‘All Hail the Cara God’ — How Cara Pils Became Belgian Beer’s Surprise Cult Favorite

In February 2015, the biggest supermarket chain in Belgium, Colruyt, was working on a rebranding strategy for its house brand. The Everyday by Colruyt line included a range of basic items such as milk, coffee, and toilet paper. One of the planned rebrands was for the retailer’s private-label beer, a 4.4% ABV European Lager called Cara Pils, available in all Colruyt supermarkets for €0.31 per 33cl can. But when it announced that the name of the beer would be changed to Everyday Pils, Colruyt was met by a storm of consumer complaints and negative media coverage.

Protest groups popped up on social media sites to vehemently oppose Colruyt’s decision. Numerous petitions were launched to prevent the switch. The hashtag #SaveCara began trending online. National newspapers and radio shows in Belgium began reporting on the proposed change. The Colruyt team responsible for the rebrand—confused at the uproar over one of their most basic products—eventually released a public statement confirming that they would no longer change the beer’s name. Cara Pils, they had discovered accidentally, was a phenomenon.

The internet is rich with videos of Belgian students expressing their love for Cara Pils (one review has garnered over 400,000 views on YouTube). National newspapers reported on tensions between customers in Bruges who were trying to buy cans of Cara Pils during a shortage “crisis” in 2017. There are online stores devoted to Cara Pils merchandise and clothing, none of which are connected to Colruyt. Belgian musicians have written songs about Cara Pils (such as a track by Luka La Menzo that goes, “Cara Pils and rock ’n’ roll, all the rest is bull”). Other Belgian brewers have produced beers with labels inspired by Cara Pils’ now-iconic design. One Cara Pils Facebook group boasts multiple Belgian Lambic producers as members. There’s even a Cara Pils cookbook.

There is no marketing budget set aside by Colruyt for Cara Pils; no coordinated presence on social media; no dedicated brand manager. Despite this, online Cara Pils fan groups are as zealous as those for Belgian beers the likes of Orval, Cantillon Geuze, or Duvel. If you have never had a Cara Pils, your experience of Belgian beer culture is overwhelmingly incomplete. The simple fact of the matter is that no other Belgian beer has a cult following that comes close.

LIVING ‘ITS OWN LIFE’

The Colruyt Group is a Belgian family-owned retail corporation that was established in 1928 by Franz Colruyt. The group owns, among others, OKay, where Belgians pick up fresh groceries; DATS 24, where Belgians stop to fuel their cars; and Dreambaby, where Belgians buy car seats and cribs for their children. But it is most famous for its discount supermarket chain, Colruyt, whose 220 stores across Belgium offer a shopping experience akin to getting lost in a strangely lit but very well-stocked warehouse. In 2019, Colruyt was the leading food retailer in Belgium by market share. Headquartered in Halle, south of Brussels, the Colruyt group has more than 30,000 employees and is estimated to be worth in the region of €2.2 billion.

Cara Pils is not a new beer. It was first brewed in 1980 with a plainer label sporting a red background and a gold trim. Today’s design features similar colors, but with a diagonal red stripe across the front, and a repeated background pattern of golden barley grains. There’s no explanation from Colruyt as to why the brand was named Cara. Indeed, the beer’s color and flavor suggest that there are no Cara-type malts in the grain bill. (Cara malts are highly modified pale malts whose sugars have caramelized so they are largely unfermentable, yielding some residual sweetness and a darker hue.) Whatever the inspiration, the name has stuck.

“We do not wish to go into detail about Cara Pils. We very rarely disclose information about the suppliers of our private labels and we will not do this for Cara either. Especially because we want to keep the ‘mystery’ around this brand alive. This brand is living ‘its own life’ and we want to keep it that way.”

Cara Pils is the cheapest beer in Belgium. Today, despite soaring inflation, a 33cl can of Cara Pils still costs just €0.31 ($.31). In comparison, AB InBev’s Jupiler, one of the most popular Lagers in Belgium, costs double that, at €0.62 per 25cl can.

In order to ensure that Cara Pils remains the cheapest, Colruyt moves production around to different breweries who pitch for the contract on price. Entries on Untappd, RateBeer, and Wikipedia suggest that it has, at different times, been brewed by Haacht, Van Roy, Martens, Bosteels, Alken-Maes, and Palm. For a period between 2017 and 2020, it seems it wasn’t even brewed in Belgium, production supposedly having moved to Brasserie de Saint Omer, just across the border in northern France. 

During my reporting of this story, I was unable to confirm where it is currently brewed, although some sources claim that production has returned to Belgium, under the supervision of the Heineken group. 

“We do not wish to go into detail about Cara Pils,” wrote Colruyt’s press officer Hanne Poppe in an email to me. “We very rarely disclose information about the suppliers of our private labels and we will not do this for Cara either. Especially because we want to keep the ‘mystery’ around this brand alive. This brand is living ‘its own life’ and we want to keep it that way.” 

When I pushed for more details, I received an email from another Colruyt press officer, Eva Biltereyst. The message was clear: “We are not willing to disclose more information.”

STUDENT TASTES

“It really is like they added just enough of whatever they needed to legally call it Lager,” says Rich Soriano, a Texan living in Belgium who is an administrator of the Facebook group Cara Pils Enthusiasts. “It’s light tasting. I guess there’s alcohol in it. It’s just this inoffensive yellow water. They whispered the word hop at it at some point. They showed it a picture of a grain.”

There’s no information available about the ingredients used in Cara Pils or about its brewing process except for those which Colruyt is legally required to disclose. Given the beer’s price and flavor profile, it’s highly likely that it’s made with cheaper adjuncts like rice or corn as well as malted barley, with a level of hopping that can only be described as low. 

For an objective viewpoint on Cara Pils’ qualities, I presented sommelier Jasper Van Papeghem with a range of Belgian Lagers and asked him to taste them blind. Van Papeghem won the Best Sommelier in Belgium award in 2017 from the Belgian Sommelier’s Guild. He worked as head sommelier at the two-Michelin-starred restaurant De Jonkman, near Bruges, where he put Belgian beers in the gastronomic spotlight as much as the wine. “I have no idea how they make Cara Pils,” Van Papeghem told me before the blind taste test. “The legend when we were students was that all the ingredients that were disqualified from other breweries were used to make Cara Pils.” 

“It really is like they added just enough of whatever they needed to legally call it Lager. It’s light tasting. I guess there’s alcohol in it. It’s just this inoffensive yellow water. They whispered the word hop at it at some point. They showed it a picture of a grain.”

Before the Lager tasting, I gave Van Papeghem two glasses of wine—one red and one white—and asked him to taste them blind and tell me about them. He correctly nailed their vintage, country of origin, and grape varietal. In the Lager test, he was unable to identify Cara Pils from the other five Lagers, but he did note a kind of bizarre green apple flavor. It’s not certain whether this was a case of acetaldehyde arising as an off-flavor during production, but all the cans in the slab of 24 presented it when we checked afterwards. “I’m getting used to number five,” said Van Papeghem. “I didn’t like it in the beginning, but now with the green apple and everything, I really start to like it.”

Just as Van Papeghem did in his younger days, students in Belgium today prize Cara Pils. It facilitates high-volume drinking, with its inoffensive flavor profile, and serves as an affordable social lubricant to bind large groups. With each year’s intake, tens of thousands of students develop new relationships with the beer; after they leave university, all those cans of Cara Pils consumed on late nights or between study sessions take on a nostalgic feel. 

In a 2017 article in Le Soir Plus (“Cara Pils, l’anti-marque superstar”), journalist Jean-Francois Munster pointed to the anti-hero, anti-establishment pull of Cara Pils as a brand. Not only does its price point make it attractive to students, but drinking the cheapest beer on the market is a signal to others that you don’t care what people think of you. In this way, Cara Pils drinkers translate financial constraint into social glory. 

There are some who’d prefer not to look back at their Cara-fueled student days. “I vomited so much Cara Pils, it reminds me of the smell of vomit,” says Nacim Menu, owner and brewer at Brasserie de L’Ermitage in Brussels, which produces hoppy Pale Ales and blends using Cantillon Lambic. “We bought [Cara Pils] by the pallet. Those student buildings have a very particular smell, a mix of wasted beer and vomit. I just cannot smell that beer anymore.”

UNITING BELGIANS

In 2020, Dorian Coppenrath was a University of Leuven student. Living alone in the city, he took pleasure in cooking for himself. On one occasion, he wanted to make a risotto recipe using beer. “Normally you make it with a dark beer, but the only thing I had in my fridge was Cara Pils,” he says. The result, he claims, was so good that he started cooking more often with the beer. Later, he contacted Colruyt to let them know about his experiments and they suggested producing a book together, with Coppenrath delivering content and Colruyt assisting financially. One year later, the book was published: “Koken met Cara Pils” (“Cooking with Cara Pils”) is one part ode to Cara Pils, one part useful student cookbook.

Recipes in the book include Pasta Cara-bonara, Chilli con Cara, and Ma-Cara-oni. There’s a tongue-in-cheek undertone (images in the book include male biceps tattooed with a can of Cara Pils, as well as cans of Cara Pils being used as rolling pins). But Coppenrath believes in the integrity of the recipes. “Every recipe that’s in the book is a good recipe you can make at home,” he says. “It’s simple so every student can make it.”

“I vomited so much Cara Pils, it reminds me of the smell of vomit.”

Not all the recipes that Coppenrath tried worked. There’s an image in the book of someone pouring a pot of soup down the toilet. “The Cara soup was really bad,” says Coppenrath. “So many times I tried different recipes and they were all disgusting. I tried with many different vegetables. I don’t know what happens, but if you boil Cara Pils together with vegetables, I think you get a chemical reaction or something. It’s just something really bad. So I stopped trying.”

Within two days of the launch of “Koken met Cara Pils,” the first print run of 1,000 copies sold out. “It was totally crazy,” Coppenrath says of the interest. “A lot of newspapers. Journalists wanted to have an interview. I came on the radio.” Today, people send Coppenrath pictures of the dishes they have created with Cara Pils. “They send me tips about how they do it and how they changed the recipe a little,” he says. The book is now on its third print run.

It’s not just books about Cara Pils that sell. Cara Pils merchandise has become a lucrative business in Belgium. None of it is created by Colruyt. The website Redbubble sells Cara Pils posters, Cara Pils coffee mugs, and Cara Pils stickers, as well as a range of Cara Pils T-shirts, one of the most popular featuring the word “Carantaine” across the front. There’s also a “Carantaine” face mask.

Ghent-born Ben Ebben is a designer of bicycles for Belgian brands, but in his spare time he runs the online store Upsmuck on which he sells Cara Pils clothing items. It all started with a small Cara Pils patch. The most popular items on Upsmuck include a Cara Pilz T-shirt with a small embroidered can on the breast, a Jesus loves Cara patch, and Cara Pils crew socks. One comment from Ebben about his Cara Pils merchandise struck me as significant. “It’s one of the only products that sells well in both Flanders and Wallonia,” he told me, referring to Belgium’s Flemish- and French-speaking regions. “I don’t know any other things that work as well on both sides actually.” 

Most beers in Belgium, even national brands that are known all around the world, have a sense of place baked in. Orval is worshiped in the Gaume. Rodenbach is a Roeselare institution. De La Senne has Brussels coursing through its veins. Cara Pils, on the other hand, has no such provenance. Cara is not a Dutch word or a French word or a German word, and so cannot be claimed by any official Belgian language community. There’s a Colruyt supermarket in every big town in Belgium and, given its price, there are no barriers to buying the beer. Nobody knows where it’s made. No one knows who makes it. And no one seems to care. Cara Pils doesn’t belong to one particular group of Belgians—it belongs to them all. 

CARA PILS ENTHUSIASTS

Cara Pils has attracted a following not only among the greater Belgian public, but among Belgian brewers and beer enthusiasts. They are often tongue-in-cheek, but always fervent in their fanaticism. 

Take the Cara Pils Enthusiasts Facebook group, whose members include local beer festival organizers, brewery owners, taproom employees, and others in the industry. The group features a long list of eclectic posts: images of ultrasound baby scans aside cans of Cara Pils by way of celebration; discussions about Cara Pils’ potential for aging; videos of people being fined by police during the COVID-19 lockdown for leaving their homes to buy cans of Cara Pils; slabs of Cara Pils cans stacked in people’s trunks on top of wooden crates of Westvleteren Trappist Ales; and photos of Cara Pils being smuggled into sold-out beer festivals such as Billie’s Craft Beer Festival in Antwerp, and at famous beer cafés such as Moeder Lambic in Brussels. There are even videos of people sabering bottles of Cara Pils. 

Interestingly, the group is also populated with Lambic producers like Pierre Tilquin of Tilquin, Raf Souvereyns of Bokke, Jo Panneels of Lambiek Fabriek, Werner Van Obberghen of 3 Fonteinen, and Karel Boon of Boon. “All Hail the Cara God,” is their common mantra.

The Cara Pils Enthusiasts Facebook group is a “100% reaction to the lust that people have for some of these Belgian beers,” says Rich Soriano. “And then, there’s Cara Pils. Don’t take yourself too seriously.” 

Other brewers are taking the inspiration further. Misery Beer Company is a family brewery and bar located in a converted manor in the Ardennes region of southeastern Belgium. It designed a label for a new beer, Misery Pils, and published it online on April 1 as an April Fools’ joke. Its design was more than a little familiar. The iconic red band across the front was there, but the rows of golden barley grains were replaced with rows of golden pine trees, as a reference to the forest right next to the brewery. “Colruyt actually spotted it and contacted us saying it was funny and they liked it,” says Samia Patsalides of Misery. Misery later released the beer itself, Misery Pils, as a one-off batch in December 2020.

“You cannot say it’s a very good beer,” says Jan Kemker from Kemker Kultuur of Cara Pils. “But it’s something completely down-to-earth, which is sometimes necessary.” 

Kemker Kultuur is located on a farm in Alverskirchen, a small village near Münster, Germany. It’s brewed historical beers since 2017, focusing on original ingredients, wild yeasts, and long maturation in wood. One of Kemker’s beers is Alte Welt (“Old World”), a Lager brewed with historic Chevalier barley grown organically in the local area, and malted by a family maltster in Franconia. Its wort is cooled in a coolship and fermented with pure-culture Lager yeast. Kegs of the beer were sent to Gist, a famous beer café in Brussels, for a tasting event, and the stickers on the kegs had been designed in the style of the Cara Pils label. The name was changed to Coolship Pils for the occasion. Photos of the Coolship Pils keg stickers in the style of Cara Pils spread like wildfire online among the Belgian beer community. 

PUBLIC HIJACKING

In 2018, three assistant professors of marketing—Nicolas Kervyn and Iskra Herak of Université Catholique de Louvain, and Michael Breazeale of Mississippi State University—wrote an article in Vol. 14 of The CASE Journal (pp.69-87) entitled “Cara Pils, a brand despite itself.”

In the article, Kervyn, Herak, and Breazeale suggested that Cara Pils was an extreme example of brand hijacking, a concept defined by marketer Alex Wipperfürth as “the consumer’s act of commandeering a brand from the marketing professionals and driving its evolution.” 

“In the case of Cara Pils, there is literally no attempt at promotion,” wrote Kervyn, Herak, and Breazeale in their article. “There are thus no marketing professionals from which to commandeer the brand. Such an open source brand was thus ripe for a brand hijack.”

Such a brand hijack is evidenced by the popularity of Cara memes. One of the most popular features a young man trying to open a can at the 2010 Pukkelpop music festival in the Belgian village of Kiewit. In a YouTube video which has racked up more than half a million hits, the man is seen smashing the can with a rubber mallet amidst hundreds of festival tents. Beer sprays everywhere, and a woman’s voice from off-camera is heard shouting “wat een verspilling van bier” (“What a waste of beer”). The man’s response is instant. “’t Is Cara, trut”—“It’s Cara, bitch”— he shouts back dismissively. A dance remix video based on the verbal exchange—“’t Is Cara trut! (Jump Up remix)”—has been watched more than 250,000 times on YouTube. 

Charleroi-born comedian Tamara Payne, playing her famous character Stacy Star, filmed a parody commercial for Cara Pils nasal spray. The skit also featured Cara Pils toothpaste and Cara Pils hairspray. The video has received more than 420,000 views. And the Flemish creator Average Rob, who has almost 500,000 followers on TikTok, produced a short comedy video in 2020 in which he staged a conversation with himself to explain Cara Pils to his international audience. “It’s the most popular beer in Belgium,” one character says to the other. “It’s very special. The first one you drink, it tastes like piss of a horse. But then the one after, you’re already used to it, so it’s OK.”

But it’s perhaps the online groups which show just how ardently the Cara brand has been commandeered by the people of Belgium. In the Facebook group Daily Photos of Wild Carapils in Its Natural Habitat, you’ll find photo after photo of empty cans of Cara Pils scattered across fields, bus stops, and city squares. In the group The Church of Saint Cara Pils, you’ll discover images of babies being christened with Cara Pils, the beer poured over their heads from the can instead of holy water. There are online groups with Photoshopped memes of George Clooney, Taylor Swift, and Donald Trump with Cara Pils. On Reddit, there’s a discussion about whether a can in a screenshot of the animated sitcom “Rick and Morty” is a can of Cara Pils or an elaborate fan art manipulation. 

Another Facebook Group—CaraPils Around The World—features photos of Cara Pils in front of famous global landmarks: at Mount Vesuvius in Italy; at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin; at Niagara Falls in Canada; at the foot of the Eiffel Tower in Paris; among the standing stones at Stonehenge in Wiltshire; and under the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur. There are photos of Cara Pils riding tuktuks in New Delhi, being subjected to visual trickery on the salt plains of Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni, and even showcased in front of a scientific base at the South Pole in Antarctica. Cara Pils means so much to its cult following that Belgians are packing cans of Cara Pils in their luggage on long-haul flights so they can take photos of them all around the world.

Colruyt has gradually facilitated export of Cara Pils to Central and West Africa, China, Armenia, and a number of other regions and countries in recent years. One of its more unexpected success stories is in Costa Rica, where up until the current supply chain crisis, it was being imported by Belgian businessman Nico Mortier and his company Imbelco. Cara Pils was available to buy in 250 locations across the country. A local football team—Mejengueros F.C. of Venecia—plays with Cara Pils across the front of their jerseys. Cara Pils was marketed by Imbelco in Costa Rica as “Premium Belgian Pils.” (In Spanish, the word “Cara” translates as “expensive.”) 

BRAND EXTENSION

In March of this year, Colruyt launched two line extensions to Cara Pils. Cara Blond (8.5% ABV) is a “strong blond” and Cara Rouge (7.5% ABV) is a “fruit beer based on cherries.” “The taste of consumers is changing,” Koen Debusschere, a purchaser at Colruyt, was quoted as saying in a press release at the time. “Customers are now more likely to buy a strong blond beer or a fruit beer. We can tell by looking at the sales figures of the special beers in our stores.”

This brand extension is a dangerous game for Colruyt. Previously, it launched a non-alcoholic version of Cara Pils, an initiative which it has admitted was not a success. With these two new beers, it’s attempting to produce distinct flavors at price points which, while still incredibly low (€0.52 and €0.69 for a 33cl can respectively), are not the very cheapest of all beers in Belgium. There’s no brand nostalgia. There’s no anti-hero glory. With every new Cara beer and every joyful press release, Colruyt might be seen as trying to wrestle back the brand from the Belgian consumers who made Cara Pils what it is. 

Rich Soriano of the Cara Pils Enthusiasts group describes a typical Cara Pils occasion as popping into a nightshop (late-night convenience store) and grabbing cans to drink with friends on the steps of the Bourse, the old Stock Exchange building in the center of Brussels. 

“At this point, it’s no longer about the beer,” says Soriano. “You’re fostering connections and you’re talking and laughing and doing all these things. And there just needs to be something there. Cara Pils is the vehicle through which the evening goes.” 

The Bourse—a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which acts as a major meeting place for Brusseleirs—is currently undergoing an ambitious renovation which the city is hoping will transform it into a cultural and tourist hotspot. From spring 2023, it will boast a skybar, restaurant, and brasserie, with new access to an existing archaeological site. There will also be a permanent exhibition center about Belgian beer called Belgian Beer World, with beers from more than 100 breweries on display for an expected 400,000 visitors per year. Cara Pils won’t make it into the experience center, but Soriano and other enthusiasts will still be drinking Belgium’s most cult beer right there on the steps outside.

Words + Photos
Breandán Kearney