1. Buy the Delerium pink elephant hat. It may look stupid, but if you wear it with confidence, it will help you get elected “queen of the festival” (at least, by a drunk Belgian soccer team with no authority whatsoever). As an added bonus, you may also get a marriage proposal or two.
2. Check how much each of the beers are before you buy ten tokens. While you might think that beers will be all different prices (e.g., some are 3 tokens, some are 2), you may find yourself with too much to drink when it turns out that all beers are only 1 token each. 10 beers with an ABV of 10% is just too much.
3. Drink the cookie beer. Then buy a case of it to take home, since they don’t sell it in the US. You don’t want to have to be Googling it later that night and trying to figure out where to buy it in Brussels before you fly home. Also, please remember that drinking cookie beer is not the same as eating a cookie; you really need to eat some solid food as well.
4. When calculating your train trip home, use the following guidelines: find the last train to Brussels. Subtract one hour for a missed connection. Subtract one hour for stupidity. Subtract one hour for falling asleep (this is separate from stupidity). Finally, subtract one hour for the trip from your station-in-the-middle-of-nowhere to Antwerp, where you transfer to the train to Brussels. This means you must leave the festival by 7pm, not 8pm. Trust me when I say that you do not want to be arriving at Antwerp at 12:30am with the last train at 12:15am and the next train at 5am. If you are a student, this might be a good opportunity for you to explore Antwerp and have stories for the ages; if you are an adult, this will only cause you to throw money at the problem by taking a taxi home for 100 Euros ($140 USD) and then regret your extravagance later.
5. Write a blog post about all your adventures to make yourself feel better.
So who’s in for the next festival?!
Beers tried:
Brasserie Saint-Monon Au Miel
Brouwerij De Dolle Boskeun
Brouwerij De Dolle Stout
Brouwerij De Dolle Verse Vis
Brouwerij De Dolle Export Stout
Brouwerij Van Eecke Het Kapittel Prior
Brouwerij Malheur Dark Brut
Brasserie Caulier Abbaye Paix Dieu
Brasserie Artisinale Millevertus La Safranaise
Brasserie D’Ecaussines Cookie Beer (I give it 4 stars – DELICIOUS)
Brasserie D’Ecaussines Framboise
Brouwerij de Ranke Hop Harvest 2010
Brasserie de l’Abbaye du Val-Dieu Grand Cru (I give it 5 stars – complex and FABULOUS)
De Zennebrouwerij Equinox
Sounds fun to me. Missed train and all.