Belgium, by the square of chocolate and the glass of beer

Belgian chocolate has a surprisingly precise birthday. In 1912, a Brussels confectioner named Jean Neuhaus is generally credited with inventing the praline in its modern form: a hard chocolate shell filled with a soft centre, rather than the solid chocolate that had dominated the market until then, sold from the family shop in the Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert, one of the oldest covered shopping arcades in Europe. Neuhaus's invention, refined further within a few years by his own family when his daughter-in-law devised a fitted box, the ballotin, to stop loose pralines being crushed in a paper bag, gave Belgian chocolate the format most of the world still associates with it: individual filled chocolates, boxed and sold by weight, a business model that has barely changed in over a century.

A trade built on cacao it never grew

None of the cacao behind any of this was ever grown in Belgium, a fact easy to overlook amid the shop windows. Belgium's early access to cacao ran through its colonial control of the Congo, a history the country's chocolate industry has, in recent years, been pressed to reckon with more directly than it once did, alongside the wider and considerably darker legacy of Belgian rule there under Leopold II. The chocolate itself, refined and marketed from Brussels and Antwerp workshops, became an export success distinct from, and largely disconnected from public awareness of, where its principal raw ingredient actually came from.

Beer, on an entirely different clock

Where chocolate can point to a single inventor and a single year, Belgian beer's history runs on a far longer and less tidy timeline. Trappist brewing, the tradition of monasteries producing beer to fund their own upkeep, traces back centuries in the Low Countries, and Belgium remains home to several of the small number of monasteries worldwide still entitled to the Trappist designation, which requires the beer to be brewed within the monastery walls, under the supervision of the monks, with profits directed to the community's own needs and to charity rather than commercial growth. Alongside the Trappist tradition sits a far broader range of styles found almost nowhere else: lambic beers fermented using wild airborne yeast rather than a cultivated strain, a technique largely confined to the Senne valley around Brussels, and strong, often spiced abbey ales brewed in a similar style by secular breweries without any formal monastic connection at all.

Two traditions, one square

What unites Belgian chocolate and beer, beyond simple national pride, is how little either tradition has been streamlined for scale. A great many chocolate shops still hand-finish pralines in small batches rather than mass-producing them, and a meaningful share of the country's beer is still brewed in quantities small enough that a single town's specialty rarely travels far beyond it, a deliberate resistance to standardisation that runs through both trades and gives Belgium's main squares, in Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp alike, their particular texture: a chocolatier's window beside a café with a beer list running to dozens of names, neither hurrying the visitor along.

Reaching the squares

Bruges is the easiest of the three to reach from Britain without flying, because short sailings from London Tilbury put in at Zeebrugge, a short hop from the old town. Dutch Springtime Delights, four nights in April, is the obvious choice for this particular subject: it pairs Amsterdam in tulip season with a call for Bruges, and it puts chocolates in its own title.

The Belgium & Normandy Taster, three nights from Portsmouth in May, sets Bruges beside Honfleur, and the Autumn Escape to Holland & Belgium, three nights from Tilbury in September, pairs Amsterdam and Bruges once the summer crowds have thinned.

Neither chocolate nor beer needs much planning to enjoy properly, which is rather the point of both: a good praline and a well-kept abbey ale are, by design, entirely ready the moment you are.

A box of pralines travels well enough, provided it is not left somewhere warm, but the more interesting souvenir is usually a bottle rather than a box. Belgian bars traditionally pour each beer into its own glass, usually branded by the brewery and shaped for that beer's head and aroma, a level of ceremony that can seem excessive until the same beer is tried from an ordinary tumbler and tastes noticeably flatter for it. Strength varies far more widely than the modest-looking bottles suggest, with some abbey ales reaching a strength closer to wine than to the lager most British visitors are used to, a detail worth noting before ordering a second round on the strength of the first one going down easily.