So many beers so little time

One charming quality about Belgian beer culture is that a beer must always be poured in the right glass. Instead of generic pint glasses, every brewery also produces glasses of distinct shape with the brewery’s trademark on it. For example Hoegaarden glasses are very wide and have 6 flat sides, Leffe is served in something resembling a wine glass, my favourite Grimbergen comes in a stubby short goblet.

The tradition becomes difficult to maintain when Anglo-Saxons are involved. Thanks to the European Parliament, and Irish Pubs, Brussels now has establishments that offer “Happy Hour”, something not typically Belgian. These places are distinctive because they usually have a bar name in English, have only English speakers inside, have shorter beer menus, and drink deals. After work on Fridays you can often find a sea of interns in front of the Pullman where the 2-for-1 deal makes a massive ½ litre of Hoegaarden cost only 3 euros. At my “local”, the happy hour goes until 10pm on weekdays, midnight on weekends, and beer ranges from 1 to 2 euros.

This all makes a place like the Delirium Café, all the more mind boggling. As the Guinness World Record holder for most varieties of beer available, they promise to stock at least 2004 beers, with as many as 2500 available on a given night. The beer menu is a book kept under the bar that could easily take an hour to flip through. So it seemed like the best place to end Lauren’s night-tour of Brussels.

I met Lauren at the Eurostar station just after work and we vainly tried to find a cash machine. In a train station that has almost everything it strikes me as typically Belgian to not have easy access to an ATM. We haul straight to my place to drop off bags and get Mads and head off to a Flemish restaurant for some grub. The menu is written on a tall chalkboard at the end of the bar and we grab a hot meal while having a few drinks. Lauren then gets the quick tour of the major “sites”, the bourse, the grand place, and finally the manneken pis. Lauren didn’t quite buy that a small statue of a boy peeing in a fountain can be a tourist attraction, but accepts that we aren’t “taking the piss” when other tourists start to photo it, and we show her a souvenir shop with hundreds of little naked manneken pis boys on the shelves.

Delirium isn’t the nicest bar in the world, in actuality its sort of a tourist trap. But it does have over 2000 beers available, most with their own glasses. Lauren and I get a Kwak which comes in a narrow neck glass without a flat bottom. We follow that up with a round of Bush Ambree, which holds the record as Belgium's strongest beer at 12%. Considering it was a Monday, this might have taken things too far, but all in all it was one to remember.