Poperinge
About this Place
Poperinge is a town in the province of West Flanders, close to the French border. Long associated with hop growing, it is widely regarded as the heart of Belgium's hop-producing region. The surrounding fields have supplied breweries for centuries and continue to play an important role in the country's brewing tradition.
The town's brewing heritage is celebrated through the National Hop Museum and the triennial Beer & Hop Festival, while local hops continue to find their way into the beers of breweries including Kazematten in nearby Ypres. Poperinge also has close historical links with the First World War, when nearby Talbot House provided a place of rest and companionship for soldiers serving on the Western Front. Together, these threads of agriculture, brewing and remembrance make Poperinge one of the Museum's most distinctive places.
Visitor notes
If there is one place beyond the breweries that I would gently insist you visit, it is Talbot House. Beautifully preserved and quietly moving, it tells an intensely human story that deserves to be experienced.
I've always thought hop fields have an unfair advantage over breweries. You can smell them long before you see them. If you happen to visit Poperinge during the hop harvest, your olfactory senses will become acutely, almost disproportionately, aware that you've arrived in Belgium's hop-growing heartland. Some visitors will find the aroma wonderfully evocative and strangely comforting. Others may simply marvel at quite how astonishingly hard beer has to work before it eventually becomes... well... beer.