Pedaling through a tapestry of breweries in West Flanders
From a distance, the conical green plants reminded me of the rows of Fraser firs in the North Carolina mountains, but that didn’t make sense here in the flatlands of western Belgium.
“Look! Hops!” my wife, Selina, yelled out then pointed to a road sign. “And now we’re on the official hops bike route!”
Ah, that explained it. I’d seen demonstration hops grown at American breweries but never fields of them — and certainly not more than 20 feet high. We were on what we would thereafter call our “Stop and Smell the Hops” trip, a five-night tour combining two of our favorite things: bikes and beer.
As the planner of this little adventure, I was initially overwhelmed by the options. We live in the Netherlands, so getting to Belgium was easy enough. But in this country — the size of Maryland — there are 168 breweries and counting, many run by families for generations. Where to start?
I reached out to a Dutch acquaintance, Henk Wesselink, for advice. He’s the Benelux partner
behind the Oregon-based bike tour company Beercycling, whose motto of “Getting you from pint A to pint B” pretty much says it all. Wesselink told me that Beercycling owner Evan Cohan, who spends summers in Belgium leading tours, had just written a self-guided information packet about West Flanders in response to the many independent travelers who contacted him for tips. Bingo!
Cohan steers travelers to the Flemish area of Westhoek because of the province’s high concentration of hops and breweries (27), many with regular visiting hours. For $99, customers get a downloadable guide, along with e-mail support. The guide fully details routes, lodging, bike rentals, food attractions and out-of-the-way breweries and gives insider tips. Although that might sound pricey, it was a relative bargain in that it saved me days of planning.
Thanks to the packet, I could plot out an elaborate schedule. The guide also includes small breweries I probably wouldn’t have found on my own, along with bars and restaurants that specialize in craft beers. (Despite Cohan’s lodging suggestions, I booked a mix of Airbnb stays and lowerpriced hotels, with the exception of one of his recommendations.)
Selina’s role was to map our daily routes using the national Fietsroute, a marked and numbered bike network (“fiets” means bicycle in Dutch), paying attention to scenery, mileage and brewery opening times. By tour’s end, we’d cycled just less than 200 miles over six days (low mileage for us).
We headed out on a Friday afternoon just south of Bruges, where we’d left our car. This was our longest cycling day, 52 miles, mostly through small villages and farms, passing fields of flax and Brussels sprouts (the name is no coincidence). We kept on course to arrive in Ypres for an event that marked a sobering start to the trip: the Last Post. This public commemoration for soldiers killed in World War I has been held every evening since 1928. Indeed, our beer-bike theme expanded to include a fair number of battlefields and burial places — more than half a million soldiers from more than 50 countries died in Belgium.
Ready for a bit of levity, we visited the Times, a bar popular with locals just off the gorgeous historic market square and rebuilt after the war. We started with the locally brewed Wipers Times, a blond ale (“Wipers” was the British soldiers’ pronunciation of Ypres), followed by hoppy, bold beers brewed in the next day’s destination of Watou — a St. Bernardus Tripel and a Poperings Hommelbier. Hommel is the local abbreviation for humulus, the botanical name for hops.
Any questions I had about hops — the herbs of beer — were answered the next day at the fascinating and recently updated Hop Museum Poperinge, housed in a beautiful and aromatic 19th-century building that once held the municipal hops weighing and storage facility. The region, I came to learn, produces the vast majority of the 271 tons of hops harvested in Belgium annually, most of which go to regional breweries. Not to be missed is the museum’s “wall of beer,” which contains hundreds of bottles from every Belgian province, many for sale in the gift shop.
From there, we dropped in on nearby De Plukker, a brewery run by organic hop farmer Joris Cambie. Tastings are held in a nondescript industrial building only on Saturday afternoons. We sampled a Keikoppenbier, a fresh blond, top-fermented ale and chatted with Cambie, who turned the family farm organic when he took over in 1993. At his invitation, we cycled through his 35-acre farm, passing tall, tidy rows of hops before heading out.
At this point, we made the agonizing decision to skip De Struise Brouwers, famous for its big, bold brews and barrel aging, in order to accept a challenge posed in Cohan’s guide.
“Like the idea of doing more mileage and hills?” it asked. “Consider cycling over the border into France to visit the Mont des Cats Trappist Monastery.” Mais oui! We worked up a thirst climbing the steep hill to the monastery, which welcomes the public to its gift shop and cafe. The abbey, known mostly for making cheese, in 2011 revived its original amber-beer recipe after a 163-year hiatus, although it’s brewed by another abbey. (Only 12 abbey breweries worldwide carry the Trappist label, which guarantees that the beer is brewed by or under the supervision of monks. That exclusivity gives the ales their avid fan base.)
We spent the night in Watou, a small, sweet Belgium town with a historic square ringed with restaurants and a large church. Dinner at our hotel on the square, Het Wethuys, included a crepe-like “pancake” made of beer batter and stuffed with meat and vegetables, and two pints of their house beer.
Sunday started with a pilgrimage to the Holy Grail of Trappist beer: Westvleteren, made at Trappist abbey of St. Sixtus in Vleteren. Selina, who grew up a few hours north and used to occasionally purchase crates of beer to go, couldn’t believe how the beer outlet had transformed from a tiny shop in the woods to a tourist mecca, with bus parking. The modest-looking abbey, founded in 1831 by a monk from Mont des Cats, is private, but visitors can tour its lovely shrine to the Virgin Mary just outside the walls. Across the street is the modern cafe called In de Vrede, said to be the only place in the world one is guaranteed to find Trappist Westvleteren 12, Westvleteren’s highestalcohol brew (10.2 percent alcohol). Some have called it the best in the world for its complex flavors.
For the last day we did a must-do canal tour and made our final stop to smell the hops, at Staminee De Garre. Tucked into a narrow alleyway, this low-key, old-world tavern manages to maintain its local cred despite an ever-growing fame among hopheads. Stealing the show among De Garre’s 100-plus beers is its exclusive house beer Tripel de Garre, a hearty abbey blond served in a goblet set atop a paper lace doily, a nod to traditional Belgium lace. The nose was sweet and hoppy, a fitting farewell to Flanders.