Postcards from Belgium: De Halve Maan in Bruges
If you happen to have read some of the beer buzz coming out of Europe about a half-decade back, you might recall a Belgian brewery that made international headlines with its beer pipeline. That brewery is De Halve Maan, a centuries’ old brewery set amid cobblestone lanes, Gothic churches, and step-gabled medieval buildings. Save for the buzz of pedestrians, the brewery’s surroundings are peaceful. From the rooftop of the brewery you can see into the courtyard of the Ten Wijngaerde beguinage, once home to lay religious women (béguines) who lived communally without taking vows. Today the beginuage houses a Benedictine convent.
It’s the character of these surroundings that prompted the Maes and Vanneste families, owners of the brewery since 1856, to construct a pipeline to their new bottling facility outside the old-city core. The pipeline helped this socially conscious brewery do several things at once, including maintaining brewing operations in the historic old town while reducing the brewery’s environmental impact through the reduction of noise and traffic.
Opened to much fanfare in September 2016, the 3.2-kilometer pipeline was just the answer to the trucks that had become a regular fixture in the old town hauling beer from the historic brewery to the bottling line.
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Cut to a recent springtime before the pandemic. Suitably caffeinated after a quick jolt of espresso in Brussels, we got our 9:00 train to Bruges, arriving over stone bridges across languid canals at De Halve Maan just in time for our mid-morning tour.
De Halve Maan was also a trip back in time for me. When I first visited Bruges in the early 1990s, I went on a tour of Flanders’ WWI battlefields. It had been a somber day, fields draped in mist and dampened by an unrelenting rain, cemeteries dotting the countryside near Ypres.
On the way back into town, the tour guide lightened the mood with a stop at one of Bruges’ breweries — the brewery now known as De Halve Maan, as it turned out. I heard the words “top-fermented” and “bottom-fermented” for the first time that hushed evening in the brewery, no one there but us.
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The Tour
Back at the brewery several decades later, I learned something new again: fruit beer originated as a means of preserving fruit, according to the tour guide. Farmers added cherries, raspberries, and other fruits to the beers they had brewed. They ate the fruit over the winter, then drank the beer. Whether or not this story is apocryphal — I haven’t had a chance to research it further — it sounds plausible enough.
The rest of the tour consists of the new brewhouse and a walk through their in-house museum of historical brewing and bottling implements. Up and up it goes. You’ll see the open fermentation squares that the brewery once used, an old coolship all polished up and ready for its cameo, horizontal fermentation tanks of 1950s vintage, and the old malt floor and chimney. Your reward for all those stairs is a stellar view over Bruges from the roof of the brewery.
A Few Beers
When all is said and done, you can relax in the airy taproom or on the bustling terrace with a glass of the crisp, refreshing, and colourfully named Brugse Zot (Bruges Fool), a Belgian pale ale with aromas of pear, subtle clove and coriander, and orange zest.
Next up, try the elegant Straffe Hendrik Tripel. Powerful yet refreshing, you’ll have to work hard to stop yourself from ordering too many glasses of this smooth ale with honeyed malt, a twist of citrus, and peppery spice wrapped in a creamy fullness suggestive of wheat bread.
Save room for the prodigious Straffe Hendrik Quad, a beer that hits all the malty bass notes of the style: toffee, rum-soaked plums, hazelnuts, burnt caramel, and notes of ripe clove-spiced banana, all mingling with a dusting of smoky cocoa and a dash of espresso thrown in.
Keep an eye out in the taproom or the bottle shop for limited-edition bottlings of Strafe Hendrik Wild (the tripel bottled and refermented with Brettanomyces) or Strafe Hendrik Heritage (the quad aged in oak for a year), both compelling beers worth cellaring.
Related Posts
Close to the train station, De Halve Maan is an ideal first stop before exploring the bounty of beer — and not only beer — that Bruges has to offer. The only question is where to head next? Here are links to a few spots that won’t steer you wrong:
Café Vlissinghe, Bruges’ oldest tavern
De Garre, where they serve a knock-out Tripel in elegant surroundings
’T Brugs Beertje, where the beer list is as long as War and Peace
Sources
For all you ever wanted to know about the conception and construction of the beer pipeline, check out this press release from De Halve Maan. Notes the brewery, the pipeline “makes the preservation of the historic past possible. For more than 500 years, there has been a brewery on the present site on the Walplein. The Halve Maan is the last original brewery still active in the old city center and is therefore one of the last witnesses to the rich beer tradition of Bruges. The laying of the pipeline helps to guarantee the future of this historic association. It means that the famous ‘city beers’ — Brugse Zot and Straffe Hendrik — will continue to be 100% brewed in the historic city center at their original location.”
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