The tourist season is here again, and for a beer tourist, there’s no better place than Belgium. Therefore I recently visited three ‘beer experiences’ in and around Brussels. What do they offer, and is it worth spending your hard-earned money on a ticket? Let’s look inside the Abbey beer museum at Grimbergen, the Beer museum on the Grand-Place, and the Belgian Beer World at La Bourse.
Researching lost beers demands quite a lot of imagination. More than often the available brewing records are illegible, messy, incomplete or they simply look like something from another planet. The problem is of course that the brewer who once wrote them down was completely familiar with his own brewery and the ingredients, so he didn’t record everything. Clearly he didn’t think: ‘Would someone still understand this in one and a half century’s time?’ Today’s breweries, big or small, differ greatly from the situation back then. What was a hopback at the time? How did you handle a mash tun or a fermenting vessel? Only slowly old texts start to make sense. Therefore, it’s very helpful to see everything for real. And that is possible in Maastricht, a city at the most southern tip of the Netherlands. (more…)