We started our morning by taking a pretty long walk over to the Cantillon Brewery. It was founded in 1900, and it's a traditional family-run brewery that's known for its lambics. They do everything the old-fashioned way at this brewery, and one of the most interesting parts is the fermentation process: they leave it completely up to nature and don't add any yeasts. They rely on wild airborne yeasts to start the fermentation process during open-air cooling in a large copper vessel. The brewery wants the wild airborne yeast to get in their lambic but they don't want bugs, bacteria, etc that are prevalent during the warmer seasons to contaminate their lambic, so they only brew during the cold season: the end of October through early April. It's really fascinating... And the brewery itself is really fascinating too, because they still use equipment from the 19th century. The tour was self-guided, which was a lot of fun. It was cool to explore this super old brewery on our own, and we had booklets that they gave us to help us with the tour. Oh another thing I thought was funny was that during the tour I was noticing TONS of huge spider webs everywhere, and we were commenting to each other about how that'd never fly in the U.S., and then in the tour booklet they actually comment on the spider webs towards the end of it. They said that insecticides are harmful to beer maturing in barrels, so they let Mother Nature take care of the job of controlling insects... and that means spiders! Spiders are natural predators, so they help maintain the biological equilibrium in the brewery by controlling insects. They never destroy cobwebs or kills spiders in the brewery. At the end of the tour, we got to sample some of the lambics!! These are not the super sweet fizzy lambics that they offer sometimes in the states. There was nothing sweet about these lambics! They were potent.
Here's McGee standing in front of some of the old-school equipment!
Another area in the brewery...
Here's the copper cooling area for the open air fermentation (you can see the windows that they open on the left side of the picture)
Our samples after the tour!
We had another awesome Belgian waffle today. I can't get enough of them! They're so good with the caramelized sugar on the outside. And the Belgians don't eat waffles like we do - they aren't breakfast or a dessert really, they're more of a snack that you walk around with. They don't put syrup, etc on them like we do! They usually just eat them plain, or sometimes with jam on them. Interesting, huh? After our waffle, we walked over to the Delirium bar. They sell Delirium's beer in the states (it has a pink elephant on it), but the bar has their own beer and a HUGE selection of other Belgian beers. So we spent some time hanging out there. Oh and we made sure to get McGee some mussels today! He loves mussels, and it is definitely mussels season here in Belgium.
For dinner, we went to this awesome tiny restaurant that specializes in Belgian comfort food, and it was AMAZING. The name of their restaurant translates to The Greedy Glutton. They cook pretty much everything with beer (of course). McGee had rabbit and frites, and I had some chicken in a kriek sauce along with stoemp (a potato and vegetable dish). After supper, we went to this super teeny tiny old bar that McGee read about online, because it's one of the few bars that offers a trappist beer he really wanted to try. The beer is called Westvleteren 12, and it's ranked as one of the best beers in the world. McGee agreed.
Here's the inside of the bar! There were some beautiful windows.
Here McGee is leaving the bar!
And this is the funny little doorway that leads to the alley that the bar is down. Can you see how short the doorway is? If you compare it to the garage doors next to it, you can see how tiny it is...
Here's another picture of some Christmas lights that are up in Brussels! It's so pretty.
Tomorrow we leave for Antwerp! We've had a lovely 4 nights staying in Brussels, and next it's one night in Antwerp and then 2 in Amsterdam after that! This has been an amazing trip so far!!
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