My wife and I have been living in Antwerp for two months now (business) and have used it as our base to explore most of Belgium. Phil Seitz posted some information on visits to Belgium a while back. All excellent information. I hope to supplement some of it; Phil, you seem to visit Francophone Belgium more often than not. I aim to provide more details about the Flemish side.
I will disclaim this information now. I do not have lots of different books on Belgium and Belgian beers, so I don't know if any of it is redundant. I do have Jackson, which seems to be pretty good. I also have your collected wisdom. Thanks to all. I apologize for length, but hope you'll find the bandwidth worthwhile. I'll be happy to respond/defend, but would appreciate it if you wouldn't overload my CompuSpend mailbox; TIA.
If you will be based in a city, use the trains, trams and subways. They run frequently and are reasonably priced in a country where gasoline costs a buck a liter and parking is a PITA. They are even cheaper on the weekend if you buy a return ticket, and if there are two or more in your party it gets cheaper still. We can both go round trip to Brussels from Antwerp for 420 BeF on the weekend.
An excellent, budget way to see Belgium is by the Train and Bicycle program You can take a train to a station and then rent a bicycle for a day (return by 8PM) or longer. 35 stations participate in the program, and most have marked trails through the surroundings. If you take the train, you get a discount on the bike rental; it costs 150 BeF instead of the 280 BeF you pay for walk-in rentals.
You call the stations in advance to book the bikes; pick up a Trein + Fiets or Train + Velo brochure from your local station. They also provide a lock, a bungee and a pump. No helmets were available. You have to pay a deposit (3 bikes = 700 BeF) and have some ID; passport is better than drivers' license.
These bikes aren't all in the best condition, but they let us pick our own out from those in stock. I call them 'Peewee Herman' bikes, more for their appearance than their behavior, although mine did slip gears time and again. They're 3-speeds and are available in mens' and womens' models.
Antwerp has a small center; you can walk to all of the places listed here from the Central station. There's also a good tram link that runs the width of the center, so if you visit one too many places, you can still get right back to the train station. If you drive, park along the Schelde river; spots are more plentiful there.
If you've been reading a while, you've probably guessed that the Kulminator cafe is my favorite. It has the best selection of any cafe, anywhere, that we've visited to date. It's namesake beer is available here, as well as a reasonable selection of other imports, but who comes to Belgium to drink Guinness? Classical music is the background. It's speciality is cellared beers, and I've recently posted a list of just the lambic selections. They also have some aged Goudenbands, Chimays, Stille Nachts (nachten?).
This is the home cafe of De Objectieve Bierproevers. The proprietor, Dirk van Dyck, is the club's VP. Peter Crombeq, BTW, is the Prez. You can join OBP here for 600 BeF if you're so inclined. Membership includes a subscription to the quarterly journal and you can participate in activities like brewery tours, the weekend of Spontaneous yeasting, the 24 hours of Belgian Beer, etc.
Jackson makes mention of De Pelgrom on Pelgrimstraat. Rightly so, perhaps. It's a great old brick cellar, with a reasonable selection of beers. Their speciality is the Poorter beer sold in a 750 ml crock. They let you keep the bottle if you like, but the beer didn't live up to its $10 pricetag.
Located nearby, however, is an even greater find; De Cluyse, which is another cellar, this one in stone, dating back even further. It appears non-descript from the street, but the atmosphere is unique and they have a much better selection here, including Boon products (sir, I must warn you, these beers are very sour :-))
These places are both close to the 280 + beer soorten store on Reynders Straat. I posted some information on this place a few digests back. In that relatively short span, they've received a new order of Cantillon which they are selling at much better prices. The 750 ml Gueuze was down from 300 BeF to 115 BeF. I asked the shopkeep about this (complimented him, actually) and he told me that he was now buying from the brewery directly rather than from a distributor. They also had quite a stock of lambic products just in; the Liefmann's Foudroyant line is there. I'm not a Genever-proever, but if you are, note that there is also a genevers shop and cafe (De Vagant) on Reynders straat.
A couple of other notes. The cafe Bierland, mentioned in Jackson, sadly doesn't live up. You walk down the street and there's a huge inviting sign screaming BIERLAND. You go in; it's a student cafe (apparently didn't used to be). The menu is the old Bierland menu, but most everything is crossed out.
Jackson mentions the old place 'Aux Armes de Tirlemont' at the Eiermarkt as a good place to drink Gueuze (de Neve). We keep trying to go but it always seems to be closed. Once we got through the doors, only to find that it was a private party.
And another place to drink in style is De Elfde Geboud, near the cathedral; there's a beer of the same name, but I doubt if there's an affiliation. The place is chock full of icon statues apparently 'purchased' from churches. The beer list isn't vast, but it beats the heck out of Quinten Matsijs, which Jackson touts.
East of Antwerp, the Westmalle Trappistencafe. The locals tell a story that this cafe is connected by underground pipes to the brewery across the road. True or _not_, it's a great place for a pilgrimage. One would suppose that you get the freshest Westmalle here, as well as the opportunity to eat the monastery's cheese and bread with your beer. It's got a large patio for sitting in the sun and people-watching, and even on the blustery, rainy day we visited, it was quite crowded.
For classic cafes, don't miss A la Mort Subite. Their Mort Subite Gueuze is served from 750's and is more complex that the stuff I can get in the supermarket (375 ml bottles). Probably lays around a while. Either that or the atmosphere makes it better. This is the only cafe I've seen with a non-smoking section. They also stock the full spectrum of flavored MS products. The Art Deco places near the Bourse are also nice, but their beer lists are pretty lame.
Otherwise, consider stepping out to Lambic country (would you not? :-)) There are three tours we saw; the Hoppe, the Geuze and the Brueghel. All cross around this country and you can visit nearly every lambic town within a few km. We drove, but you could bike it if you don't mind some hills. I didn't get to visit any breweries (to Jay Hersh, who posted on the Boon brewery in LD #342, thanks, made me feel like I didn't miss it all). The countryside is gorgeous, particularly on the Brueghel route.
We did stop at De Rare Vos in Schepdaal, which is the home town of Eylenbosch. There you can drink young lambic straight from the barrel; purchase it by the liter for 110 BeF. For Todd Gierman, who asked about pure lambics, it was slightly sour and totally flat. Young is probably the key word here; with age it would be different. I've only tried one Eylenbosch, but I'd guess it's pretty souped-up, so to speak, by blending, sweetening (?) and certainly by carbonation. They also have a kriek lambic which tasted like Faygo Redpop, if that doesn't pin down my region too much. It was really too much cherry. Since I don't brew (yet), I don't know if this is par for the course on fresh kriek.
The Brugse Beertje, which receives digest mention occasionally, is a good stop. We had the Boon Framboise '86 here, but we were contributing to the tourist menace and so I didn't have too much time to drink in the menu. The surroundings are pubby; they have lots of posters, etc.
We found the cafe Erasmus to be even more enjoyable. For some reason, the place was completely empty when we visited. It doesn't jump out as a beer cafe; very modernistic. The proprietor entertained us with stories of his desire to serve quality beers; his favorite at the moment, and not a hard sell at that, was De Dolle Brouwers' Dulle Teve. I received a lengthy lecture about the pronunciation of Gueuze (huur-zuh) here.
And the Hopduvel, which has been made famous by Jackson, is worth seeking out. It's a good walk from the city center on a small side street - hard to find on most maps, but check out the Belgium street guide. They have a good selection of beers and a collection of breweriana; also a beer garden which would be pleasant if it ever stopped raining. They list Cantillon products as their house brand; I also understand that they brew some of their own beers. Jackson notes their spice beer, which I didn't see on the menu. One word of caution; they committed the faux pas of serving the lambics upright. You can see on the bottles where the yeast has laid down on the side during storage. By the end of a bottle, you can imagine where the yeast winds up. A bright point. They are the only place where I've found a DDB Boskeun beer in stock, and this was a fantastic product.
And finally on Ghent, we've spun some bandwidth over the book Het Mysterie van de Geuze by Jos Cels lately. I found my copy at the Club Gent (which, despite it's name, is a paper/book store). Price is 1695 BeF (about $50). Books cost a lot in Belgium. They had a copy at a store in Bruges, too, but I forget the name. As noted, Standaard Boekhandel doesn't stock the book. You can order it there; two weeks delivery, same price.
Last Updated: 16 August, 1995
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