Brussels

The CMIC Brussels visit encompassed four days but we only attended the first two visits and it is difficult to imagine a more diverse pair of breweries.

The Cantillon brewery is the last remaining traditional brewer of Lambic beers in Brussels. Lambic beer is brewed slowly using the wild yeasts and bacteria that are available naturally at the site: the wort is pumped into a large, shallow (to maximise the surface area) copper vessel in the attic, left for a few days to attract the yeasts and then stored in oak barrels for a couple of years to ferment. It all sounds delightfully quaint and natural and wholesome.
But when I used to brew at home, all the instructions stressed the importance of sterilisation to avoid contamination of the brew by wild yeasts and there is a reason for that: Lambic beer tastes awful, like the last inch of a bottle left in the garden for several days in the summer, but some folks like it.
Lambic beers are blends of three-year-old brews. Gueuze is a blend of 1, 2 and 3 year old brews.

By contrast, the following day we visited the Brasseie de la Senne brewery. This is a small, young brewery, fanatical (in a nice way) about taste and traditional methodology combined with innovation.
There Taras Boulba is the nicest beer we have tasted in a long time and we brought back four bottles for Christmas morning, replacing the (faux) champaign this year.