The Trappist monks at The Abbey of Saint Sixtus of Westvleteren, Belgium, aren't in the business of brewing beer for the riches or glory — they brew only enough to support themselves and their abbey.
But fame found them anyway in the mid-2000s, when the beer-information website RateBeer.com named their dark, quadrupel-style 12 the best beer in the world.
RateBeer executive director Joe Tucker, who put together the beer ranking based on reviews from the site's users, said he had no idea how much of an impact it would have on the abbey/brewery, collectively known as Westvleteren. The brewery had also been declared the best brewer in the world on the site's first annual list of the World's Best Brewers back in 2002, but no one had paid much attention.
"One day, 20 people were there drinking the beer," Tucker told Business Insider. "The next, there's a huge line of cars waiting to buy it." A Belgian TV station even captured footage of a fistfight that broke out in the line.
The beer that no one had heard of had suddenly skyrocketed in popularity. Tucker got a phone call from Westvleteren soon after, and the monks weren't happy. Thanks to Tucker's list, they told him, the public was demanding more beer. The monks "were not going to make it," Tucker said. "Beer's usually a business; there's a market for it, but the monks don't see it that way.
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A Small Operation
Of the 10 Trappist monasteries that produce beer, Westvleteren produces the least: just under 4,000 barrels, or 126,000 gallons, a year. The largest, Chimay, produces about 3.2 million gallons a year.
The abbey began brewing beer around 1839, and it started selling to the public in 1931, author and photographer Charles "Chuck" Cook, who specializes in Belgian beer, told Business Insider. The recipe has changed very little since then.
The abbey brews about 70 days a year, starting at about 9 a.m. and finishing at about 5 p.m. Five monks work in the brewery, and an additional five help on bottling days.
Cook, who is one of few non-monks to have gone inside the Westvleteren brewery, is particularly well acquainted with its beer. He has had all three of its brews — the 8 and the 12, both dark ales, and the Blond, a 5.8% ABV (alcohol by volume) Belgian blond ale. He has even tried one that had been aged since 1969.
So does Cook think it is the best in the world?
"There's a lot of great strong, dark beers in Belgium — there's the Rochefort 10, the St. Bernardus Abt," he said. "There are numerous beers that are dark and strong and start at 10, 11, 12% [ABV]. But [for Westvleteren], when you throw in the taste, A, and B, [the fact] it's brewed by monks, and C, the 'scarcity factor,' that's a lot of it."