Right, here it is, the Big One. Or the Big Two, if you want. A walking tour of Brussels, with tastings of chocolate and beer along the way. Thanks to Trip Advisor, I was tipped off to Hungry Mary’s Beer and Chocolate Tour – and it’s well worth your money.

Nina, our host and guide, started us off with a note that it’s better to do some chocolate first, before everyone is tipsy….

As Nina told us, when shopping for Belgian chocolate, keep in mind a few things: If there’s a sign offering a discount outside the place, keep walking. If you can buy some of the store’s goods in the airport’s duty free shop, buy it there. Look for a place that shows the name of the person supplying the chocolate, because that person is the one sorting through the cacao to find the really good stuff and experiment with flavor combinations. They’re the people who sell the chocolate to companies like Leonidas and Neuhaus that they use to make their chocolate candies.

Our first stop was at the Pierre Marcolini shop in the Royal Galleries of St. Hubert (Brussels’ upscale shopping mall). I don’t remember what I tried; I think it was just basic chocolate. Nina was giving us too much good info anyway.

We moved on to one of the Elisabeth shops. That company sells the chocolate of Frederic Blondeel, who has been trying out a lot of interesting things. Like infusing sweet basil into the chocolate. We were given samples of that without any description, and asked to guess what the flavor was. I thought it was spearmint, but I wasn’t sure….

Our last chocolate stop was at BS40 (named for its location at 40 Butter Street), where you can find the chocolates of Jitsk Heyninck. He’s also trying out unusual flavor combinations, like chocolate and miso, and making them work.

Hope you can read it.

OK, it’s Beer Time. I was thinking we’d be getting small tasting glasses, but we actually got respectable servings of everything. Maybe a quarter liter.

The first beer stop was at the rooftop bar at The Bourse, which is also where you end up if you visit the Belgian Beer World Experience (more on that in a later post). We sampled Blanche de Namur, a light wheat beer, and Boon Framboise – which, if no one told you anything different, you’d think was a really good raspberry/cherry soda.

Next stop was Le Roi d’Espagne, a restaurant on the Grand-Place. For a bit of privacy, we went to an upstairs room for our tasting. Plus a bit of a nosh – cheese and bread. We had a Delta IPA from the Belgian Beer Project. They’re a fairly new brewery, and they actually crowdsourced this recipe. Our second beer was Gouden Carolus Tripel, whose recipe dates back to the late 1400s. The “triple” doesn’t mean it has three times the alcohol of a regular beer (it refers to steps in the brewing process), but it does have more – 9% ABV (Dubbels are around 7%, and quads can get up to 12%).

Our final stop was a “hole in the wall” theater and bar: the Théâtre Royal de Toone, an old school puppet theater (and cafe) tucked away at the end of a short alley. Our beer selections were a Westmalle Dubbel and a St Bernardus abt 12, a “quad”. Westmalle is an authentic Trappist beer; St Bernardus can only boast of being an “abbey ale” made in a similar manner. They take the “Trappist” designation extremely seriously; there are only thirteen Trappist monasteries in the world that make beer, and not all of them meet the standards of the International Trappist Association (Belgium is home to six of them that do).

Everything we sampled was great. If you find yourself in Brussels, take the tour.

OK, my feet are tired. Next time, I’ll relax a bit with some general observations.