Rives de Clausen

The bars and restaurants along the river here, in the tall brick buildings with the old brewery's name still on them, stand where Luxembourg has been making beer for as long as anyone can trace. The monks of the abbey on the plateau above brewed by the river from the early fourteenth century, growing their own barley and hops; when the emperor's troops destroyed the abbey in 1543, the mills, the ovens and the brewhouse down here were about the only things spared. Twenty years later Governor Mansfeld, building his palace next door, put up a brewery of his own — in 1929 workmen found his initials under a crown in the old brewhouse — and after his death it passed to the Teutonic Knights, who ran it until the French Revolution. Clausen, the French say, is the "cité de la bière".

The name over the door is Mousel's. Michel Mousel bought the old abbey brewery on the 17th of December 1825, and four generations of the family ran it and grew it: his grandson Emile, who became a deputy and mayor of the city, merged the family's two Clausen breweries in 1885, and in 1971 the firm joined with its neighbour and old rival, the Brasserie de Clausen — Mansfeld's — to form the Brasseries Réunies, Mousel et Clausen. Brewing here stopped in the end, and the buildings stood idle, until in 2008 the Rives de Clausen opened in them: a street of bars, and, fittingly, a small brewery called Clausel making beer on the old site again. The saint at the entrance is Arnould, patron of brewers.

The street itself was the Rue Émile Mousel until it was renamed; the square at its end still carries his name.