Hello, Belgium!

Should have been posted Friday:

Hello from Brussels! We arrived here Thursday afternoon after a long train ride. The group went to dinner at a restaurant that brews lambic, an interesting Belgian beer. I tried the Lambic Blanc. It was very different. Not very carbonated and quite sour. It reminded me more of a champagne or wine than a beer. We stopped at a grocery store on the way back and bought a few Belgian beers for relatively cheap. I tried a couple Chouffe beers which were good. They were quite strong (8.5% ABV...a big difference from Germany!). Then a few of us went to Cafe Delirium, a bar that is very close to our hotel and popular with the locals that serves 1000 beers. There were a lot of people there. I noticed the demographic was much younger than in Germany. There were also many more females here. I tried a blonde beer that was again quite strong compared to German beers. 

Friday we got up early and began our tour of Brussels. All of the buildings we saw were so old! The streets here are very narrow and the buildings are very close together. We walked to the center of Brussels which is right inside the City Hall. I learned that all of the buildings in the city center were once destroyed and the king said the guilds had only four years to rebuild all of the buildings. That's why 1697 is written on all of the buildings in that area; to represent the four years they had. Each guild had their own building and their own church. We also got to see some of the old wall that surrounded Brussels. Our tour guide then took us to the cafe at the top of the art museum where we had a coffee and looked at an amazing view of Brussels. We were at the top of a mountain at the highest point in Brussels. It feels so different here than in Germany. It is much more ethnically diverse and feels much older. 

After a lunch consisting of pommes frites (french fries...healthy, I know :] ) we took the metro to Cantillon, a very old brewery in Brussels. All of the equipment used was very old...very different from what I saw at any other brewery. I believe they have been around since 1900. This brewery specializes in lambic beer. They concentrate on the sourness of the beer...not sweetness or bitterness. They use spontaneous fermentation in wooden barrels and bacteria that lives in the barrels contributes to the beer's sour flavor. The beer is fermented for three years and it is only brewed in the winter when it is cold. After the tour, we got to taste lambic, gueze (a mixture of young, 1 year old lambic with 3 year old lambic), and kriek. The lambic was hardly carbonated at all. It was light and reminded me a lot like wine. It was very sour and hit the sides of my tongue. It was so different from anything I had tasted and did not seem at all like beer. The gueze was a bit darker and more carbonated. It seemed more sour than the lambic. The kriek smelled and tasted like cherry pie. Again, it was very sour and didn't seem like beer. The brewery was unlike anything we have seen so far. Belgium doesn't have a purity law like Germany, so they are able to add more interesting ingredients to their beers. In just two days I can already tell that the beer here is very, very unique. I can't wait to try more!