(Belgian) Highways and byways
You may have noticed I have a new book out. If you’ve read this far and didn’t notice, then my website is clearly not doing its job.
As many people will already be aware, the new CAMRA Good Beer Guide Belgium is not the first, but the ninth edition, in a series dating back to 1992 in print form, and which was conceived some years before that.
I can’t claim credit for the first eight versions. They were the work of Tim Webb, in later editions with the expert assistance of American beer pilgrim Joe Stange. Both however, chose to take a back seat this time around.
And so it fell to me. I got the gig in June 2024, not in Belgium as it happens, but in Amsterdam. In Café Gollem to be precise. My wife Amanda and I were sharing a few beers there with the aforementioned Tim Webb and his partner. By way of idle conversation I asked ‘tother Tim what was happening with the Belgian book, since it had already lain dormant for six years.
“I was meaning to talk to you about that,” he said. “Do you want to write it?”
Naturally as a fellow beer writer I saw this as an opportunity not to be missed. I said yes right way.
“You can think about it,” Tim went on, expecting hesitancy from me. I had none to offer.
And so it began.
But like all beginnings, that was just the start of it. And enthusiasm will only carry you so far. Updating a long-established and already revered guidebook about Belgian beer was still going to be a long and tough job.
Commission to publication took 23 months of hard graft. Despite living for almost four decades in the Netherlands Amanda and I had never visited Belgium quite as extensively as we did during that period.
In 2025 alone I spent 31 weekends making separate research trips, covering tens of thousands of kilometres by road, rail, bus and foot. We visited dozens of breweries and in excess of 800 cafés, restaurants and beer shops, looking to find the best of the very best: the 650 that made the final cut.
Along the way there were frustrations. Most Belgian roads are smooth and a pleasure to drive along, but in smaller towns and villages there are enough traffic-calming measures to drive any motorist insane. Equally not restful are the occasional roughly cobbled country lanes that appear not to have been resurfaced or repaired since Roman times.
Moreover, whether accessed by good road, bad road, bus or train we lost count of the number of places we had to return to visit a second time because we arrived to find a handwritten sign on the door, in one language or another, announcing a ‘congés annuels’ or ‘jaarlijks verlof’: an annual holiday usually well-known to locals but often unannounced anywhere on social media.
We also had to deal with two broken ankles – one each for Amanda and I, in separate incidents – but that’s another story.
Yet these minor niggles were more than offset by the treats that lay before us in the world of a Belgian beer culture that has deservedly been inscribed since 2016 on the UNESCO List of intangible Cultural Heritage.
I doff my cap to that.
The real adventure started with our first research trip on July 21 2024, coincidentally Belgium’s National Day, and a visit to the Grain d’Orge brewery taproom in Hombourg, Liège province. The research part of the book ended fourteen months later, in November 2025 at a bar called Kelly’s Getaway in Lummen, Limburg province.
In between those bookends was a lot of zigging and equal measures of zagging, criss-crossing the country from extreme north (Dochter van de Korenaar’s brewery and tap) to far south (Brasserie des Trévires). And from the westernmost beer outpost (Café ‘t Pannepotje in the seaside resort of De Panne) to the far east (Bierhaus Fexen in the German-speaking region).
In the centre of the country we made it to Brasserie Invictus, arguably the remotest and hardest to reach of Belgium’s 400 breweries, with a pondside brewery and taproom in a forest clearing, one kilometre down a rough dirt track and two from the nearest but poorly served bus stop. You can drive there, not that your car will forgive you, and it is on a hiking trail.
Kelly’s Getaway
Dochter van de Koren
Bierhaus Fexen
Brasserie Invictus
And then there was Belgium Peak Beer, not exactly hard to reach, but somewhere with a unique claim. With its location close to the Signal de Botrange, Belgium’s highest point at 694 metres, it has an unassailable right to call itself the nation’s highest brewery.
On a typical weekend, usually with Amanda as designated driver (thanks Amanda!), we might visit 20 to 40 cafés, breweries or shops. And just for the record, and for the sake of my own liver, I didn’t drink everywhere, only in places where there was something I needed to taste. Still a lot though.
All told it was a voyage both of discovery and of rediscovery. After 40+ years of exploring Belgium, we still came upon new (to us) gems of beautiful, out-of-the-way inns, met some lovely people, and drank some extraordinary ales.
So then. Just a typical day at the office for any aspiring beer writer, or indeed beer tourist, in Belgium.
What struck us most of all was the sheer diversity of drinking emporia, from simple brewery taps through high-class restaurants to good old-fashioned local boozers where the appearance of a stranger still causes heads to turn and the bar to fall silent before the quiet gossip begins. We’ve all been there, I’m sure. Above all though, we were reminded of what we knew already: in Belgium there is something beery for everyone.
And for that too, I doff my much-doffed cap. Chapeau Belgium!
