In Bruges: A Pilgrim's Guide to the World's Most Improbable Beer City

The City That Time Forgot to Modernize

In the fourteenth century, Bruges was one of the richest cities in Europe. Its harbor sat at the mouth of an inland sea that connected the Flemish weaver's looms to the wool of England, the spices of the Levant, the wines of Bordeaux, and the silks of Genoa. Italian bankers opened branch offices on its squares. The first stock exchange in the world arguably opened on a Bruges street called Beursplein, named after the Van der Beurze family whose inn served as the meeting place for traders. Painters like Jan van Eyck made the city the cradle of Northern Renaissance art. Bruges was, for about two centuries, the New York of the Low Countries.

Then the harbor silted up. The Zwin estuary that had connected Bruges to the North Sea slowly filled with mud, the ships moved to Antwerp, and the city (almost overnight, by the standards of European history) became economically irrelevant. By 1600, Bruges was a poor backwater. By 1800, it was a punchline. The Industrial Revolution went somewhere else. The city's medieval cathedrals, guild halls, almshouses, market squares, and crooked little streets sat there for centuries, neglected, unmodernized, and, crucially, un-demolished. There was no money to tear them down.

By the time the rest of the world noticed Bruges again in the late nineteenth century, it had quietly become the best-preserved medieval city in Europe. UNESCO designated the entire historic center a World Heritage Site in 2000. Six million tourists a year now wander its cobblestone streets, photograph its swans, ride its canals, and, if they have any sense, drink its beer.

Because along with the cathedrals and the canals and the cobblestones, Bruges preserved something else the rest of the world mostly forgot: the medieval Flemish café. The kind of low-ceilinged, smoke-stained, candle-lit room where a man could walk in off a freezing canal in 1620 and order a glass of strong abbey ale, and where you can walk in today and order something extraordinarily close to the same thing. Bruges is a city of about 120,000 people. It has, by most counts, more than a hundred beer bars. The math is generous, and the city earns it.

The Brewery That Built a Pipeline

In the heart of the old city, on a small square called Walplein, sits a brewery that has been making beer since 1564. Its name is De Halve Maan, "The Half Moon", and for most of its history it was an unremarkable family-run operation supplying local cafés with local beer. The Maes family took it over in the 1850s, and a Maes has been running it almost continuously since. Today, the sixth generation, Xavier Vanneste, is in charge of one of the most famous breweries in Flanders.

De Halve Maan brews two flagship beers, both named after old jokes about the people of Bruges. Brugse Zot, "the Bruges fool", is a 6 percent blond ale that takes its name from a tradition that the people of Bruges, after some forgotten medieval insult from a passing duke, are all considered fools. The Brugse Zot is the city beer, the bar regulars' beer, the beer that gets poured onto a thousand café tables every afternoon. Straffe Hendrik, "Strong Henry", is the brewery's tripel and quadruple range, named after one of the older Maes brewmasters. Both are excellent. Both are brewed entirely in the city center, in the original brewery, on the original site, using the original water source.

Which raises a problem. Bruges is a UNESCO World Heritage city. The historic center is a maze of canal-side cobblestone streets, most of them too narrow for a modern delivery truck. As Brugse Zot's popularity grew through the 2000s and the brewery's production volume tripled, De Halve Maan was running tanker trucks through the medieval city day and night, hauling fermented beer from the brewery to a modern bottling plant in the suburbs three kilometers away. The trucks rattled the foundations of buildings older than the United States. Tourists complained. Residents complained. UNESCO did not, but it certainly noticed.

Xavier Vanneste's solution was so audacious that, when he first proposed it in 2014, most of the local press treated it as a joke. He wanted to build a beer pipeline. Underground. Under the medieval city. From the brewery on Walplein, beneath the cobblestone streets, beneath the canals, beneath the ancient foundations, all the way out to the bottling plant in the village of Waggelwater. A 3.276-kilometer underground polyethylene tube, two and a half inches in diameter, running at depths of up to 34 meters below the surface. Carrying, at any given moment, up to 6,000 liters per hour of finished beer.

The pipeline opened on September 26, 2016. It works. It has worked, continuously, ever since. Beer flows under the streets of Bruges right now, beneath the feet of tourists who have no idea they are walking on top of it. It is the world's first urban beer pipeline. It cost about four million euros and was financed in part by a now-legendary crowdfunding campaign in which Bruges residents could buy a "lifetime supply of beer", one bottle a day for the rest of their lives, for a single payment of 7,500 euros. Five hundred people signed up. Some of them are still alive. Some of them are still collecting.

The pipeline made De Halve Maan internationally famous. The brewery is now the most-visited brewery in Belgium, and the rooftop tour, where you climb to the top of the old brewing tower and look out over the medieval city while the brewmaster explains how beer is moving under your feet, is one of the strangest and best tourist experiences in Europe. You finish the tour with a glass of Brugse Zot in the courtyard. You drink it slow. You think about how it got there.

The Pub Hidden in an Alley

Walk from the Markt (the great central square of Bruges, dominated by the Belfry tower) toward the Burg, the slightly smaller square that holds the old city hall. Between them runs a short street called Breidelstraat, lined with chocolate shops and souvenir stalls. About halfway down, on the left, there is what appears to be a covered passageway. It is so narrow that two adults cannot easily walk through it side by side. Most of the people who walk past it every day don't notice it at all. The locals call it De Garre, "The Lane", and it is officially the narrowest street in Bruges, perhaps the narrowest in Belgium.

Halfway down the alley, there is a small wooden door. Above it, in faded gold letters, the words "De Garre: Estaminet." Push the door open and climb the steep wooden staircase to the upper floor, and you will find yourself in one of the most beloved beer cafés in the world. Low beamed ceiling. Heavy wooden tables. Soft yellow light. A wall of bottles. The smell of old wood and warm beer. There is no music. There is, by long-standing house rule, no mobile phone use. There is a list of about 130 Belgian beers. And there is the house tripel.

The Tripel van de Garre is brewed for the café by Brouwerij Van Steenberge, a respected family brewery in Ertvelde. It is a Belgian tripel (pale gold, peppery, fruity) but at 11 percent alcohol by volume rather than the usual 8 to 9. Three times the normal malt bill, the brewery says. The result is a tripel with extraordinary depth: layered honey malt, banana and pear esters, a long warming finish, the kind of beer where each sip is a slightly different sip than the one before. It is also, at 11 percent, exactly the kind of beer that will hurt you if you do not respect it.

The café knows this. They have a rule: a maximum of three Tripel van de Garre per customer. After three, the bartender will politely refuse you a fourth and offer you something else: a coffee, a glass of water, perhaps a beer half the strength. This is not, in their experience, an excessive limit. It is a kindness.

The presentation is part of the magic. The beer arrives on a small oval silver tray. Beneath the glass, a doily. Beside the glass, a small saucer of cubed cheese, usually a sharp Belgian gouda, speared with toothpicks. The glass itself is unique to De Garre: a thick-stemmed tulip with a "pregnant" inward-curving bowl, designed to concentrate the aroma. You sit. You sip. You eat a cube of cheese. You sip again. The room is quiet. Nobody is in a hurry. Outside, two stories below, in the narrowest alley in Belgium, tourists walk past without ever knowing what they're missing. This, more than almost anything else in the city, is Bruges.

The Brown Café and the 300 Beers

A few minutes' walk from the central square, on a quiet street called Kemelstraat, is a tiny brown café: bruin café in Flemish, named for the centuries of pipe smoke that stained the wooden walls and ceilings of this kind of establishment a deep, warm brown. The building dates to 1632. The café itself has been there in some form for decades, and in its current incarnation since 1983, when a woman named Daisy Claeys took over the lease and quietly began assembling what is now one of the most respected beer lists in Europe.

't Brugs Beertje, "The Little Bruges Bear", pours about 300 different Belgian beers, with five rotating taps. The list is encyclopedic, the bottles are cellar-fresh, and Daisy herself, decades into the work, is still likely to be behind the bar on any given evening, advising visitors on what they should be drinking. The café has been named one of the world's twenty best beer cafés by every publication that issues such a list. The room itself has perhaps eight tables. The walls are covered with old enamel beer signs, bottle caps, framed brewery memorabilia, faded photographs of brewers who died forty years ago. The tables are heavy oak. The light is dim and warm.

The category, bruin café, is worth pausing on. Brown cafés are not unique to Bruges; you find them throughout Belgium and the Netherlands. They are the small, traditional, unpretentious neighborhood pubs where local regulars come to drink, talk, read the paper, and pass the evening. They are usually owned and run by a single person or a single family. They serve beer, sometimes wine and gin, never cocktails. The decor is whatever has accumulated over the decades. There is no design budget. The character is in the patina. A real brown café cannot be built; it can only be inherited or grown over forty years of careful neglect.

't Brugs Beertje is what every brown café in the world wishes it were. It is small enough that on a busy night you'll be sharing a table with strangers, and within ten minutes you will be friends with them. It is exactly the kind of place that does not exist outside Belgium, and the kind of place that is the reason serious beer travelers cross oceans to come here. We have visited many times. We have never had a bad night. The little bear has earned its name.

Five Centuries of Last Calls

North of the central square, in the quieter Saint-Anne quarter, where the tourist crowds thin and the canals turn lazy, there is a café that opened for business when Henry VIII was still married to his first wife. Café Vlissinghe, also called Herberg Vlissinghe, has the first written record of its existence dated to 1515, which makes it the oldest documented pub in Bruges and one of the oldest continuously operating cafés in Europe. It is not the oldest building in Bruges; it is older than that. The structure is, like a lot of Bruges, a pair of late-fifteenth-century houses joined together, modified gently over the centuries, and never quite torn down.

The interior is what you would expect and also somehow more. Heavy oak beams. Whitewashed walls. A long wooden bar. A massive open fireplace at one end, which is still lit on cold afternoons. Walls covered with old paintings, some of them centuries old, including (according to local lore) a panel that once hung in a Bruges merchant's house in the 1600s. The current owners, the Hoste family, have run the café since 1995. They serve a small list of well-chosen Belgian beers, simple Flemish food, and the kind of slow afternoon coffee that you can stretch out into an evening if you have nowhere to be.

There are older drinking establishments in Europe (a handful of inns in Germany and the British Isles claim earlier dates) but few of them have continued operating without major break. Café Vlissinghe has poured drinks across the Reformation, the Eighty Years' War, the Spanish Netherlands, the Austrian Netherlands, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, two world wars, and the recent rather uneventful arrival of WiFi. There is a quiet weight to the place. You sit down with a Brugse Zot in front of the fire, and you become, for an hour, part of a five-hundred-year-old line of people who have done exactly the same thing.

It is one of those rare places where the marketing claim, "the oldest pub in Bruges", is, if anything, a little understated. It is not just old. It is the kind of place that makes you understand why Belgians take their beer cafés so seriously: because the room itself is part of the brew.

Where to Eat What You Drink

A serious beer pilgrimage to Bruges has to include a serious beer-and-food meal. Belgian beer cuisine is a real culinary tradition, not a marketing afterthought, and Bruges takes it as seriously as any city in the country. Two restaurants in particular have built reputations around it.

Den Dyver, on the canal-side street of the same name, opened in 1979 with a single audacious idea: every dish on the menu would be paired with, and often cooked with, a specific Belgian beer. Carbonnade flamande braised in Rodenbach. Rabbit stewed in Westmalle Dubbel. Trout poached in Saison Dupont. The menu rotates seasonally, the beer pairings are recommended by the kitchen, and the whole thing is presented in a series of quiet rooms looking out over the water. Den Dyver is the place where, for many visitors, the idea that beer can be a serious dinner-party companion to food finally clicks into place.

Cambrinus, named after the legendary Flemish king of beer, takes a slightly different approach: a working tavern with 400 beers on the list and a kitchen that turns out classic Flemish comfort food: beef stew, pork knuckle, mussels, beer-glazed sausages, the kind of food that calls for a strong dark abbey ale and a long evening. The room is busy, the beer list is intimidating, and the prices are honest. It is one of the most reliably good beer-meal stops in the city.

For a more contemplative dinner, Le Trappiste, in a vaulted thirteenth-century cellar a few steps from the Markt, focuses on Trappist and abbey beers and a tightly curated tasting menu. The cellar is candle-lit, the ceiling is brick, and the beer list reads like a love letter to the six remaining Belgian Trappist breweries. Order the Westvleteren if they have it. Don't ask the price. Just drink it.

The Festival, the Day Trips, and the Other Small Brewers

Once every two years, in early February, Bruges hosts the Brugs Bierfestival, a weekend-long beer festival that takes over the Belfort hall and several adjacent buildings on the Markt. About 100 Belgian brewers attend, with around 500 beers on offer, many of them rare festival-only releases or one-off collaborations. Tickets are inexpensive, glasses are included, and the line outside the Belfry on opening Saturday is one of the great displays of Belgian beer geekery on the calendar. UNESCO recognized Belgian beer culture as part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2016, and a winter weekend at the Brugs Bierfestival is the best single demonstration of what they meant by it.

For the truly committed, Bruges is also a base for day trips deeper into West Flanders' beer country. Brouwerij Rodenbach in Roeselare, about an hour by train, is the temple of Flanders red ale, with a foeder hall containing 294 oak vessels, some of them more than a century old. Brouwerij Westvleteren, the Trappist abbey of Saint Sixtus, is also in West Flanders, less than an hour from Bruges by car; the in-abbey café (In de Vrede) is open most days and serves the world's most legendary beer at terms its monks find dignified. Brouwerij Van Honsebrouck in Ingelmunster, brewer of Kasteel and St. Louis lambic, runs a fine castle-grounds tour. Each of these is a half-day round trip, and each repays the effort.

Within Bruges itself, smaller new-wave breweries are quietly rising: Bourgogne des Flandres, on a canal-side site that has brewed since 1765, was reopened by the Van Honsebrouck family in 2015 and now produces a Flemish red ale brewed and aged on the original premises. Fort Lapin, in a converted suburban industrial site, makes excellent saisons and farmhouse ales. The old beer city is still making new beer.

How to Walk a Beer City Properly

A few rules of thumb, accumulated over too many trips. First: pace yourself. Belgian beer is between five and twelve percent alcohol, served in glasses calibrated for sipping, in cafés that expect you to take an hour over a single drink. Bruges is small. You can walk between any two beer cafés in fifteen minutes. There is no need to rush. The temptation to keep ordering (because the next beer on the list is also magnificent, and the one after that) is exactly how a Bruges visitor ends up missing dinner. Three serious beers across an evening is a reasonable upper limit. Two is wisdom.

Second: respect the glassware. Every Belgian beer is served in its own dedicated glass. The bartender will refuse to serve a Westmalle Tripel in a Duvel tulip; this is not an affectation, it is a centuries-old discipline. If you see your beer arrive in a glass with the brewery's own logo and shape, you are being well looked after. If you see it in a generic pint glass, you are not in a real Belgian café.

Third: eat. Belgian beer is designed to live with food. A bowl of moules-frites, a wedge of strong cheese, a bowl of beef stew: these are not optional accessories to the beer, they are how the beer is meant to be experienced. Bruges has more restaurants per capita than most cities its size, and its pricing for beer-and-food meals is, by Western European standards, reasonable. Lunch with a saison and a bowl of waterzooi will set you back a fair fraction of what the same meal would cost in Paris or Amsterdam.

Fourth: stay overnight. Most Bruges visitors come on a day trip from Brussels or Ghent and leave on the evening train. They miss the best part of the city, which is what happens after the day-trippers go home and the cafés fill up with locals and overnighters. The medieval streets at 10 p.m., lit only by lantern light, with the bells of the Belfry ringing the hour and a candle-lit beer café two minutes' walk in any direction: this is the Bruges that justifies the trip. Day-trippers see the city. Overnighters see the city's soul.

Why It Matters to Us

We talk about Bruges at Mort Subite a lot. Some of it is shared geography: the founder grew up an hour from the city, and a good half of the bottles on our wall came out of West Flanders. Some of it is shared philosophy. Bruges is a city that decided, at some point in the nineteenth century, that it would not pretend to be modern, would not chase whatever the rest of the world was chasing, and would instead lean as hard as it could into being exactly what it was: a small medieval city with very good beer in very old rooms. It worked. The world eventually came back around.

A Belgian café in Austin, Texas is by definition a slightly improbable thing. We took the same approach, on a much smaller scale: pour the right beers in the right glasses in a room that does not pretend to be anything it isn't, and trust that the people who care about that will find the door. The cobblestone alleys, the canal-side cafés, the brown-stained walls of 't Brugs Beertje and the doily under the De Garre tripel: these are the rooms we think about when we set our own. We will never have five centuries of patina. We can have the same intent.

If you are in Bruges, eat at Den Dyver, drink at Vlissinghe, climb the rooftop at De Halve Maan, find De Garre, and sit a long time at 't Brugs Beertje. If you are in Austin, come see us, and we will pour you a Brugse Zot in the right glass and tell you about the day, in 2016, that they buried two miles of pipe under a UNESCO city to keep the trucks off the cobblestones. Most beer stories are not that good. This one, like the city it came from, is exactly that good.

Check the draft menu, or ask the bar what is on today. The pipeline does not, alas, reach Congress Avenue.