Having a beer with your lunch — even on a normal work day — isn’t uncommon in Belgium, but finding high quality beer in a sandwich place, is. At Pistolet Original they’re not only serving some of the best Brussels beers to drink with your ‘pistolet’, they even use our beloved Cantillon gueuze as an ingredient for their latest creation, the Zenne Pistolet Cantillon!
City of Brussels
Hoppy Loft
UPDATE: Is just a part of the Delirium bar now, and doesn’t serve anything special anymore…
We had selected the Hoppy Loft for a blog post before, but that night they only had almost nothing but Huyghe beers on draught, and once you’ve tried their Delirium beers, you’ve had their best already. So we quickly left again, to visit an other place to write about for that week.
Lesson learnt: don’t go to the Hoppy Loft, unless they’ve announced something interesting on their Facebook page.
Luckily, last week they posted something about some beers from La Débauche, a French brewer until that moment unknown to us. Knowing there would al least a couple of new beers to try, we headed back to the dreaded Delirium Village…
ViaVia Traveler’s Café
UPDATE: Moved to the other side of the Vismet and got a new name: Au Bassin
ViaVia Traveler’s Café is not new, but its current location is. And what a difference it makes! We had visited ViaVia quite a few times before at its old location, and then it already was a very pleasant place, with a nice covered courtyard, and on sunny days a terrace on the sidewalk as well. But now, in addition to a courtyard — open this time — there are two more covered terraces. the barroom itself is a lot bigger than the old one as well.
When it comes to the beers and bites bit, it seems not much has changed so far: the menu is the same as before, or at least very similar.
RITCS CAFE
A lot of universities and university colleges opened their doors to students again this or last week. One of these university colleges is the Erasmushogeschool Brussel, and their Arts department “Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema and Sound” has its own bar: RITCS CAFE. It’s not run by students — as often is the case for student bars in Leuven for instance — but very professionally, by beer lover Steven. Within the restrains of a space used as a college cafetaria at noon, he manages to make RITCS CAFE a place where both lager guzzling students and more discerning adult beer drinkers feel welcome in the evening.
The Sister
Every now and then, you’ll find an organic beer on the beer list of a bar. Often by coincidence, because some good beers just happen to be organic, sometimes it is a deliberate choice to offer some organic options for the more environmentally and health conscious customer. At The Sister however, the menu almost exclusively lists organic dishes, beers and other drinks. Almost, since four of the five draught beers are InBev beers, which couldn’t be less organic or even craft. No need to drink them though, there are plenty of tasty beers on the organic list!
Moeder Lambic Fontainas
It surely was beery last weekend, and we hope you had the opportunity to visit one or more of the beer festivals. One of the smaller festivals — if you can even consider it a beer festival instead of just a themed weekend — was the Italian Beer Weekend at Moeder Lambic Fontainas. It’s the kind of weekend they organize on a regular basis, featuring a different country every time. But the bar is well worth visiting on normal days as well!
Good Beer Feast
It really is a beer weekend in Brussels, and then I don’t (just) mean the massive event on the Grand Place. Brussels Beer Project opened their brewery one year ago, and they’ll be celebrating this with a brand new beer festival: Good Beer Feast! They’ve invited thirteen breweries from all over Europe, each pouring four different beers. Including four of their own beers, that means 56 different beers will be available on the Vismet this Saturday. That’s not a lot compared to the hundreds of beers served on the Grand Place, but in our opinion, it will be a much more interesting selection!
Churchill’s
“Churchill’s – The English Pub” is the name of this week’s bar. Well, the draught beers are Belgian and Irish, and the only dish they serve is American. But if you’re lucky, you’ll be able to taste some fine English beers — although only bottled — while you leisurely watch a game of cricket on one of the many tv screens.
No such luck during our visit, however: the best British ales available were Scottish, and there was only football and boxing on the screens.
Booze’n Blues
It’s not very likely we will ever again feature a bar where the eight “draft beers” on the menu are actually just the 25 cl and 50 cl version of each of their InBev pilsners, a mazout (pilsner with coke), and three sous-marins with different jenevers… The Booze’n Blues however, has a trick up its sleeve: about every currently available beer of Brasserie de la Senne! The jukebox is nice too, of course.
Nüetnigenough
Never not enough. That is the literal translation of the peculiar name this restaurant goes by: Nüetnigenough. Don’t let the double negation fool you though: it is a Brussels word for a greedy glutton. Nüetnigenough is not an all-you-can-eat restaurant however, but it offers a fine selection of mostly very Belgian, often beer infused dishes, and more importantly, an even finer selection of Belgian beers.