BrewDogging #91/#92: Rotterdam Outpost/Rotterdam Witte de Withstraat

[previously: Amsterdam, Utrecht]

Bip! That's the sound of a credit card tapping in at Utrecht station. Bip! That's the sound of the same credit card tapping out at Rotterdam station. I could get used to this as a national railway payment system. (Apart from the convenience, there’s also the simple pleasure of having a reasonably priced rail fare that doesn’t go up or down wildly depending on when you pay for it.)

By now it’s Boxing Day 2024 – well, at least it is back home. Here in Rotterdam, it’s pretty much back to normal again after the Christmas break. It’s a fairly unfamiliar city to us: I think that we’ve changed trains there a couple of times, but unlike Utrecht we’ve never felt the need to leave the station. This time round, it’ll be different. Among other things, we’ve got two – count ‘em, two – BrewDog bars to report on, plus all manner of other foody and arty stuff.

And another hotel, of course. If you’re a fan of trendy hotels that have names which could easily be misunderstood if you brought them up in casual conversation, then I guess The Usual counts as one of those. It’s part hotel, part co-working space, as evidenced by the ping-pong table and the general air of a nicely maintained student union building. It’s the one hotel on this trip where we spend time in the bar every night, simply because we usually wind down with a fruity tea before bed and our room doesn’t have a kettle. I suspect it’s because they couldn’t find a way to make a kettle U shaped, like every other thing in the room.

The other thing about The Usual is that it’s very nicely located. For a start, it’s in the same block as a delightfully old-school cinema called Kinepolis Cinerama. In a dance as old as time itself, arseholes want to close it down and build flats there: there’s a petition you can sign, but we show our support by catching a post-breakfast, post-Christmas screening of Gremlins. There are plenty of places within walking distance that’ll do you decent breakfasts and lunches: we can recommend uitsmijters at By Mi and Es, toasties at Tosti Club and bagels at Bagel Bakery (though the buffet breakfast at The Usual is good, but overpriced like all hotel buffets are). And there’s a good selection of tram stops just around the corner, so I get to install another transport app on my phone to pay for tickets for the two of us, this one courtesy of RET. (Unlike Amsterdam, the scanning machines seem to work just fine here.)

Once we’re checked in, it’s time to check out the BrewDog bars. After a quick stroll around town that takes in the other bar (briefly) and the gargantuan Markthal market hall, we head towards what they call BrewDog Rotterdam Outpost, as it’s another one of the bars that brews on the premises. That gigantic neon sign you can see at the top of the page isn't just for show: the bar finds itself in the middle of one of those semi-permanent building sites you see occasionally in Holland, which basically hides the bar's location from the main drag. But once you find where it is, it's quite a decent size, initially reminding me of the Outpost in Tower Hill but with the brew tanks located at the opposite end of the building (to the left of the bar rather than the right).

The BBG has a theory - and quite frankly, I find it hard to argue with her on it - that the most interesting brewing work being undertaken by BrewDog nowadays isn't at their Ellon headquarters: it's in the brewpubs like this one, where staff are given the freedom to play around with different styles and flavours. The main beer we sample on our first visit to this bar (there will be two) is their own Smokestack Ale, a gloriously smoky bock that almost justifies travelling to Rotterdam on its own. There's also a decent collection of local guests, such as She Wants More, a red ale from Fuerst Wiacek in Berlin.

For an early evening on a Thursday, it's reasonably atmospheric even though it's a little short on people, including some taking advantage of the at-table taps you can connect to your own personal keg. Possibly the one disappointment is the food menu, which is the standard collection of burgers without even the little bits of local colour they added in Amsterdam Centraal. No matter: we end up having a very nice dinner at Sijf, the closest thing to a traditional Dutch brown bar we've visited so far, and another one that makes its own beer. We'll be back, though (albeit briefly).

With one bar ticked off, the next day we visit the other one, which is in a much more interesting location than the first. Witte de Withstraat is a fabulously cool street, with multiple restaurants and drinking establishments scattered along its length. And it's got art by the ton, too. At one end you've got Kunstinstituut Melly, which we never get to visit despite being intrigued by the huge poster outside proclaiming 'Melly Shum HATES her job.' If you walk past the other end down Museumpark, you'll hit Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, one of the finest museums in the country. Except right now, you won't, which makes it even more fun.

Right now, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is undergoing a programme of refurbishment, which started in 2019 and is scheduled to run until 2030. That's an awful lot of art to put into storage for a decade: but the good news is, the storage is available for anyone to visit. Depot Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is a six storey building where the museum's collection is either put on public display (like Carlijn Kingma's jaw-droppingly detailed The Waterworks Of Money) or held in storage rooms with huge glass windows the public can look through, stacked up on massive shelves like the world's most pretentious Ikea. Thanks to a combination of yet another app plus some carefully deployed QR codes, you can find out what's in each storage room and peer through the windows trying to spot things on the shelves. (The app also stores details of what you've scanned, so you can look them up when you get home.)

It's possible that what makes this fun is the suspicion you have deep down that you shouldn't be looking this far behind the curtain of a working museum. They're putting themselves entirely out there with this project, with their restoration and conservation teams treated as just another exhibit behind glass to look at. It's well worth the extra money to book yourself on one of the tours of the building on the day, but be sure not to make the mistake we did of accidentally getting ourselves onto a Dutch language tour. It turns out not to be a problem, because each tour includes the chance to go into one of the storage rooms - under strict supervision, of course - and get up close and personal with the contents. That's how I got to see Olaf Mooij's Chesterfield Car, which doesn't require any particular language to enjoy.

After a morning watching Gremlins and an afternoon looking at art from a distance, it's time for a bar crawl. And the obvious starting point has to be BrewDog Rotterdam Witte de Withstraat. To be honest, there's not much to be said about it. It's got an unusual split-level structure to it, but it still looks much the same as any other BrewDog bar does these days. It's interesting to note that even on a cold December Friday night, there are a lot more people sitting at the pavement tables on the street than inside. We stick with where it's warm, have a couple of decent guests from Brouwerij Noordt and Kompaan, and then decide to move on. And yes, I am well aware that I've written three times as many paragraphs about an art storage warehouse as I have about the bar.

Thankfully, there are lots of places to move on to from here. De Witte Aap has already been mentioned in these pages, and should be celebrated not just for beers by the likes of Gebrouwen Door Vrouwen, Jopen, Two Chefs and Noordt (again) but for the cheese sticks we nibble with them as an accompaniment. Nieuw Rotterdams Café is where we end up having our main meal of the evening, but it's a bit disappointing: a noisy, brightly lit place full of young things and staff who serve you a different Kaapse Brouwers beer from the one you asked for (though they got the Oedipus Brewing one right). Bierboutique runs a close second to De Witte Aap for its fascinating beer list including ROTT. Brouwers and Brouwerij Turelurr, though it's the Aap that gets the honour of a second visit that night. In an attempt to get over our disappointment at BrewDog RWdW, we pop back to BrewDog RO for a big finish, only to find it almost totally deserted, though that doesn't stop us from getting our nightcap of Brouwerij Het Anker and Noordt (again(again)).

Other things to do in Rotterdam that aren't to do with beer or art will generally involve water. The most basic one is the harbour cruise, run by Spido, which is an enjoyable 75 minute run out from their Erasmusbrug base to where the container ships are unloaded, and back again. It's pleasant enough, but the most memorable part is at the Erasmusbrug end where, while waiting to board, we encounter a rally of a hundred or so people in little cars whizzing along the waterfront. See the picture if you don't believe me.

Mind you, this city is wet enough for boat travel not to be just a tourist thing. There's the fascinating fleet of water taxis, which can take you anywhere around town on demand (proximity to water permitting), although on this particular day they're largely disrupted owing to misty weather. They also operate scheduled ferry services, which thankfully are running on this particular day: they're the most fun way to get from Centrum to Hotel New York, the best stop for the Nederlands Fotomuseum. Like Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, it's undergoing some heavy rearrangement at the moment as it prepares to move to a new location later in 2025, so we only get two exhibitions on display (both still running till May 25th, if you happen to be in the city before then).

Çiğdem Yüksel's If only you knew makes a greater impact on us because it's got English captions: it's a series of new portraits of Turkish women who emigrated to the Netherlands half a century ago, accompanied by their stories and their own personal snaps from when they first arrived. It quite neatly dovetails with a parallel strand showing the work of photographer Bertien van Manen, who undertook a similar project in the 1970s with her book Women As Guests: some of van Manen's subjects end up being revisited by Yüksel, and the two women's pictures play off each other entertainingly. By comparison, the other exhibition WOMXN. More than a muze is a little harder to connect to because of the lack of English captions. It turns out that Sebiha Öztaş has taken pictures of a couple of dozen local Rotterdam heroines, and asked each one to select a picture from the gallery's collection that inspires them: but none of that's entirely obvious while we're in the building, so you're just left with a collection of portraits of interesting-looking women.

Both the Fotomuseum and the harbour cruise take up most of our Saturday: so what should we do for Saturday night, bearing in mind that one week earlier we were at an old people's disco of sorts in Amsterdam? Inspired by a poster we happened to see on Witte de Withstraat on our first day, we wind up at jazz club Dizzy to see something that calls itself Soul NL, described on the poster as 'soul meets Dutch classics'. It turns out to be the brainchild of vocalist and sax player Derick Stadwijk, who's taken a collection of cheesy Dutch pop songs from decades ago and given them a funk and soul rearrangement. Obviously, this would be a lot more fun if we knew what the originals sounded like - having said that, there's at least one song they play that's tantalisingly familiar, and we assume that it must have been on that disco playlist in Amsterdam seven days ago. (It's possibly called Alsjeblieft, but as that's the Dutch for 'please' there are a trillion songs with that title on Spotify.) Anyway, despite the caveats, and the fact that there's not as much dancing going on in the room as we'd hoped, it's another fun night out of experiencing nostalgia for a culture you were never part of.

Saturday is only our penultimate night in Rotterdam, but that's where we're stopping for now, as we've got other plans for the Sunday. Bip!

[to be concluded]

[Previously: Bristol, Camden, Newcastle, Birmingham, Shoreditch, Aberdeen, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Kungsholmen, Leeds†, Shepherd's Bush, Nottingham, Sheffield, Dog Tap†, Tate Modern†, Clapham Junction†, Roppongi, Liverpool, Dundee, Bologna†, Florence†, Brighton, Dog Eat Dog/Angel†, Brussels, Soho, Cardiff, Barcelona, Clerkenwell, DogHouse Glasgow, Rome†, Castlegate, Leicester†, Oslo, Gothenburg, Södermalm, Turku†, Helsinki†, Gray's Inn Road†, Stirling, Norwich, Southampton, Homerton†, Berlin, Warsaw†, Leeds North Street, York, Hong Kong†, Oxford, Seven Dials, Reading, Malmo, Tallinn†, Overworks†, Tower Hill, Edinburgh Lothian Road, Milton Keynes, Canary Wharf, Brixton†, Paddington, Dalston†, Aberdeen Union Square, Peterhead†, Itaewon†, Le Marais†, Outpost Manchester, Perth, Edinburgh Airport, Carlisle, St Pauli, Old Street†, Cambridge, Ealing, St Andrews, Chancery Lane, DogHouse Manchester, Bath, Reykjavik, Inverurie, DogTap 2.0, Waterloo, DogHouse Edinburgh, Upminster, Wandsworth, Hull, Dublin Outpost, Basingstoke, Exeter, Gatwick Airport, Nice†, Amsterdam Centraal]