'Belgian Beer Me' probably used to be a great way to go. Their website said tours are 12 to 16 people on average with no more than 24 people. 12 to 16 sounded pretty reasonable, so my wife and I signed up. It turned out that our tour had 38 people... so that's one maximum tour PLUS one average tour combined into one giant tour. It had become the cattle-car tour that we always want to avoid, Bonus points for a tour guide who lied to us about the tour before we even met him. None of the breweries we visited could accommodate 38 people,so the group had to be split up and one half had to wait. Meals could take two to three hours because the kitchens in the quaint little places we visited were absolutely inundated. Even in the cafeteria scenarios, you're looking at a half hour wait to get food if you're the last one in line. Be prepared to spend a good amount of your vacation waiting for something good to happen if you take this tour. It became more than a little annoying to listen to our tour guide tell us that we all had to "be team players" when he was the one who screwed the team. If you're in a small tour, you get a chance to make friends with your tourmates, and it's nicer to spend time with someone you've made a connection with. That's just plain impossible with 38 people on the tour. You can make friends with some, but at the end of two weeks, half of your tourmates will be pretty close to being strangers. This problem was exacerbated by 'Team Alabama'. One of the reasons the tour was so large is that 'Belgian Beer Me' had decided to make room for a large family group. Those folks were on their own private tour. Sure, they had to share the bus with the rest of us, but you could always spot them at a large table. They were the one who turned their backs on the rest of us. FUN! 'Belgian Beer Me' was probably great back in the day. But greed and other factors have made it a tour to avoid, as I was greatly disappointed to find out.
BTW, I used to have an account here long ago. but I haven't used it for a decade and I forgot my login credentials.
This is 2018. Belgium is a modern, small, well-connected country and you should be able to self-organise a trip to see the breweries / beer stops you want at less cost than this rubbish. Hope you try again next year 'off your own bat' as we say in England.
As a Belgian expat only dipping into the home terroir once or twice a year anymore, the slow speed of developments of brewpubs and breweries in terms of accomodating groups baffles me. I sometimes tinker with the thought of showing a small group of German brew&beerfriends around my beer home though, and these are the multiple caveats that come to mind: Especially being used to German Hausbrauereien now, brewpubs like De Halve Maan in Bruges tourist centre who close at 18:00 on a daily basis and start ushering you towards the exit from 17:45h on seem like a thing of the past and make it hard for travelling beer groups to show up unannounced. At the same time, I can only imagine the wait being in a 30+ group. Service can be deliberately very slow in Belgium - it's as if the whole country was made not to involve beyond slow food and slow drink. Wait long enough for fast food and fast drink culture, and that will become a distinction once again. Unless the whole country is awash with US-style 40-taphandle taprooms by then, at a 200% markup and a considerable loss of couleur locale...
Well that's good to know. I've seen larger tours hitting some fairly large places in Germany and thought it looked painful. I'd considered one of those Belgian tours because I thought the guide might have some interesting information, but now I'll probably skip it.
Hope to meet you next time in my van then for a private tour (max 8 persons) in Belgium given by a Belgian guy(me)
