Sunday was the Toer de Geuze. a wonderful event that I have missed every year since I moved to Belgium. I had planned on joining one of the official tour busses but due to my laziness I was too late. All available seats on the buses I preferred were taken (each bus had a different route). Another year without being able to enjoy this event. Or so I thought. As I mentioned on here before, “Beery people are good people” Don S (from the Babblebelt and Celebrator Beer news) and his wife offered to let me join them in their rental car. Great people! While the buses are nice, I think that this may be the way to go. We were able to see more breweries and do them as quickly or as slowly as we wanted. My day started at 6am so I could hop on the train and try to get to Lembeek just before 10am. There I met my two fellow travelers for the day. From the station in Lembeek you could literally fall into Brouwerij Boon. You know its going to be a good day when you start your first brewery tour at 10am! I won’t go into a ton of detail about each brewery, I’ll let the badly taken photos do that, all I need to say is that all these breweries have something great to offer. Us beergeeks sometimes passover some of these breweries because of some of the products they put out. While those products may be lack lustre, the breweries can also make a pretty mean jonge lambic and oude geuze. After Boon we headed up to Hanssens. Then to 3 Fonteinen, Oud Beersel, Lindemans, De Troch and finally Mort Subite. The day ended with a quick Girardin jonge lambic at De Koekoek before being dropped off at the train station in Ternat. It was a quite fantastic day full of tasty surprises! I really can’t complain about any of the beer I had. Of course I only stuck to the traditional products. It was also nice because this event reminded me that there are great events like this that do put better beer into the eyes of the Belgian public. So its not all doom and gloom like in my rant “Beer in the gutter” … but its still partly true 😉

oh, and by the way, the Mega Blend that all the participating breweries helped in creating… really awesome!

click on the photo to see more.