Worcester’s Belgian outpost: Craig Finn on building TripelB

Most British towns get one Belgian beer, maybe two, lined up behind a row of cask handles like exotic-looking strangers nobody quite knows what to do with. Worcester got something else entirely. Tucked down Copenhagen Street, TripelB has been pouring more than a hundred Belgian beers — tripels, dubbels, Trappist and Abbey ales, lambics, fruit beers — since it opened in September 2019, plus the frites, croque-monsieurs, charcuterie and waffles to do them justice. It famously does not sell real ale, and that’s the point: this is a Belgian specialist, not a pub with a Belgian shelf.

TripelB is also special to our hearts as a Belgium Beer Week participant.

The man behind it is Craig Finn, joint proprietor and operational manager — a Worcester local who spent three decades in project management before deciding that what the city really needed was somewhere you could drink a properly poured Belgian beer. (For a while TripelB was, by some counts, only the fourth place in the UK to have Duvel on tap.)

We sat down with Craig for a long conversation about how a former project manager ends up running one of the more uncompromising Belgian beer cafés in the UK, what it takes to keep a 100-strong Belgian list moving in a regional city, and why he refuses to put a hand pump on the bar.