Hoppeland: How a Tiny Town in West Flanders Became Belgium's Hop Capital

A Town You Have to Mean to Get To

If you drive west out of Brussels for two hours through the long flat fields and the polite suburban towns of Flanders, you eventually run out of country. The North Sea is to your right. The French border is straight ahead. The British Channel ports are two hours further on. In the last fifteen kilometers before that border, the land begins to feel quieter than the rest of Belgium: fewer cars, more cows, smaller towns spaced further apart, and a particular kind of low Flemish sky that seems to hang lower over the fields than it does anywhere else in the country. This is the Westhoek. The "west corner." It is the part of Belgium most Belgians never visit because, as the locals put it without resentment, there is nothing past it.

In the middle of the Westhoek, on the agricultural plain between Ypres and the French border, sits a town called Poperinge. Nineteen thousand people. A small market square with a big Gothic church. A handful of cafés. A train station that runs four trains an hour back toward Ghent. By every reasonable measure, Poperinge is a quiet provincial town that the rest of Belgium forgets about most of the year. By every measure that has to do with beer, Poperinge is one of the most important places in the country.

Roughly seventy-five percent of Belgium's hops are grown in the fields around Poperinge. Of the thirty-five-or-so hop farmers left in the entire country, more than half work the land within a twenty-minute drive of the town's main square. The Trappist abbey at Westvleteren, brewers of what is frequently called the best beer in the world, is twelve kilometers up the road. The brewery at Watou, which produces the St. Bernardus beers under the recipes those same monks once licensed, is eight. Belgium's National Hop Museum sits one street off Poperinge's central square, in a building that was once the town's official hop weighhouse. And every third September, the entire town shuts down, dresses up in early-medieval costume, builds enormous floats out of paper-mâché hop cones, and parades for a weekend in celebration of the plant that has defined its economy since the year 1332. The town the rest of Belgium forgets about is the one the rest of Belgium quietly depends on to make its beer taste like beer.

This is the story of how a quiet corner of West Flanders became Hoppeland, Belgium's "hop land", and why, this September, you should consider buying a train ticket.

A Plant the Locals Call Hommel

The botanical name is Humulus lupulus. The English call it the hop. The Dutch call it hop. The French call it houblon. In the West Flemish dialect that has been spoken in the fields around Poperinge for the better part of a thousand years, it is called something different. The locals call it hommel. It is one of those linguistic survivors: a word that exists nowhere else in the Dutch-speaking world, preserved in this one corner of Flanders the way certain English words survive only in Appalachian valleys and certain French words only in rural Quebec. You will see it everywhere in Poperinge. On the sign outside the museum. On the labels of the local beer. On the front of t-shirts in the gift shops. Hommel.

The plant itself is a climbing perennial vine, a "bine," in the technical agricultural term, distinct from a true vine because it climbs by wrapping its main stem around a support rather than by sending out tendrils. A mature hop bine can grow six or seven meters in a single growing season. In the right weather, it climbs thirty centimeters a day, fast enough that you can stand beside it in the morning, leave for lunch, and find it perceptibly higher when you come back. The plant flowers in midsummer, and the female flowers, the cones that brewers care about, ripen by the end of August and into early September. Each cone is a layered, papery structure of small green scales called bracts, and at the base of each bract sits a tiny yellow gland called the lupulin. The lupulin is the entire reason the brewing world cares. It contains the bitter alpha acids that balance malt sweetness in beer. It contains the essential oils that give finished beer its hop aroma: citrus, pine, herbal, earthy, floral, depending on the variety. Crush a fresh hop cone between your fingers and rub them together and you will smell exactly what hundreds of years of European brewers have smelled. It is the smell of beer before it is beer.

Hops were not always part of beer. For most of the early medieval period in Europe, beer was bittered and preserved with a confused herbal mixture called gruit, a guarded blend of bog myrtle, yarrow, juniper, heather, and whatever else the local brewer or the local lord controlled the rights to. Gruit was political. Whoever owned the gruit rights in a given town owned a chokehold on the brewing trade. Hops were considered, in this earlier period, a German weed. They began moving slowly westward through the Low Countries in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, brewer by brewer, town by town, until they became the dominant bittering agent in the lowlands by the end of the fourteenth century. The fact that Poperinge entered the hop trade in the early 1300s, slightly ahead of the curve, turned out to be one of the most important economic decisions the town ever made.

1332: A Dispute With Ypres

In the early fourteenth century, the dominant industry in Flanders was cloth. The great Flemish cities (Bruges, Ghent, Ypres) had grown wealthy on wool imported from England, dyed and woven in massive guild halls, and exported across the known world. Linen and wool from Flemish looms reached as far as Constantinople. The wealth that built the belfries, the cathedrals, the city walls, and the Gothic cloth halls of Flanders was wool wealth. And the cities that controlled the cloth trade (particularly Ypres, a few miles down the road from Poperinge) guarded their privileges jealously.

Poperinge had ambitions in the cloth trade. It also had a problem: Ypres held a royal monopoly on certain kinds of weaving in the region, and the Ypres weavers' guild was unsubtle about enforcing it. In a long and bitter dispute that ran for decades, Ypres pushed Poperinge out of significant participation in the lucrative cloth markets. By the 1330s, the town was looking, urgently, for an alternative agricultural economy.

The story the locals tell is that in 1332, monks from the abbey of Saint-Bertin in nearby Saint-Omer, just across what is now the French border, introduced hop cultivation to Poperinge. The date may be slightly mythologized; documents from earlier centuries hint that hops were already grown in modest amounts in the region. (A 786 donation charter from Pepin the Short, the father of Charlemagne, mentions a hop garden somewhere in what is now this part of West Flanders, though the exact location is contested.) What matters is that around 1332, the cultivation of hops in Poperinge expanded from a small monastic side-crop into a serious commercial agriculture, taken up by the lay farmers of the region as a deliberate replacement for the cloth trade they had been shut out of. The decision was driven by economics. The result was that Poperinge happened to start growing the right crop, in the right soil, in the right climate, at exactly the right moment in European brewing history.

The Westhoek's combination of mild maritime climate, long summer daylight hours, and slightly chalky, well-drained soil turned out to be almost perfect for hops. The plant likes a long temperate growing season without summer heat extremes. It wants plenty of water but resents waterlogging. It wants long evenings of warm sunlight during cone formation in late summer. Poperinge gets all of that, more or less every year, from the influence of the nearby North Sea. By the middle of the fifteenth century, the town was supplying hops not just to Belgian brewers but exporting them to England, France, and the Hanseatic League ports. By the 1700s, Poperinge hops were a luxury commodity in their own right.

The town built infrastructure around them. Hop kilns, the wood-and-brick structures used to dry the freshly picked cones, sprouted on the edges of farms across the region. A municipal hop weighhouse was built on the main square to certify the weight and quality of bales bound for export. By the mid-nineteenth century, when modern agricultural statistics begin to be useful, Poperinge had become Belgium's dominant hop-producing area, surpassing earlier rivals like Aalst in East Flanders. It has held that position, more or less unchallenged, for the past hundred and seventy years.

The Vrimde Plokkers: Ten Thousand Pickers in a Town of Nineteen Thousand

Until 1965, every single hop cone harvested in Poperinge was picked by hand. The harvest happened in a tight three-week window in September, when the cones had ripened and the lupulin had filled out but before the first autumn rains could threaten the bales. The window was unforgiving. Pick too early and the cones were green, weak in alpha acids, and short on aromatic oils. Pick too late and a single wet weekend could rot a year's crop on the bine. There was no margin. The harvest had to happen, all at once, in three weeks, every September.

The labor required was staggering. A mature hop yard at full production needed something on the order of fifteen to twenty pickers per hectare to bring the crop in on time. At the peak of Poperinge's hop production in the early twentieth century, the town's farms together needed several thousand additional pickers during harvest season, far more than the local population could supply. So every September, the town flooded.

The locals called them vrimde plokkers, the "strange pickers," the migrant workers who arrived by train and on foot from across Flanders, from across the French border, and increasingly from the industrial cities of Belgium where unemployed factory workers spent the late summer doing harvest work for a few weeks of wages. Whole families came. Children came. Grandparents came. The schools in Poperinge and the surrounding villages traditionally started their academic year in October instead of September, so that local children could be in the fields with their parents. Schoolhouses were turned into temporary dormitories. Barns were swept out and lined with straw mattresses. The town's population, in a good harvest year, could swell from around twelve thousand permanent residents to more than twenty thousand for the three weeks of September.

The work itself was hot, sticky, and physically punishing. Pickers worked from dawn to dusk, stripping the cones off the cut bines that had been pulled down from the trellises and laid in long rows across the fields. The lupulin oils, the same oils that give finished beer its aroma, stained skin and clothing a sticky yellow-green that did not wash out for weeks. The cones smelled wonderful at first and overwhelming by the end of a long day. Pickers' fingers blackened from the resin. The air in a hop field at harvest was thick with the dusty smell of crushed lupulin and the hum of insects.

And at the end of each long day, the pickers were fed and watered, and at the end of each harvest week, they were paid in cash and in beer. The local farmers brewed special low-strength session beers specifically to keep their pickers hydrated through the long workdays. These were the original plokkersbier, the "pickers' beer," brewed weak enough that a person could drink several liters across a workday without falling out of the trellis. The tradition of plokkersbier survives today as a heritage style, brewed in small quantities by a handful of local breweries each September to commemorate the labor that built the region.

In 1965, the first mechanical hop-picking machines arrived in Poperinge. They worked. Within a few years, the hand harvest was effectively over. The vrimde plokkers stopped coming. The schools moved back to a September start. The barn dormitories went back to being barns. An entire seasonal economy, and the social fabric that came with it, evaporated in less than a decade. The hops kept growing. The town kept brewing. But something about the rhythm of the year in Poperinge changed, and the locals knew it. They went looking for a way to remember.

The Hoppefeesten: A Festival Built to Save a Memory

In 1956, just as mechanization was beginning to threaten the old harvest traditions, the local Committee of Trade and Industry in Poperinge, together with the city council, organized the first Hoppestoet, a hop pageant and procession, on the main square at the end of harvest season. The idea was simple. The town would put on a public commemoration of the harvest itself. Pickers and farmers and townspeople would dress in traditional clothing, build floats representing the history of the hop in Poperinge from medieval times forward, and march through the town in celebration of the agricultural year that had just ended. They would crown a Hop Queen, a Hopkoningin, chosen by competition from among young women in the town. The whole community would eat hommelpap, a sweet hop-and-cream porridge that locals had served at the end of every harvest for as long as anyone could remember, and drink the year's first batches of fresh hop beer.

The first Hoppestoet, in 1956, was a small affair. It was held annually for the next four years. By 1960, the organizers realized that an event of the scale they wanted to mount (with hundreds of costumes, dozens of elaborate floats, real horses, brass bands, and the participation of essentially the entire town) was not something a community of fewer than twenty thousand people could sustain every year. So they made a decision that has shaped the festival ever since: the Hoppefeesten would happen every third year. Three years to build the floats. Three years to write the new songs. Three years for the new Hop Queens to grow up. The town would catch its breath in between.

The triennial format proved to be exactly the right rhythm. The festival has run every three years since 1960, with very few interruptions. In 2011, the name was officially expanded to Bier- en Hoppefeesten, Beer and Hop Festivals, to formally recognize that the celebration had become, by then, as much about the beer culture of West Flanders as about the hop agriculture that fed it. By the most recent edition, the festival was drawing somewhere around thirty thousand visitors over three days, half again the permanent population of the town.

The structure of the modern Hoppefeesten weekend is the same one the town settled into in the late 1960s and has refined every cycle since. Friday is a children's parade and a "fraternization evening," when delegations from Poperinge's sister cities in other European hop regions (places like Tettnang in Germany, Žatec in the Czech Republic, and Kent in England) arrive, are formally received in the market square, and are folded into the weekend's events. Saturday is the day of competition and music. Teams from the town and surrounding villages compete in a series of public games (endurance challenges, beer-knowledge contests, traditional Flemish games) for the right to put one of their members forward as a candidate for the Hop Queen's court. There are concerts. There are tapped kegs of the year's first fresh-hop beers, including special editions of Hommelbier, Plokkersbier, and other locally-significant beers that exist only because the festival exists. The Hopkoningin is crowned in the evening at the town hall.

Sunday is the day. The Hoppestoet, the great hop procession, starts in the early afternoon and runs for several hours through the streets of central Poperinge. More than thirteen hundred participants march, ride, or float through. Some forty separate groups, each with their own theme drawn from the history of the hop in this region, build floats and costumes that take three years to design and assemble. There are tableaux depicting Pepin the Short's eighth-century hop garden. There are giant paper-mâché Saint-Bertin monks bringing the plant to the Westhoek in 1332. There are recreations of nineteenth-century hand-harvest scenes, complete with whole families of costumed pickers on slow-moving wagons. There are floats showing the enemies and friends of the hop: the diseases and insects that threaten it, the predator beetles that protect it. There are floats representing every stage of beer production from the field to the glass. The procession ends back at the main square with the public eating of the hommelpap, prepared by volunteers in enormous copper kettles, and an evening of fireworks and music that runs until late.

The next edition is the weekend of September 18-20, 2026. If you have ever wanted to see what a small Flemish town looks like when it has been planning a single weekend for three solid years, this is the weekend.

The National Hop Museum: A Weighhouse Full of History

If you arrive in Poperinge on a day that is not the festival weekend, the place you want to start is the National Hop Museum on Gasthuisstraat, one street west of the central market square. The museum occupies the former municipal hop weighhouse, the Stadsschaal, a tall brick building that, until 1968, served as the official scale where every bale of hops produced in the region was weighed, certified, and graded for sale. The weighing floors are still intact. The original scales still work. Standing in the central hall, you can look up at the wooden trusses where bales were lifted on chains to be weighed, and look down at the loading docks where the certified bales went out by wagon to the railhead.

The collection itself runs from the medieval period to the present day. There are spinning displays of historical hop varieties: the lost native Belgian cultivars like Coigneau, Groene Bel, and Pottenkeet, most of which were grown for centuries and then quietly disappeared in the twentieth century as international varieties took over. There are reconstructed scenes of the picker camps, with photographs of the vrimde plokkers from the 1920s and 1930s that show entire families staring solemnly into the camera in their work clothes, picking baskets at their feet. There are tools (the cone-stripping combs, the bine-cutting hooks, the long-handled twine setters) that have not been used in any working farm in fifty years. There are samples of every commercial Belgian hop variety, sealed in glass jars, with their alpha-acid percentages and aromatic profiles printed on small cards beside them. You can pick up the jars, twist the lids open, and smell the hops directly.

The museum's exhibitions extend into the brewery hall on the top floor, where a small artisanal brewery still operates as part of the museum's educational programming. Visitors can watch a brew in progress on a small scale, and a museum-branded ale is brewed on-site using exclusively Poperinge-grown hops. The tour ends, as the best museum tours always do, with a tasting in the museum's café, a small wood-paneled room overlooking the back garden, where the staff pours the museum's own beers along with a rotating selection of beers from the surrounding region.

In April and early May, if your timing is right, the museum café also serves hoppescheuten, hop shoots. These are the young, pale-green tips of the emerging spring bines, harvested before they begin to climb, blanched briefly, and served as a delicacy in the very brief two-week window when they exist at all. They taste vaguely like asparagus crossed with very fresh fava beans and a faint bitterness from the lupulin already developing inside the stem. They are also, kilo for kilo, among the most expensive vegetables produced in Europe, because they have to be cut by hand and they cannot be stored. A small plate of hop shoots in butter, eaten in the museum café on an April afternoon, is one of the more particular experiences in Belgian food.

Hommelbier: The Beer the Town Made for Itself

In 1980, in the run-up to one of the triennial Hoppefeesten, the Poperinge city council made a small commercial request to a local brewery. The festival, the council pointed out, was scheduled to celebrate hops. The beers being served at the festival were the same beers being served at every other Belgian beer festival. They could just as easily have been brewed in Brussels or Liège for all the hops in them spoke specifically to West Flanders. The council wanted something local. A beer brewed deliberately to showcase Poperinge hops, named in the local dialect, designed to be the official beer of the festival and an ambassador for the town between editions.

The brewery they approached was Leroy Brouwerij, one of the older surviving family brewers in West Flanders, with historic ties to Brouwerij Van Eecke in Watou and Brouwerij Het Sas in Boezinge. Leroy agreed. In 1981, they released Poperings Hommelbier. The name says everything you need to know: Poperings, "of Poperinge"; Hommel, the West Flemish word for hops; bier, beer. A beer of Poperinge hops.

The recipe is straightforward and confident. Hommelbier is a Belgian strong golden ale, 7.5% ABV, in the same general family as Duvel and the more hop-forward pale Belgian ales, but built around hops grown exclusively in the Poperinge region. The grain bill is simple: Belgian Pilsner malt and a touch of pale Munich for body and color. The hop bill is the point: four traditional varieties grown within twenty kilometers of the brewery, including classic European cultivars like Brewers' Gold and Challenger and, in some batches, locally-grown English Goldings. The bittering is moderate (around thirty-five IBUs, well-balanced for a Belgian strong pale), but the aromatic hop charge is where Hommelbier announces itself. There is a real green, grassy, slightly citrus character on the nose that no commercial Belgian beer of the 1970s was offering. It is, in modern terms, a beer that anticipated the hop-forward trend by twenty years, brewed by a family brewery in a town nobody outside Belgium had heard of.

Hommelbier was an immediate local success and a slower-burn international one. Today the beer is on tap and in bottle across Belgium and exported in modest quantities to specialty importers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and elsewhere. There is a regular version, a Dry Hopped Hommelbier with additional post-fermentation hops layered in for extra grassy and floral character, and, in years when Leroy can get fresh-picked cones from the September harvest into the kettle within forty-eight hours of leaving the bine, a Fresh Hop Hommelbier released in tiny quantities each autumn. The Fresh Hop edition is one of those beers that connoisseurs in West Flanders quietly tip each other off about, the way wine drinkers in Burgundy share intelligence about a particular grower's harvest.

There is now a small constellation of other Poperinge-themed beers in the region: Plokkersbier from various local brewers, a Hop Queen specialty edition released for each festival cycle, a handful of farmhouse ales that put estate-grown hops on their labels. Hommelbier started the conversation. The rest of the region picked it up.

The Beer Cycle Route: Hoppeland by Bicycle

The Westhoek is flat. This matters. Most of the agricultural plain around Poperinge sits within ten meters of sea level, and the only hills in the region are the modest rises of the Heuvelland, twenty kilometers to the south. The flatness, combined with the dense network of small farm roads and the slow rural traffic, has made the area one of the most popular cycling destinations in Belgium. The local tourism authority has, over the past twenty years, built out a series of marked cycling routes that link the breweries, the hop farms, the museums, and the small village cafés of the region. The signature route is the Hoppelandroute, a roughly forty-kilometer marked loop that runs out of Poperinge through the hop fields, past the Trappist abbey at Westvleteren, through the village of Watou (with a stop at the St. Bernardus brewery), and back through the small farming villages of the western Westhoek.

In late August and early September, when the bines are at full height and the cones are beginning to ripen, the Hoppelandroute is one of the more memorable cycling experiences in Europe. The bines reach six meters into the air on their trellises, in long parallel rows that flank the small farm roads on both sides. Riding between them, in late afternoon light, is like cycling through a green Gothic cathedral. The smell, a constant low note of lupulin and resin and ripening fruit, hangs in the air for hours. Local farms along the route sell hop-themed snacks, fresh farmhouse cheeses, and small bottles of estate beer. The Trappist café at Westvleteren (the only place in the world where you can drink Westvleteren 12 by the glass, alongside a plate of monastic cheese, with no appointment required) sits roughly at the midpoint of the loop.

Bike rental is available from a handful of shops in central Poperinge, including from the National Hop Museum itself. A good rider can do the full loop in three hours. A more sensible rider, who stops at the breweries and the café and the museum, takes most of the day, which is the entire point.

The Quiet Threat: Why Poperinge's Hop Acreage Is Shrinking

There is a story underneath the festival and the museum and the cycling route that the town does not advertise on its tourism brochures but that the local farmers will tell you over a glass of Hommelbier if you ask. Poperinge's hop acreage has been slowly contracting for the better part of forty years. At the historical peak, in the late nineteenth century, the region around Poperinge had thousands of hectares under hop cultivation. By the 1960s, the era of the last hand harvests, the figure had dropped to several hundred. Today, the entire Poperinge district has approximately one hundred and thirty-six hectares of hops, worked by about sixteen farms. Across all of Belgium, the total is roughly thirty-five farms working a hundred and eighty-four hectares. These are very small numbers.

The pressures are familiar. Global hop production has consolidated into a small number of large industrial regions (the Yakima Valley in Washington State, the Hallertau in Bavaria, the Žatec region in the Czech Republic) where economies of scale, modern varieties, and centralized infrastructure produce hops at prices Belgian growers find very difficult to match. The Belgian climate, once a comparative advantage, has become more volatile in recent decades; wetter springs and hotter, drier mid-summers stress the bines in ways that the traditional varieties were not selected for. Land prices in West Flanders have risen as urban Flanders has crept westward, and a hectare of hop trellis is competing for ground against potato farms, cattle pasture, and, increasingly, suburban development.

The surviving Poperinge farms have responded in two ways. The first is consolidation: fewer farms, each working more land, with more mechanization and tighter margins. The second is what some of the younger growers call "specialty positioning": leaning into the fact that Poperinge hops are not commodity hops. They are a regional product, with a 700-year continuous cultivation history, grown in a specific terroir, and they can be sold to brewers who want exactly that story on the back of the bottle. Several of the remaining farms now grow heritage Belgian cultivars that exist nowhere else in commercial production, and sell their entire annual harvest in advance to a handful of specialty brewers willing to pay a premium for them. The Belgian Trappist breweries are major customers. The artisanal brewing revival, which has produced hundreds of small breweries across Belgium in the past two decades, has produced exactly the kind of brewer who cares whether his hops were grown in Poperinge or in a generic European wholesale lot.

The question is whether this specialty positioning can sustain the region long enough for a generational handoff. Most of the remaining hop farmers in Poperinge are in their fifties and sixties. The next generation, in many farming families, has gone into other work. The town and the regional government have invested in programs to encourage young farmers to take over hop yards, with some success and many setbacks. The Hoppefeesten, alongside its cultural function, is also, quietly, a long-running public-relations campaign to keep the hop visible in the minds of the next generation. Every triennial procession is also an argument for why the work is worth continuing.

If You Go: A Practical Note

Poperinge sits about thirty minutes by train west of Ghent, with frequent service from Brussels-Midi via Ghent or Kortrijk. The train ride from Brussels takes about two hours. From Lille, in northern France, it is forty minutes by car. The closest airport is Brussels-Charleroi (about ninety minutes by car) or Lille-Lesquin (forty-five minutes); Brussels Zaventem is roughly two and a half hours by direct train.

For the 2026 Hoppefeesten (September 18-20), book accommodation now if you have not already. The town has limited hotel capacity, and the festival weekend sells out rooms not just in Poperinge itself but across nearby Ypres, Veurne, and even into the northern French towns of Cassel and Hazebrouck. The triennial nature of the event means that international beer pilgrims plan their travel years in advance, and 2026 is no exception. Local Airbnbs and small B&Bs in surrounding villages tend to be your best option once the in-town hotels are full.

For any other time of year, Poperinge is an easy day trip with a comfortable two-day option if you want to do the cycling route properly. The National Hop Museum is open Tuesday through Sunday, year-round, with extended hours April through October. The Watou breweries (St. Bernardus prominently, and Brouwerij Van Eecke a few streets over) offer tours by appointment. Westvleteren's monastic café, In de Vrede, is open daily except Friday, and is the only legal place in the world to drink Westvleteren beer by the glass without making an appointment to buy a crate at the abbey gate.

There is also, for serious beer travelers, a quiet pilgrimage to be made to the surrounding fields. The hop farms are private property, and you do not have an automatic right to walk into them, but the lanes between them are public, and a slow afternoon's drive or cycle through the country roads west of Poperinge in late August will give you the sight of six-meter bines in full ripe condition, in long rows that stretch to the horizon, on a scale that exists nowhere else in Belgium and almost nowhere else in Europe. It is one of the great quiet sights of European agriculture, and almost nobody outside the region knows it is there.

What We Pour at Mort Subite

Mort Subite is a Belgian bar in Austin, Texas, run by people who care about which town in West Flanders a beer's hops came from. We keep Hommelbier in regular rotation in our bottled selection, alongside the St. Bernardus range from Watou and as much of the surrounding Westhoek brewing tradition as the U.S. import market makes available to us. When the autumn fresh-hop Hommelbier release is allocated to American specialty importers, which happens irregularly and in tiny quantities, we put our hand up for what we can get. Drinking Fresh Hop Hommelbier in Austin in November is, in its small way, a direct line back to a hop field outside Poperinge in early September.

For September 2026, we will be doing a Hoppefeesten-themed tap takeover the weekend of the festival itself: three days of Westhoek beers, hop-forward Belgian ales, an iteration of hommelpap if our kitchen can talk itself into it, and a side-by-side flight of Hommelbier (regular and dry-hopped) for anyone who wants to taste what a beer from this specific corner of West Flanders is actually built to do. We will not have the parade. We will not have the Hop Queen. We will not have thirteen hundred costumed Flemish villagers marching through Congress Avenue. But we will have the beer, and we will have the story, and on a slow Saturday afternoon in central Texas in mid-September, that is most of what matters.

If you have never been to Poperinge, you should consider going. If you cannot get to Poperinge, you should taste the beers that come out of it. The town that the rest of Belgium forgets about is the town that quietly makes most of the rest of Belgium's beer possible. The story of how a small corner of the Westhoek ended up that way (through a 14th-century cloth-trade dispute, a Frankish king's hop garden, seven hundred years of patient agriculture, a brutal annual harvest involving ten thousand seasonal workers, and a triennial parade designed to keep the memory of all of it alive) is one of the more particular stories in European beer, and worth knowing the next time someone hands you a Belgian ale with an unusually hop-forward nose and asks where it came from.

Ask the bar what is in the cellar today. Come ask for it, and we will tell you about the town that brewed it.