Brussels

We started the day with a call home before heading out on our day of exploring the beers of Belgium!

Our first stop was Brussels oldest brewery where we learnt about the process required to brew ‘Lambic’ beer. The production of this beer does not use modern cooling tanks and temperature control, and as such cannot be brewed in summer when it is too hot. Instead, it relies on the natural weather environment and traditional methods like using wind to cool the beer as it is produced. It was very cool seeing the entire process from mashing the ingredients through to bottling and then finished the tour with a few samples of the lambic beer. It had a very interesting taste and is more similar to a wine rather than a beer, which makes sense given it is aged in a oak barrel. This type of process of making wine is only now done in Belgium and is very rare.

We walked for a bit from the brewery and checked out some more comic book murals across the city (and we even checked out a comic book store which was very cool!)

Our next stop involved ticking off another important Brussels food tradition - mussels! We had some delicious mussels and fries accompanied by a couple of very flavourful beers, a red rosè (made with raspberries) and triple amber!

There was one last "must eat" item in Brussels and that was chocolate! We went to Mary’s, the oldest shop in Brussels (which was the first to officially be the chocolate of choice for the royal family). Mary's was highly recommended by our tour guide from yesterday and they use traditional chocolate making techniques so we had to give it a go! It now has chains all over Belgium. We tried a couple each including a salted caramel dark chocolate, peacan chocolate and dark chocolate mousse (which was our favourite!) The chocolate was nothing short of delicious and gave us the energy to continue on with our pub crawl!

We went to the Delirium Cafe, where we tried their ‘Beer Meter’ - a long paddle of 10 quite sizeable tasting beers! We enjoyed the various flavours as we made another call ‘home’ - to Daniel’s parents in the US!

We made our final stop at a bar called Gist (dutch for yeast), which brew their own beers and just so happened to have happy hour whilst we were there! We enjoyed some strong sours (which Gab loved), amber and dark beers as the days' drinking was starting to catch up with us! We had some great chats and lots of fun sitting outside enjoying the little bit of sun.

We made it back to the Airbnb in one piece to have dinner and watch a movie and then called Daniel’s cousins in the US before heading to bed!Read more