It was, honestly, entirely by chance that my recent stay with my son in Brussels turned out to be the same weekend that the city hosted not one but two beer festivals.
The bigger of the two was the 24th annual Belgian Beer Weekend, organised by the Belgian Brewers, the Knighthood of the Brewers’ Mash Staff (the brewers’ guild), and the City of Brussels. It’s held in the Grand Place, the magnificent medieval central square, and it offers 400 varieties of beer from more than 50 Belgian breweries.
There is a long line of stalls, and each brewery has one, staffed by representatives who talk about their beer rather like French vintners talk about their wine. Belgium is justly proud of its national drink, and just a little bit fussy about it.
So heaven forbid you should drink one beer from another brewery’s branded glass. To avoid this, there is a complicated payment system. You have to put money on a special card, and each brewery’s stall takes the price of your beer from your card, and also takes a deposit for your glass. Before you move on to the next brewery, you must return the glass to get your deposit back. As I said – a bit fussy.
Like most people, Peter and I avoided the stalls offering Stella and Leffe, which you can buy anywhere. We started at the Het Anker brewery, based in the Flanders city of Mechelen, where there is a hotel and a restaurant attached to the brewery. We asked for a tasting glass of their pride and joy, the Gouden Carolus, impregnated with whisky: alcohol content, 11.7%.
It was like nothing either of us had tasted before – strong, dark, smooth, complicated, and delicious. We expected just a note of whisky, but instead we got the strong taste of a very fine whisky. We could have drunk it all night, though we wouldn’t have got home afterwards.
Nothing was going to compete with that. We had a couple of Belgian IPAs – perfectly pleasant, and better than the American sort. And from the St-Feuillien brewery, we had a dark, sweet, luxurious Christmas Beer (Cuvée de Noël), which did taste a little like Christmas, but much more like licorice.
We savoured it and watched the crowds. Beside us was a large man in brown lederhosen, and at the next brewery stall was a man in a red waistcoat, green coat, breeches and shovel hat. We recognised him as one of the hallebardiers who gravely escort visitors around the town hall, which was only a few yards from where we stood. He was on duty, as you could see from the costume, but judging by the glass of Christmas Beer in one hand and the cigarette in the other, he was on his break.
The second beer festival was less than a five-minute walk from the first, in Place Sainte Catherine. It’s run by the Brussels Beer Project, a fairly new Brussels brewery, and the festival hosted 14 craft breweries from 11 countries. No obsessing about glasses here – you get a plastic cup and take it round the stalls for a refill.
We headed straight for Varvar, the brewery founded in Kyiv in 2015, and asked to try their Imperial Stout, which they describe as “a deep and luxuriant imperial stout with an eight malt base and a heavy dose of lactose for a full and smooth mouthfeel. Cold rested on locally roasted coffee with a generous addition of caramel and Madagascan vanilla.” That’s as may be: it tasted like beer and chocolate to us. The alcohol content was 11.4%. We couldn’t have managed a second.
Belgium is full of these beer festivals. Bruges also held one when I was there, and if you’re in Antwerp on November 8-9, you can check out 56 breweries at Billie’s Craft Beer Fest.
Francis Beckett is an English journalist, biographer and contemporary historian
