It’s a bitter irony that our licensing laws, dating from an era of temperance and moderation, encourage us to drink too much, too quickly. I’m not the type to remove my clothing and discuss my nakedness with police officers after a night on the town, but I still have an urge to consume sufficient alcohol by 11pm to ensure that everyone is either my best mate, or my worst enemy. I thought that perhaps a day spent in Belgium, gently grazing on the most original and diverse range of beers in the world, might lead me to value quality over quantity – and, in the process, give me a continental sophistication that might stop me from collecting bruises and traffic cones as drinking mementos. Sadly, travelling to Brussels, visiting ten bars and getting home on the same day requires an irritatingly early start. My accomplice, Will, turned up at Waterloo at 7am looking bleary-eyed and hungover, having not only won a bottle of champagne in a pub quiz the previous night, but failed to resist the urge to drink it. I’d been slightly more sensible, but neither of us were remotely tempted by the pints of Carling on offer at the Eurostar terminal, and we settled into our seats for a gentle two-hour slumber.

We were roused by the multi-lingual announcement of our arrival in Brussels, and we made our way to our first bar. Situated just off the bustling Place de Monnaie, La Lunette’s unique selling point is their glasses: gigantic soup tureens with a one litre capacity. My grasp of metric measurements is shaky, but I do know that “a litre of water’s a pint and three quarters”. If this same rhyme can be applied to beer – and I fear that it can – a quick drink at La Lunette becomes a daunting prospect. Fortunately, they also sell beer in smaller glasses; I began unadventurously with a Hoegaarden that I could have had back home, while Will opted for a kriek; these are supposedly made by steeping whole cherries in ale, but his bore more resemblance to a lager with a shot of Ribena in it. It was already time to find something a little more challenging. A La Mort Subite, or “Sudden Death”, is a handsome, fin-de-siecle bar named after a variety of beer with the propensity to deliver a biblical hangover. Wary of this, we opted for a couple of bottles of Orval, a glorious trappist beer which has been brewed by monks since 1931 in order to fund the rebulding of their abbey; by now they’ve probably coined enough to build five or six. Feeling peckish, we scanned the menu. “What does ‘tête pressée’ mean?” Will asked me, tentatively. I wasn’t sure. “I think it might be ‘pressed head’,” I replied. “Hm. Shall we have some cheese, then?” A couple of minutes later, a plate piled with yellow cubes on cocktail sticks had arrived, giving our table the air of a cash-strapped 70s community centre party for which the kitty couldn’t stretch to a can of pineapple chunks.

Onward. After wandering through the oldest shopping arcade in Europe, down sidestreets and alleyways, we arrived at Delirium, a cellar bar whose menu is the size and shape of an Argos catalogue and features 2000 beers. Warily noting the “English” section – featuring such dubious delights as Carling for €6.50 – we decided to investigate the old Belgian brewing traditions: bitterness and sourness. The barman poured a stout for Will with the poise and solemnity of a sommellier, while I went for de Ranke’s XX Bitter, a brew whose uncompromising flavour flicks a contemptuous V-sign at commercial Belgian brewers, while breaking into their car and nicking their stereo. To complete the sensory overload we ordered lunch: a large block of Herve, a magnificently ripe Belgian cheese which is rarely allowed to leave Belgium because of the extraordinary stench it gives off in transit. To my knowledge, no scientific studies have ever proven the effectiveness of smelly cheese in staving off intoxication, but our pungent Herve left us thirsty and eager to press on.

Visiting these bars without trying lambic beers is like ordering an omelette in an Indian restaurant. The air around Brussels and the surrounding Payottenland is said to be particularly rich in yeast, and lambics are brewed by using the air alone as the fermenting agent. This creates a unusual and addictive brew with citric and lactic tangs that bears little relationship to beer as we know it. Will advised that his prior attempts at drinking lambics had caused the air around Brussels and the surrounding Payottenland to be particularly rich in his sonorous belching, but he was willing to give it another go; the ideal opportunity arose at A La Becasse, a handsome, wood-panelled bar where men in starched aprons pour lambics from beautiful ceramic jugs. The ferociously complex biological brewing process was of no interest to a fat man in the corner, who had the look of someone who has always just had lunch and was working his way through several jugs of the stuff. I ordered a gueuze (pronounced gerz), a carefully blended concoction of lambics and for many the ultimate Belgian brew, while Will bottled out and chose something with the hilariously English name of John Martin’s Pale Ale, using a preposterous French accent to conceal his embarrassment.

With our train leaving in a couple of hours, we sped around a clutch of city centre establishments, our sense of direction becoming increasingly erratic as we went. Falstaff is a gigantic art nouveau bar with listed status, and one of Brussels’ best known; sadly the beer list was depressingly corporate, and we quickly moved on, past a miniscule statue of a urinating boy that is, inexplicably, Brussels’ main tourist attraction. Nearby is Poechenellekelder, a dark, slightly spooky bar with dozens of minatures of the weak-bladdered child, along with large, sinister looking dummies whose eyes follow you to the toilet and back. Then around the corner at Toone, there’s a similar preponderance of mannequins, who stand guard over the adjoining puppet theatre. As we sat under their watchful gaze, swigging at round-bottomed glasses of Kwak beer kept upright like test tubes in a wooden rack, we realised that, amazingly, we were still not tired of drinking beer. Back in Britain our systems would by now have been rejecting lager in a spectacular and unpleasant fashion. So, en route to the terminal, we dropped in at Porte Noir, another lambic specialist, before heading out the suburb of Anderlecht to find Laboureur, our last chance saloon, right opposite the station. Its combination of down-at-heel décor, draught lambics and ping pong gave us our best example of an authentic Brussels bar, the perfect place in which to raise a glass in a final toast (with apologies to Julio Iglesias) to all the gueuze I’d loved before If half a lager in my local tasted as glorious as this, I’d probably never need to go to Belgium. But it doesn’t. So I do.

Later, as our train slunk into the Channel Tunnel, I realised with dismay that we’d only visited nine bars; still one short. Will disappeared through the doors to the restaurant car and returned 10 minutes later with a tube of Pringles and two cans. Stella. ‘Welcome to England,’ he said, as he cracked back the ring pull.