Hunt for Westvleteren

Cantillon tour	€5
Convenience store croissants & water	€13
Bad sandwich place	€5
Decent cafe (for 3)	€30
Bier Palace (beer & glass)	€40
Brussels Bar Crawl	€15
Drinks on the Bar Crawl (total)	€60
Late fast-food dinner	€5

 

Brussels is actually an awesome city. They have a ton of bike rental stations all around the city, and you can rent a bike in one spot and return it to another. The only problem is it requires a credit card with a chip, which none of us have. So we didn't get to experiment with that.

We did visit Cantillon, a Brussels classic brewery. It's been around for 8 generations and it brews some of the best beer in Belgium. It's a traditional / lambic brewery, so all their beers are spontaneously fermented and quite sour. They have the process down, they really know how to blend and they have excellent ingredients. We visited the brewery and got a tour -- it's also called the "Museum of Gueuze" because they have intentionally never upgraded their brewing equipment, instead using all the stuff they used 100 years ago. This is an awesome experience and highly recommended to anyone visiting Brussels.

They barrel age most of their product for 1-3 years, and the barrels all have cryptic markings on them, presumably indicating the type of beer and year. They also love spiders: they eat the insects you don't like, so any spiderweb is sacred in a lambic brewery.

We traded our Dogfish 90 minute to the Cantillon head brewer, who seemed like a cool guy -- he knows (and loves) Lord Hobo, one of my favorite bars in Cambridge, MA.

 

After Cantillon, we had sandwiches, pasta, and Kasteel Brune for lunch, then bought several bottles at Bier Temple, which is a very well-stocked beer store in downtown Brussels. I'm sure we're overpaying compared to the source, but the excellent beers are still quite a bit cheaper than in the US. And they had some illicit Westvleteren in stock, which was a nice prize and for which we obviously paid €8 per bottle to try. (This was our first taste of Westvleteren and we savored it with joy.)

We had some beers in our hotel room and then decided to take a look at the aforementioned Brussels Bar Crawl to see if it was going to be cool. There were a lot of really attractive girls there, mostly aged 19-23, when we arrived, and more showed up, so it was definitely worth the entrance fee (since we knew from yesterday that the beer was going to be terrible). So we paid the €15 for the company and mostly just bought our own beer. One of the bars on the tour was Delirium again, where they (predictably) served us Campus. The next bar was a pirate-themed bar which actually had a really good selection of bottles.

Tim managed to go home with a hot girl, and I was proud of him. The rest of us went to a club after the bar crawl and danced to David Guetta and Black Eyed Peas. Typical Eurodance music, which I really like. The other guys were meh about it.

 

Cantillon	Gueuze	Beautifully crafted, one of the best beers in the world if you like gueuze. Which I do.
Cantillon	Kriek	Perfect balance of sourness, dryness and sweet from cherries.
Cantillon	Rose Gambrinus	Very good raspberry beer, though I like the kriek more.
Cantillon	2-year lambic	Served from the cask, perfectly flat, sour, and quite pleasant (but not quite as refreshing as a gueuze).
Cantillon	Faro	Lambic sweetened. Reminds me of semi-sweetened iced tea, but with more sourness. Refreshing in a different way.
Kasteel	Brune	Alcohol flavor in this (13%) beer is too strong, but otherwise it has a wonderful flavor. I would like this one a little less strong.
Rodenbach Grand Cru	Flanders Red	My favorite Flanders Red. Very dry, much drier than the others. Oak flavor is awesome.
De Ranke XX Bitter	Pale Ale	Quite hoppy, but pleasant. I found it too bitter.
Rochefort 10	Strong Dark Ale	A rich, delicious classic, findable in the US.
Westvleteren	Blond	I love this. It's got enough hop aroma to make it interesting but not bitter. Good amount of wheat, very refreshing.
Westvleteren 8	Strong Dark Ale	Oh wow. Rich, dark, with a definite, charming Brett finish which makes this a really lovely beer.
Malheur 10	Pale Ale	Strong pale ale, comparable to XX bitter, but less bitter. It's still not my favorite though. Something about the flavor balance.
Gueuze Boon	Gueuze	A good gueuze though it doesn't hold a candle to Cantillon.
Vichtenaar	Flanders Red	A sweet one, and very well crafted. Too sweet for my tastes, but Neil and Tim love it.
Huyghe La Guillotine	Strong Golden Ale	This seems a lot better than Delirium Tremens. Neil likes it a lot. Perhaps closer to a tripel?