David Pennington reflects on Orval and the fading art of divine brewing.
Abbaye Notre-Dame d’Orval is a monastery in southern Belgium that is known the world around for brewing and distributing Orval, a Belgian Pale Ale that is the sole commercial beer of the monastery. Orval made the news recently when they announced they’d possibly have to scale back production because there aren’t enough monks to brew. In the past decade, the population of the monastery has gone from 35 to 12 – a significant problem, as joining a monastery is more of a spiritual calling than a job opportunity.
The Trappists were in the limelight for a different reason over the past few years as monasteries sent out cease-and-desist letters to breweries here in the States who were claiming to brew Trappist ales for retail sale. Around 1985, the Trappist Association lawyered up and created an international copyright on the name and created a trademark that “guarantees the monastic origin of the products as well as the fact that they measure up to the quality and traditional standards rooted in the monastic life of a real Trappist community.” The monks knew that the romantic, monastic origins of their product could easily be replicated and put the reputation of the name at risk of being tarnished, especially when a saturated market wouldn’t know what an authentic product was actually like. Today, a Trappist product carries an official logo. When it comes to beer, there are only 10 breweries in the world who can brew certified Trappist ales. What makes these ales so exclusive? According to the official Trappist Association website, a Trappist ale must be:
- brewed within the walls of a Trappist monastery, either by the monks themselves or under their supervision
- the brewery must be of secondary importance within the monastery and it should witness to the business practices proper to a monastic way of life
- the brewery is not intended to be a profit-making venture. The income covers the living expenses of the monks and the maintenance of the buildings and grounds. Whatever remains is donated to charity for social work and to help persons in need
- breweries are constantly monitored to assure the irreproachable quality of their beers
These guidelines set up a quagmire that makes Orval so unique and the situation they are in so dire. Trappist-style recipes can be replicated by anyone with a brew kettle. However, being brewed by a monk of the appropriate order is a harder quality to fake. At the same time, it is not difficult – especially here in America – to find someone who is ready to change their whole life for the opportunity to brew beer for a living. But to find someone who is ready to shake loose their worldly possessions, commit their lives to a higher power, and brew beer as a means of sustenance? Suddenly, the application target is much smaller.
There is no denying the popularity of craft beer here in the states. In Europe, a region that has been constrained by law to brew their beer with very specific ingredients, brewers are looking to shake things up and create something special. With hundreds of new beers hitting the public market each year, many of them brazenly close to what Orval produces, what would the world be missing if the Trappists scaled back their production to a subsistence level?
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Drinking in the Name of God
The Trappist Association is a collection of 18 monasteries in the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, a group who make food, wine, cleaning products, and decorative items in order to sustain their way of life or give to those in need. To become a monk or nun in the OCSO is a process that could take anywhere from 3 to 9 years, requires strict observance and a chaste lifestyle. But if one is to be so chaste, what are they doing messing about with beer?
Drinking beer, or any alcohol for that matter, has taken a secular light in the past several decades. There is little divinity in the bar room; only those in the most dire of straits find God at the bottom of a bottle of Mad Dog. Yet one of the most recognizable stories from Scripture involves turning water into wine. Dom Perignon, a Catholic monk, invented what we know as Champagne. If a church anoints something like Franzia to serve as sacrament, does drinking a Belgian Pale made by a monk serve a similar purpose?
Monasteries are typically built as a shelter for those who adhere to a strict observance for a higher power. As you can imagine, there usually isn’t much in terms of economic prowess when it comes to praying around the clock, so monks had to make the monasteries as self-sufficient as possible. This meant everything from construction to digging wells to planning crops and, in 1931, establishing a brewery. Most beer that is brewed in the Flanders region isn’t particular to the yeasts that are added. Stop by any brewery in America and you’ll see a uniform row of stainless steel kettles, fermenters, and Brite tanks. Visit a traditional Belgian brewery and you’re likely to see a more organic environment, where the fermentation process is activated by whatever yeasts happen to fall out of the air. To brewers in the past, brewing beer wasn’t so much a calculated recipe but something that just happened – a divine intervention. To the Trappists, the continued creation of their product isn’t so much a gateway to getting drunk, but as a way to supplement oneself during a liquid fast (thus, the advent of the doppelbock) or to support their way of life by selling additional brew to the nearby community.
Does alcohol brewed by a man of faith bring one closer to God somehow? Probably no more than the Franzia at a Catholic Mass. The primary mantra of the Trappists is “Ora Et Labora”, or “Pray and Labor.” Orval isn’t brewed or sold to necessarily be served at bars or be argued over on websites, but is rather created in observance of a feeling the average drinker will probably never comprehend. Today, some churches in the States are trying to attract younger crowds with the appeal of beer; sermons held in pubs, beers brewed over burners in parking lots after Mass, or simply social events held in church basements with the promise of free alcohol. While a noble effort, there is a difference between beer as an accessory to the experience, rather than beer being the experience in and of itself.
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The Rise of Craft, the Protection of a Heritage, the Observance of Ritual
In 1919, the Prohibition amendment was ratified. It didn’t take long for the Budweiser-sized breweries to grasp a majority of the beer drinking market, shipping out millions of cans of beers chilled in foam coolers, forgotten and recycled as soon as they were emptied. When home brewing was once again legalized in the 1980s, the dominant breweries (Budweiser and Coors) lost their stranglehold on the beer market. Today, breweries are bringing back styles that haven’t been produced in the US in decades, preserved on metaphorical recipe cards since the days before Prohibition.
There’s a joke among craft brewers: Everyone works for the yeast. Here is this microbe, invisible to the naked eye, that doesn’t make itself known until it ferments wort into beer. Sugars turn to alcohol, carbonation occurs, little streams of bubbles become visible. Sight unseen, yeast turns a mash of grains and water into a beautiful thing – beer. You can understand why this process could be seen as divine. It’s a kind of miracle.
American breweries are notoriously clean and sterile. Rows of stainless steel fermenters are scrubbed and sprayed with scalding water between batches. Taprooms practice the laborious task of cleaning tap lines while pouring into carefully designed and cleaned glassware, all in the name of consistent production. The brewer fills kegs and bottles with the stuff. He cleans the glasses, sets the bar stools straight, and tells a story of how this particular beer came to be. The brewer opens his doors and patrons come from all around to enjoy his craft, to partake in the ritual of the beer: the olfactory sensation, the mouthfeel, the flavors, the conversation sparked by lowered inhibition. A simple process, a basic ritual, but missing for so long that the reprise of it has gathered a church-like following.
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What if Orval Scales Back?
Ultimately, it’d be harder to find Orval at your local specialty beer bar or retailer. To fans of the beer this may come as a tragedy, but beer isn’t a secret; another Belgian Pale will come along to fill that void. As for the Trappists, it doesn’t take much to brew a supply of beer for the 15 or 20 residents of the monastery. Merely a day a week to observe yeast fermenting magic from the most basic ingredients is all that is necessary. This would likely be a chance for the monks to protect the heritage of their beer from the public eye, make it unobtainable, a product that is worthy of pilgrimage.
In any case, this is an opportunity for brewers and connoisseurs of fine ales to take a step back and meditate on their relationship with the divinity of beer.
Photo via Smabs Sputzer/flickr, modified per Creative Commons
Thanks for writing about Orval Trappist Ale. We are their US importer. -Respectfully, the term “Trappist” is specific: it’s not a style. While any brewery can emulate beer recipes, there is no such thing as a “Trappist-style” recipe. -There was a blogger who wrote about Orval scarcity last month (and that article has been taken down) but I have not seen an announcement from Orval that they will “possibly have to scale back production.” On their website, they discuss how sales of Orval have grown dramatically over the past few years – 40k hectoliters in 2000 to 69k hecs in… Read more »
Thankful for the First American Trappist Brewery a town next to me, The Spencer Trappist Ale made by St. Josephs Abbey in Spence MA. http://www.spencerbrewery.com/ Soon to have national distribution.
And it’s delicious!
Good shoutout. The Trappist breweries know what they’re doing. Belgian beers are sublime.