It’s been a while since we had an excuse to visit Schaerbeek to report on a new beery destination, but the Python Beer Cellar finally lured us back to the city of donkeys!
The modern looking bar—but with just a touch of curly nostalgia—is quite a walk away from the other beer bars in Schaarbeek, therefore serving a completely different herd of customers, who can—and should—make this bar their own.
You’ve probably tasted their products, even if you’ve never heard of La Fruitière: some of the best beer bars get the cheese for their cheese platter from this cheesemonger. Cheese and beer make a great combination, so it shouldn’t really come as a surprise that finally, a cheese shop decided to sell and serve beer as well, and even on draught! And not just any beer, but some of the best Brussels—or even Canada, as it happens—has to offer!
If you’ve been to any beer bar or beer festival in the last couple of months, you must already have noticed the posters or flyers, for BXLBeerFest. In just a week— Saturday the 25th and Sunday 26th of August 2018 to be exact—the biggest, cleanest, freshest, and tastiest beer festival dedicated to artisan beer in Brussels, will take place for the second time at Tour & Taxis, and we sure hope you can all make it!
We’ve sat outside a couple of beer shops enjoying a freshly bought fresh beer before, but there are only few beer shops that actually encourage this. Luckily, Les Fleurs du Malt does—at least in summer—and it has set up a nice little terrace on the square in front of the store. This was an excellent opportunity for us to spend a bit more time on the metro to get to Woluwe-Saint-Lambert, as it turns out, for the first time for this blog.
UPDATE: Closed permanently…
We’ve discussed a couple of buvettes and guingettes in parks before, but the hot and sunny weather forces us to drink outside again… Not that we mind! This time, we visited Bar Eliza in the Elisabethpark, a bar quite unlike the other park bars we visited so far. For starters, Eliza isn’t exactly in it for the money, but it’s ran by a couple of local foundations, of which you might already recognise community centers De Platoo and De Zeyp as organisers of the Plazey festival.
We don’t like to repeat ourselves, but the amount of burger places with some attention for beer is considerable, so once again, we visit a burger restaurant: Broebbeleir. This time, we have to compose the burger ourselves from scratch, there aren’t any chef’s suggestions to avoid it. However, there are enough options to make yourself a tasty burger, and a couple of sides if you don’t think it will be enough. And there is beer, of course!
UPDATE: After being closed for a while, it reopened under new management. We have revisited it since, and it seems mostly unchanged.
Once again, we found ourselves in the Marolles, right next to the location of the famous flea market, this time at CHAFF. While the band was getting ready to play later on that evening, we picked a table on the first floor to have a couple of local beers—almost every brewery in Brussels was represented with at least one beer—and something to eat. Despite the large choice of rather healthy looking dishes, we decided to go for the burgers.
Pizza and beer, it still is a great combination! Most pizza places, however, offer little more than a commercial lager, and certainly no draught options. At La Bottega della Pizza Sablon, there’s at least the reassuring presence of a couple of De la Senne beers on draught, alongside Dupont‘s organic saison Biolégère, to go with the wide selection of Neapolitan pizzas.
If you’ve been to any of the beer bars in Brussels, it would have been hard to miss: the beer festival summer in Brussels kicks off again this weekend with the second edition of the Swafff! Brussels Craft Beer Fffestival. It has already started a little bit with several Swafff Week events in a number of bars—still some more tonight—but the main event is in Karreveld Castle on Saturday the 19th and Sunday the 20th of May, where more than 20 Belgian and other European breweries will gather to serve us their best beers.
UPDATE: Closed permanently…
A well-known, centuries old, derisive term to describe the inhabitants of Brussels, is “Kiekefretters“, which translates to ‘chicken devourers’. However, with a name like that, there are remarkably few chicken restaurants in Brussels. La Pouletterie en Ville is one of the more recent restaurants trying to fill that gap, and very successfully, we must say!
Is one main ingredient—roast chicken, of course—and one beer on draught—Bertinchamps Blonde—really all you need?