This is the weekend of the annual Brussels Beer Festival, when just under thirty breweries descend on the Grand Place to enable all the tourists to get drunk just a little bit faster… 🙂
We went out at lunch to take a look and came across the parade of brewery carts with their beautiful big horses getting ready to depart in front of St Catherine’s church. Every time I see these horses it reminds me of trips to the Shire Horse Centre in Cornwall or the Clydesdale Farm in Scotland as a child. I think we even had a book about them!
The beer festival was your average display of Belgian organisation – hundreds of punters queuing at just three booths to get their “cork crowns” to pay for the beer with. Finally we had our currency in hand and headed into the chaos to find some beer.
Of course, if you know me at all well you know I am not actually a fan of beer. I managed once to drink a whole glass of Delirium beer, and have occasionally tried some of Rasmus’ and thought it not too horrendous. But I tend to stick to the “girly beers” which in Belgium are most commonly Kriek (cherry flavour beer) or Framboise (raspberry flavour beer).
So to be a little adventurous this time I tried the Strawberry beer, the Banana beer and the Blackcurrant beer. Yes, you read that right. Banana flavour beer. It was actually not so bad. I wasn’t expecting much because come on, I know I don’t drink “real” beer but that’s just taking it a bit too far. But aside from reminding us a little of those banana sweets you get, it was quite good. There was a bitterness to it which balanced out the tastes-like-penny-sweets effect.
The festival is still on until tomorrow evening so if you’re one of my Brussels readers, you should head that way and check it out yourselves.
