Six generations on the Walplein
Henri Maes began brewing at Walplein 26 in 1856. The site had been a brewery for centuries before him, which is why the cellars and the oldest walls feel older than the company. Six generations later the beer is still made in the middle of a city that receives more visitors per year than it has residents, and the brewery has not moved to an industrial estate.
The beers that pay for it are newer than the building. Brugse Zot was launched in 2005, a blond brewed for a city that had lost its everyday beer; the name means Bruges fool, and the label carries a jester. Straffe Hendrik dates from 1981, when Véronique Maes and her father Henri IV brewed a strong tripel for the inauguration of the Saint Arnold statue. It was later brewed elsewhere and brought home to the Walplein.
Véronique was one of the first women brewing in Belgium, which the family mentions without much fuss. The range now runs from a wheat beer to a quadrupel, brewed on equipment replaced piece by piece rather than all at once. Nothing here is a reconstruction for visitors: the copper is working copper, and the smell in the brewhouse is not staged.
The pipe under the street
By the 2010s the brewery was sending tankers through the centre to a bottling plant in Sint-Andries, three kilometres away. The streets are cobbled, narrow and full of people, and the trucks were not popular. The solution was a pipeline: 3,276 metres of it, at a cost of around four million euros, partly financed by crowdfunding in which contributors were paid back in beer.
It opened in September 2016, runs up to 34 metres below the surface and carries beer rather than water. The beer travels to the bottling line, where it is filled, labelled and sent out; the pipe takes the tankers off the streets. There is a glass plate in the pavement where you can look down at it, which is the closest the visit gets to a spectacle.
The pipeline is also the reason the brewery can still brew in the centre at all. Without it, expansion would have meant moving to an industrial estate, and Bruges would have lost a brewery that had been there since 1856. That is the argument the tour makes, and it holds up: the alternative was not a prettier brewery, it was no brewery here. The pipe settled it.
The visit and the room
The classic tour takes about forty-five minutes, covers 220 steps and ends with a glass in the brasserie. It goes through the brewing hall, the old cellars and the roof, where you get a 360-degree view over the city. The XL tour adds a guided tasting of three beers in the cellars and runs at weekends. Tours run in Dutch, French and English.
The one beer you cannot get anywhere else is the unfiltered Brugse Zot, poured from the tank rather than the bottle. It is softer, breadier and worth the ticket on its own. The brasserie serves Flemish dishes, and the terrace on the Walplein is pleasant when the square is quiet, which is early morning or late evening. It tastes like the brewery smells.
Book ahead in summer; this is one of the most visited brewery tours in Belgium and coaches arrive through the day. The brewery is a ten-minute walk from the Markt and five from the Church of Our Lady. If you have one hour in Bruges and you care about beer, this is where to spend it, then walk to De Garre.