, which is to say that you won’t lack for choices: five beers on tap, several abbey/Trappist ales in bottles, a handful of beers from the gueuze and fruit beer category, and five from the hometown brewery.

Since you’re in Mechelen, opt for Het Anker’s Maneblusser Mechels Stadsbier, a lively and quaffable blond ale with mild bitterness and subtle Belgian yeast notes of pear and baking spice. Fortunately, the beer clocks in at a relatively modest ABV by Belgian standards (5.8%), so you’ll have to drink more than a few before you become a Maneblusser yourself.

The Maneblusser

And just what is a Maneblusser? The bottle’s label, which depicts a citizen of Mechelen dressed as a fireman carrying a beer in one hand and a bucket in the other, provides a clue. As the story goes, the tower of St. Rumbold’s Cathedral was shrouded in mist one January night in 1687. A rather inebriated chap stepped out of a tavern on the Grote Markt, thought that the tower was on fire, and sounded the alarm. An emergency bucket brigade was hastily assembled. Up the tower stairs the buckets went, but just before the first bucket reached the top, the moon emerged from the fog.

The tower wasn’t on fire after all. It turns out that the good people of Mechelen had been trying to extinguish the moon glowing through the mist.

Of course, the citizens of Mechelen tried to keep the incident quiet, but the news soon slipped out. To this day, residents of Mechelen are known as Maneblussers, or “extinguishers of the moon.”

Sources

Visit Mechelen. https://toerisme.mechelen.be/en

Wikipedia, “Mechelen.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechelen

Het Anker (https://www.hetanker.be/en) for notes on the history of the brewery along with colour commentary about Mechelen.

Het Anker brewery tour, 7 June 2019. Guide: Pierre Bohrmans.

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