Belgian beer, French cheese

We traveled to northern France for a little less than a week of touring by motorhome (or camping-car, as it's called over there). We saw plenty of the countryside, but more importantly: we drank a lot of beer, and ate a lot of cheese.

This is what I thought of it.

Beer

When you go to Belgium, you drink Belgian beer. It's almost offensive to see Heineken and Desperados on the shelf. Best drunk out of a fancy glass with gold leaf on the rim.

• Tripel Karmeliet. Good and Belgian. Nutty notes. Good pub beer I reckon. Lighter coloured than I was expecting. 8.4% is a good spot to be. 3/5.
• Trappistes Rochefort. Very sweet, thick in the mouth like fudge. An excellent beer to have just one of. You can get 750ml for like €6 at any corner shop in Belgium, or 250ml for £15 at the Head of Steam in Durham. 5/5
• Straffe Hendrik Brugs Quadrupel 11. Putting "quadrupel" and "11" together in the name of a beer constitutes a promise that the beer itself sort of fails to fulfil. Lots of Belgian character, but it lacks the sauce. 750ml of it will make you feel pretty good though. 4/5
• Maredsous. Blond, drinkable. "Only" 6.5%, which makes it session-able, I guess. I don't know why you'd want to. 3/5
• La Goudale ambrée. I think that this is a sort of proletariat kind of Belgian beer. The Belgian proletariat clearly drink well. 4/5
• La Corne des Bois des Pendus. Darker than the rest but almost totally characterless. It's recognisably beer. The label's a bit corny. 2/5
• Barbar bok brune. Very idiosyncratic, packed with spices and, apparently, honey. I don't think that it's quite my thing, but I like the bottle. 2/5
• Chimay Bleue. This is the classic. Available pretty much everywhere, always very nice, especially in the iconic Chimay glass. Best consumed with a tiny terrine of salami and the secondhand tobacco smoke of six or seven men in sunglasses and polos tucked into their shorts. 5/5

Cheese

The tragedy of trying to eat as many cheeses as you can is that cheesemongers always assume you'll be sharing with between four and six other people. Which makes it very hard to go through enough cheese to get a representative sample of what's available. To get this far, we ate multiple meals of just cheese and bread.

• Galet du boulonnais. Soft and creamy in texture, with an extremely bitter orange rind. Might be good with a sweet jam to balance the bitterness, but not very pleasant on its own with bread. 2/5
• Écume de Wimereux. Almost crumbly, with a slightly tangy taste and a chewy rind. That makes it sound worse than it is. 3/5
• P'ti frais ail - Fromagerie de la Semois. Now this is a cheese you get out of bed for. Creamy and covered in garlic. Just enough to polish off between two people. 4/5
• Le Carré - Bons mayennais. A popular camembert with almost no discernable flavour at all. Pleasant on bread but would benefit from another topping to give it some oomph. 2/5