Travel: Brussels, a beer-loving city of politicians and outlaws
Belgium’s capital city Brussels is more than just an administrative centre for the EU. It boasts of comics, history—and thousands of beer styles
Assuming it is the capital of bureaucracy as the HQ of the EU, I had long dismissed Brussels as a place to visit. The only reason I stopped there earlier this year was to break my motorcycle ride from London in the UK to Bastogne in Belgium. To get to Bastogne, I had to ride 184km from London to the ferry terminal in Dover, cross the English Channel to Dunkirk in northern France on a two-hour ferry, then ride 174km to Brussels in Belgium. Bastogne was a further 160km away.
But as I rode into the capital of Belgium after the monotony of the motorway and the flatness of Northern France, Brussels came as a surprise. The Art Nouveau facades of the city’s architecture looked like they were drawn with a fountain pen, and as I rode through the city centre, I could swear I caught the occasional whiff of waffles and yeast.
I ended the day’s ride at the Marriott Grand Place Hotel, located opposite La Bourse de Bruxelles, the erstwhile neo-Palladian Brussels Stock exchange that now houses the Belgian Beer World Experience. In Belgium, beer is so ingrained into the social fabric of the country that it’s been anointed an Intangible Cultural Heritage by Unesco. The country boasts more beer styles than it does politicians. The happy beer aficionado has a choice of Trappist ales, lambics, wit biers, and brews with names that Captain Haddock might mouth in a fit of rage.
The Belgian Beer World Experience offers storytelling sessions where enthusiasts and novices alike are regaled with brewing secrets and anecdotes, as though monks had nothing better to do than to indulge in fruity fermentation experiments. There are guided tastings to help discover one’s personal beer style.
But I wanted to give Brussels a fair chance to show me its other charms, so I legged it to the Comics Art Museum. It wasn’t easy, because it was a hot day and in Brussels, beer cafes are like tea tapris in Mumbai.
Tucked away on Rue des Sables, the Comic Art Museum is Brussels tipping its hat to what it proudly calls the Ninth Art—comics. The setting was half the attraction—it is housed in an Art Nouveau gem designed in 1906 by Victor Horta, who thought he was creating a textile warehouse but gave future Tintin fans the perfect cathedral. Inside, I got the full sweep of Belgian comic history from Tintin and my old favourite Captain Haddock and The Smurfs to lesser known but equally eccentric creations. There were temporary exhibitions that hopped from sci-fi to artist retrospectives. Panels and artwork were peppered with life-size figurines of characters, playful displays, and a gift shop groaning with books and collectibles. I walked out having absorbed equal doses of high culture and pop culture—Horta and Hergé under one roof.
I wandered 850m west to the Banksy Museum on Rue de Laeken. Here, the star attraction is an artist or a group of artists nobody’s ever seen but everybody has an opinion on. Banksy is the Batman of the spray-can world—she, he or them is anonymous, nocturnal, and forever one step ahead of authority. Banksy’s work has popped up in many places I’ve travelled through, and I always smile and wonder how the artist(s) got away with it.
The Banksy Museum bottles that feeling by recreating more than a hundred of Banksy’s greatest hits, from balloon-wielding girls to flower-flinging protesters, spread across two cavernous floors of a former fabric house.
It’s a slightly surreal experience: a bunch of anonymous artists painstakingly recreating the anonymous artist’s work so I can admire it while clutching a €14 ticket stub. But I must admit, the scale and sharpness are impressive—and there’s something deliciously ironic about it all. This city loves bureaucracy, so naturally it has a museum dedicated to an outlaw who dodges it.
All this worked up a mighty big thirst, the kind that Captain Haddock often experiences as a prelude to glugging down Loch Lomond whisky. Fortunately, I was nudged into succumbing to temptation. A friend from India who happened to be in Brussels, texted to suggest “just one round" at Delirium because she had one of those impossibly posh dinners lined up at 7pm. The kind with more cutlery than courses. So, we’d greet each other, get a glass of the good stuff, and prep her for the boredom to follow at dinner. That was the plan or so we thought.
Now, Delirium isn’t just any bar; it’s a Guinness World Record holder with over 2,000 beers on the menu. A place where the beer list reads like a novel you can’t put down, and every page is a plot twist. The first sip was glorious—crisp, complex and just dangerous enough to make us think, well, maybe one more won’t hurt.
One round became two, two became a number I lost count of somewhere between the banana beer and the Trappist that tasted like it had been blessed by monks with a wicked sense of humour. Conversation flowed, loud and laughing, first just the two of us, then with the strangers who drifted into our little corner until it wasn’t a corner anymore, it was a full-blown bar within a bar.
When my friend finally glanced at her watch, the horrified gasp she was aiming for came out as a helpless giggle. In Brussels, a city where punctuality is practically foreplay for protocol, she was now late enough to be considered Beatnik. With the poise of someone who’d just invented lateness as a performance art, she swanned off. Later she told me she made it back just in time to spear the last forkful of dessert—and pretend she’d been there all along.
I, on the other hand, took the scenic route back to my hotel—scenic in the sense that I’m somewhat sure I saw the same street twice and waved at it both times. Delirium has that effect. You go in for a beer, you come out with a story… and possibly a new best friend whose name you’ll never remember.
During those brief hours I had spent in the city, Brussels had quietly dismantled every assumption I’d harboured about it. This wasn’t the soulless administrative centre I’d imagined, but a city that had somehow managed to preserve its authentic character while hosting the world’s bureaucrats.
The next morning, as I fired up my motorcycle for the final stretch to Bastogne, I realized Brussels had taught me something valuable about the danger of dismissing places based on their reputations. Sometimes the best discoveries happen when you’re simply passing through, and sometimes the most bureaucratic capitals hide the most surprising hearts.
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