# Belgium for Food Lovers: Trappist Beer, Sour Kriek and the Chocolate Quarter of Brussels > Belgium for food lovers: five Trappist breweries, hunting Westvleteren, lambic and kriek at Cantillon, Sablon chocolatiers, beer and chocolate museums, Liege vs Brussels waffles. - URL: https://langandtrip.com.ua/en/article/belhiia-pyvo-shokolad/ - Language: en - Published: 2026-10-28 - Categories: Culture, Leisure, Restaurants, Tours, Belgium, Food & Drinks --- Belgium brews over a thousand different beers and runs roughly two thousand chocolate shops in a country you can cross by train in a few hours. That makes **Belgium for food lovers** a destination in its own right rather than a side dish to the Grand Place, and the country's beer culture has been on the UNESCO Intangible Heritage list since 2016 to prove it. Here is how to build a proper gourmet route: from Trappist abbeys to Brussels chocolatiers, and why the world's most hyped beer requires an actual hunt. ## Trappist beer: brewed by monks, not marketing departments The word Trappist on a label is a legal status, not a style. The [International Trappist Association](https://www.trappist.be/en/) grants it only to beer brewed within abbey walls under the monks' supervision, with profits going to the monastery's upkeep and charity. Belgium has five such breweries: Westmalle, Westvleteren, Chimay, Orval and Rochefort. Each has its own personality: Orval with its wild yeast and dry bitterness, Rochefort 10 as dark and warming as December by a fireplace, and Westmalle Tripel, the beer that invented the tripel style outright. One planning detail matters: the abbeys themselves are mostly closed to visitors, because the monks live there rather than perform there. Almost every monastery, however, has a cafe or visitor centre nearby where the beer is poured fresh and sold in the shop. At Orval you also get to wander the ruins of the medieval abbey standing right beside the working one. ## Westvleteren: the hardest beer in the world to buy The dark quadrupel Westvleteren 12 topped world rankings for years, and fame played a cruel joke on it. The monks of Saint Sixtus abbey brew exactly as much as the monastery needs to sustain itself and refuse, on principle, to scale up. Officially, a crate can only be bought by reserving in advance through the abbey's website and collecting it in person in Westvleteren, with a strict limit per buyer. The realistic plan for a traveller is simpler: the cafe In de Vrede across the road from the abbey pours the beer with no reservation, as long as stock lasts. Yes, the odd bottle of Westvleteren shows up in beer shops in Bruges or Brussels, but at several times the price and outside the official channel. Honest advice: do not build a cult around this one bottle. Blind tastings regularly show Rochefort 10 and St. Bernardus Abt 12 playing in the same league, and both sit on ordinary supermarket shelves. ## Lambic and kriek: beer fermented by the air itself If Trappist ales are the classics, lambic is the wild side of Belgian brewing. The wort is not pitched with cultivated yeast at all; it spends a night in open vats under the roof, and wild yeasts drifting in from the air of the Senne valley do the rest. Then come years of ageing in wooden barrels. Pure lambic is sour, flat and strange to the newcomer, so most people drink gueuze, a champagne-lively blend of young and old lambic, or kriek, where cherries went into the barrel. The essential address is the Cantillon brewery in Brussels, which doubles as the living museum of gueuze. It is a genuinely working century-old plant, cobwebs, barrels and all, with a self-guided tour that ends in a tasting. Fair warning: after the sweet cherry "krieks" of supermarket shelves, a true sour Cantillon kriek is baffling at first. Give it a second sip; the second sip is where people fall in love. ## Chocolate: the praline was invented right here Belgium's chocolate cult rests on a specific invention: in 1912 the Brussels confectioner Jean Neuhaus Jr. created the praline, a chocolate shell with a soft filling inside. The Neuhaus flagship still trades in the sumptuous Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert, worth entering for the arcade's interior alone. From there the route leads to the Grand Sablon, the chocolate quarter of Brussels. Within a few steps of each other: Pierre Marcolini with display cases arranged like a jeweller's, Wittamer bearing a royal warrant as supplier to the court, and the classic Mary, whose pralines the royal household was buying a century ago. The tasting strategy is simple: buy two or three individual chocolates in each shop rather than a box, and within an hour's stroll you will have built your own ranking. Save the gift boxes for the end, once you actually know your favourite. ## Beer and chocolate museums: for those who like a system - **Belgian Beer World, Brussels**: a large interactive beer museum inside the former Stock Exchange, finishing with a tasting at a rooftop panoramic bar. - **Choco-Story, Brussels and Bruges**: the history of cacao from the Maya to the praline, with live chocolatier demonstrations. - **The gueuze museum at Cantillon, Brussels**: the most atmospheric of the lot, because it is not an exhibition but a real brewery at work. - **De Halve Maan, Bruges**: a family brewery with a rooftop viewpoint, beneath which runs an underground beer pipeline stretching three kilometres to the bottling plant. It sounds like a legend. It exists. ## Waffles: Liège versus Brussels The "Belgian waffle" is actually two different dishes, and confusing them here counts as a sin. The Brussels waffle: rectangular, light, crisp outside and airy inside, served on a plate with icing sugar, berries or whipped cream. The Liège waffle: oval, dense, made from yeasted dough studded with pearl sugar that caramelises on the iron into a crackly crust. You eat a Brussels waffle with a fork at a table; a Liège waffle goes straight into your hand on the street, and eaten hot it needs no topping whatsoever. ## How much time to allow and how to combine it all ExperienceWhereTime neededSablon chocolate quarter and NeuhausBrusselshalf a dayCantillon and Belgian Beer WorldBrussels1 day for bothDe Halve Maan and Choco-StoryBruges1 day including the townOrval or ChimayWallonia, by car1 dayIn de Vrede and WestvleterenWest Flanders, by carhalf a day plus the driveWithout a car, the Brussels plus Bruges pairing covers most of it comfortably: they are an hour apart by train, and that is where the bulk of the chocolate and the museums sit. The Trappist abbeys are scattered deep in the countryside, so rent a car for a day if Orval or Westvleteren is on the list. One practical note: Belgian beer strength is treacherous, a 10-11 percent quadrupel drinks like an ordinary lager, so those small 150 ml tasting glasses are wisdom, not stinginess. The verdict on **Belgium for food lovers**: it works like a construction kit. Two cities, one rental car for a day, and in four or five days you will have tasted a monastery quadrupel, a sour kriek from a century-old barrel, a praline at its birthplace and both waffles. Just do not attempt all thousand beers in one trip; the Belgians spent centuries brewing them precisely so you would have a reason to come back.