Pleasant as it is to enjoy a few bottles of Belgian beer at home, nothing can beat getting over the channel and settling in a nice bar to sample a few beers.
Despite being little-known (and often the subject of unfair derision), Belgium is a great place for a holiday. Whether your preference is for a seaside holiday, exploring the countryside or strolling round medieval cities, it's a country with something for everybody. And it's easy to get to.
The big tourist destination is Brugge (annoyingly more often known by the English by its French name, Bruges). And it is indeed, a beautiful city, if perhaps rather "chocolate-box" and overwhelmed with tourists. For beer-lovers it's as close to heaven as can be imagined; within half a kilometre of the Markt there are probably over five hundred different beers to be found in a couple of dozen excellent bars.
The coastal towns and cities, such as Oostende, Knokke-Heist and Zeebrugge offer what a beach-tourist would look for, though they suffer architecturally from having been extensively bombed during the World Wars and having been rebuilt as sympathetically as was Coventry.
Brussels is a surprisingly enjoyable city. Like every European capital it has it's share of utterly revolting modern architecture. But there are also a great number of interesting buildings to look at; from Art-Deco (such as "Old England"), futuristic (The Atomium) to the baroque (the Grand'Place/Grote Markt - quite rightly a World Heritage Site). Beermad is particularly fond of the Poechenellekelder; situated overlooking the Mannekin Pis, this ought to be the kind of bar that sells fizzy rubbish at inflated prices to tourists, but it's actually a wonderful bar with an imaginative list and friendly, efficient service.
Jazz lovers may want to take a trip to Dinant, home of Saxophone inventor Adolf Sax. It's an attractive little town with impressive views from the hilltop fortifications. It's also home to the Abbaye de Leffe; Beermad's visitors will probably prefer to avoid the beer brewed in its name
History buffs can visit the site of the Battle of Waterloo, though apart from the visitor centre and a number of memorials, there isn't actually much to see apart from a lot of attractive countryside. The battlefield isn't actually at Waterloo, it's at Braine-l'Alleud a few kilometres south. It got dubbed the Battle of Waterloo because Wellington's HQ was in a hotel (now a museum) in that town.
If you only buy one guide book for your visit to Belgium, buy Tim Webb's Good Beer Guide to Belgium (see further reading).
Visiting one of the specialist beer bars in Belgium, you'll find such a range of beers that you could be forgiven for thinking there was no point in anybody running beer festivals in the country as well. But they do. And very good they are too.
Unlike British beer festivals Belgian festivals tend to have a number of small bars, each run by one or two breweries and showcasing their beers. And often you'll even meet the brewer on his bar.
There are too many festivals to list here, but a calendar with all the information you could possibly need can be found at Filip Geerts' excellent Belgian Beer Board. Some festivals Beermad has enjoyed include:
A few of the easy ways to get from Britain to Belgium:
Visit Belgium has a useful page with a lot of information about breweries you can visit, beer festivals and much more