Next Door Neighbor

We’ve been eying the country to the west ever since we got to Germany. Only a 45 minute drive away is Belgium, in all its beer-drinking glory. So close and yet it might as well be on the other side of the planet as far as the Germans are concerned. It’s easier to find Belgian beer in the United States than in German stores and bars.

Twice now we have rented a car with friends and driven westward with the morning sun to our backs. In Belgium we squirreled around country roads in search of small breweries and, if all fails, the local pubs selling the specialized brew. We’ve parked ourselves in smoke-filled rooms (Belgium is one of the few countries in Western Europe still allowing patrons to light up) and surrounded ourselves with frothy glasses of nutty brown and amber-colored drinks. Why all the fuss?

Belgium produces probably the biggest variety of beers in the world and many of them are not available anywhere except on the spot of production. The beers have robust flavors, varied ingredients including spices, fruit, and herbs, and enough alcohol (some up to 10 percent) to knock your socks off. There’s even a special yeast used that can survive in such high alcohol concentration. The tastes range from sour-lemony to sweet like a cola.

We found out the hard way — by glancing in dark windows — that most of the breweries are not open to the public. Or if they are, only to organized groups or just one day a year. Most of them are not looking to be anything grandiose. The owners, sometimes an abbey seeking to supplement its religious operations, produce just enough to make ends meet and don’t bother maximizing profit, though they could.

A good example of this is the Trappist abbey of Saint Sixtus of Westvleteren in southwestern Belgium in the hop producing area of Poperinge (an area also packed with British and American war cemeteries). Saint Sixtus beer is rated as the “best beer in the world” by some beer hounds. Thirty monks live in seclusion behind the abbey’s 180-year-old walls and make beer out of sight. There’s no getting into the abbey, but there are several options to purchase its beer. It doesn’t even have a label, but it’s so popular the abbey rations it. A rather large and modern restaurant next door, In de Vrede, sells two six-packs per adult for takeaway, as well as all-you-can-drink from the table. On a recent Saturday we happened to run into a very long line of cars waiting to pick up the one-crate-per-month of beer allowed, available only by reservation. The monks enforce it by tracking license plate numbers. There’s something that feels very special about drinking beer in the only place in which it can be officially purchased, although in the restaurant we found we were hardly the only international visitors who had “discovered” the place.

W e bought the only beer available in six-pack at the time, a blonde. After tasting the two other varieties the abbey produces — the dark 8 and 12 — we wished we weren’t so restricted. We tried to get our fill at the table. Two glasses was enough to require some cooling off time before driving away. We stumbled happily out of the restaurant and spent the next hour wandering along a path through the woods to a grotto and then into a muddy farm field where brussel sprouts had recently been harvested.

It was getting dark and we knew we weren’t going to make it far. Fortunately, the manager of the restaurant pointed out a hostel where we could stay the night only a couple miles down the road. We stopped by a frituur (a french fry shop) and then turned into the “hostel.” We were confused. Our place to sleep was an elementary school building with a packed parking lot. We walked in and found a long line of people waiting to purchase tickets into the gymnasium where a stage had been erected for what we soon found out was a school play.

It took a while for the ticket collectors to confirm that there was, indeed, a hostel on premises and who was the person in charge. When she finally came, she took us past the front of the stage, then back into the changing rooms where we stepped around little girls in flower costumes getting their paint makeup done. Up a flight of stairs and into the attic was a humongous but completely empty hostel, which not so mysteriously had been de-listed from the hosteling association. It could have been for any number of reasons: lack of windows, outside doors that weren’t locked, or maybe even its occasional use for school plays.

We set down our stuff, ate our fries, and went downstairs to check out the free entertainment. For the record, school plays in Belgium sell beer for the parents (though unfortunately not Saint Sixtus beer). We, of course, understood hardly any of the Flemish. But that was fine. The kids were adorable singing and prancing around stage as ladybugs, trees, and forest animals, and we were giddy from the day at the abbey.

The next morning we left, looking at a trunk full of Belgian beer from Saint Sixtus and various supermarkets we had stopped at along the way. We ended up with close to 100 bottles of beer. We didn’t put them on the wall. But they filled up about half the landing in front of our door where they are now being steadily consumed.