De Koninck - Antwerp City Brewery — Attraction in Antwerp

This was an anticipated part of our trip in the city, but it left us disappointed for the day. I’ve been to a couple of breweries and have always had a good, eventful time, but did not expect this experience to fall short. We spent about an hour here.

First, the instruction in English was fine, but the direction was confusing, as the Ticket Office tells you to go to the Gift Shop to pick up your ticket, where they tell you to go to the bar to grab your beer and enter the brewery. If the directions were clearly pointing where to follow, we would’ve not have an issue in the first place, so arrows at the beginning would’ve been nice. *It is absolutely necessary for you to go to the bar before entering the brewery, and finding some entrances/doors for first-time visitors can be confusing! Otherwise, you have no cup or token to refill your cup during the tour. There should’ve been someone at the entrance of the brewery to make sure guests understood the guide. Compared to other breweries, this setup isn’t quite convenient to guests. Second, we had to constantly wait for the tour group in front of us to finish each room, so the queuing for this place could be better. It’s nice that it’s interactive, but waiting for the people ahead of you is annoying. Lastly, while the tour was nice enough to accommodate different languages, one of the last rooms that’s filled with beer information did not have any translations. It was an interesting room that we want to read and learn from, but it wasn’t possible for us. Also, I’ve heard that there are tastings, which I did not see any indication of. I’m not sure what the other reviews were mentioning.

The people who work here are nice. We were thankful for this lady working at the bar who empathised with our brewery experience. She helped make the experience feel brighter with her...

Home to the infamous "Bolleke" you see everywhere in Antwerp, the 'De Koninck' Brewery underwent a dramatic renovation after its acquisition by the Duvel-Moortgat group. It now has become a very consumer-oriented brewery placing the "Bolleke" front and center with an amazing interactive tour taking you right beside the brewing vats ending in a tasting café.

The café deserves a mention on its own given the fact that even though it's near the city center and in a brewery hall, it manages to remain relatively calm and peaceful, making it worth visiting separately as well (to try an unfiltered "Bolleke", impossible to find anywhere else in Antwerp).

Built around the brewery are complementary elements such as a cheese shop run by the most renown cheese refiners in Belgium (Van Tricht), a chocolate store using infusions of the Bolleke among other things, a bakery using the yeast that is also found in Duvel-Moortgat beers, a butcher shop and multiple restaurants.

You could, and should, take half a day to just amuse yourself in this brewery....

The place is small, the visit consists only of videos. There is no interactive experience as they promote. One of the first videos is supposed to explain the history of the brewery, but they don't have enough facts to show, so most of the video is about Belgium and not the brewery. There is a part where you should be able to see the beer packaging process and the people working at the lab, but this part is not advertised so I didn't know that going on a Sunday was a bad idea as the production line obviously stops on Sundays. The audio explanation of that part was exclusively in Dutch. There was a quizz at the end of tour, also only in Dutch. You get to pour your own beer, but nobody explains you how, or how the coin operated machine works, so its good that we were two, as the first try was wasted on understanding how to operate that (there was nobody to ask around). They didn't show the ingredients or the beer making process live, only on video. I did several of beer/whiskey/wine tours in the past and this was by...