The barrel room! What a wonderfully smelling place this was. These oak barrels house 1, 2, and 3 year old lambic as well as their fruit lambics. My wife had to drag me out of here
This one was still fermenting!
It was also in the barrel room that we came across another couple speaking American English and were clearly brewers from their conversation so I had to ask. Turns out they were from Colorado too. I had to laugh at that.After the barrels was the bottling/cellaring room. Now that’s a lot of bottled lambic. All of those bottles are full and those stacks are 3 bottles deep. The bottles on the bottom have to have a LOT of weight on them and I have to say I’m impressed at just how much weight those bottles can handle! All in all what I learned touring Cantillon is that you don’t need a single scrap of stainless steel in your brewery to make good beer but you do need spiders. Lots of spiders.
After leaving Cantillon we went out for lunch and then off to another visit to the Delirium Café. Our first visit was at night and the place was a madhouse. I was drinking random gueze’s that were on tap I’d never heard of, my wife was working her way through the list of trippels and all along there was a group of ever growing 18-20 year olds in the back who started out calm enough but after a couple hours and several boot’s (full liter glasses in the shape of a boot) they were singing, pounding on tables, and raising a general ruckus to which nobody seemed to be phased by. Fun but we decided a day trip was also in order to really check this place out.
Then it was off to a good dinner and we crashed out for the night.Day 3 Free public transit day? Yup, on Sunday the city of Brussels closes down the city streets to traffic and the only way to get in and around it is by public transit, so they make it free. Taking that as a perfect excuse to wander and learn without monetary penalty we hopped the metro across town and then a tram out to the small town of Tervuren which is also the home of the Museum of Middle Africa which we visited. I’d recommend to anybody to go check out this Museum. Amazing. After the museum we stopped for a beer in town and then hopped the transit back into Brussels to find not only were the streets closed to vehicles but there was a HUGE fair going on throughout all the streets. It was wall to wall people but we wandered into the Grand Place and took the opportunity to look like the rest of the tourists and take photos of the buildings:
Leaving the Grand Place we came across a bottle shop which just so happened to have a handful of these unlabeled bottles on their shelves. Upon picking the bottle up and inspecting the cap it turned out to be exactly as I had hoped….. the precious…. Westvleteren 12. At 6.50 euro a bottle they weren’t cheap but I bought 2 and took them back to the room where they went in our mini fridge to chill. 2 hours later, WOW what a beer. I’ve got a new benchmark for just how good a dark Belgian strong can be!
We also picked up a bottle of Cantillon’s Rose de Gambrinus before we realized that this bottle was corked in addition to being capped. Our hotel room was smart enough to equip us with a bottle opener to save the edges of their furniture but no cork screw in sight. Not one to be beaten by any bottle of beer I dismantled furniture with my trusty multi-tool until I found one with a long screw (the coffee table as it turned out) and fashioned a cork screw.
Afterwards we went out for an incredible dinner at a nearby French restaurant. While the staff was none-to-excited at having to translate the occasional word in their menu I was none-to-interested in eating cow brains. In the end the food made up for the attitude. I had rabbit stewed in gueze and my wife had salmon with a wit-beer sauce over top. Dessert was a kreik sorbet. AMAZING.Day 4, time to move on. We got up early, packed up, and hopped the train to Brugge. It was only a 1 hour train ride but I could have stared out the window for 4 hours watching the countryside go by. One of the most amazing sights was the train station in Ghent. The Belgians love their bicycles and the Ghent train station showed this. While most train stations you would think would have a 10 story parking garage they had a 2 lot bicycle lot that was PACKED! No joke there easily could have been several thousand bicycles, yes thousand. It went by before I could get my camera out but it was astounding. Anyway an hour later we were in Brugge ditched out stuff at the bed and breakfast we were staying at and walked into town. Like most towns in Europe the center square is the heart of every city and here is Brugge’s square:
We stopped for the requisite couple beers and then headed back to make ourselves some dinner (this place had a kitchen we could use) and relax for the night.
Day 2 Touring Cantillon! We got up and hiked out to the museum/brewery that is Cantillon. There were no tours in English and my Flemish is pretty rusty so we opted for the self tour. Rumors of the self tour are true, they hand you a map and turn you loose in the brewery. First stop the mash tun, and yes this is the actual functioning mash tun they use.
It’s wild, everything is gear driven. The center rod turns spinning the rakes and walking the rakes around the circle. The pie shaped pieces in the bottom are the removable false bottom.
Then there was this guy, always poking his head into everything to get a closer look. If you own a brewery I’d watch out for this one:
The boil kettle and that same guy:
This is the grain mill and gives you an idea of how everything is powered. Belts. No joke there are belts running everywhere with different sized pulleys on them to control the speed of rotation. The big motor is in the bottom left of the photo which powers the shaft above it. Off picture to the left is a belt that connects the shaft in the background. Note in the left of the photo the belt that goes through the floor to the mashing room below. Crazy.
Another boil kettle with a belt/gear driven stirrer. Each of those copper lids sitting on top had to weigh about 30lbs!
Inside that boil kettle.
The infamous Cantillon coolship!
The equally as infamous vents which go to the outside world which the breeze comes through and over the top of the wort, which is their only method of chilling.
*shakes fist at the IT overlords*
