COALVILLE, England — The conveyor belt was ready and the empty bottles were stacked. But one more step was necessary before beer bottling could get underway.
And it required a monk.
Father Joseph Delargy soon appeared, dressed in the white tunic of the Cistercian order, to bless the event. And the bottles of Britain’s only Trappist beer —Tynt Meadow, an English dark ale celebrating its fifth anniversary—soon began chugging rapidly along the small production line.
“If it’s a day that hasn’t been blessed, you can guarantee everything will go wrong,” said Ross Adams, who is not religious but was recently hired as the first professional brewer at Mount Saint Bernard Abbey. “Beer will be thrown everywhere and pieces will fall.”
Only beers brewed in monasteries with the active participation of Cistercian Catholic monks are classified as Trappist products. There are only a dozen Trappist breweries in the world, mostly in Belgium and the Netherlands.
Tynt Meadow, named after the nearby field where the abbey’s founders settled in 1835, is a malty ale with a light chocolate flavour. That flavor has been so successful that local volunteers are helping with bottling to ease the burden on the abbey’s 17 monks.
A dairy farm used to support the abbey. But that didn’t prove viable in the 21st century when milk prices fell. The Cistercian monasteries had a long tradition of brewing beer, particularly in Belgium, so it seemed an obvious alternative, even more so because records show that the monks of this abbey were brewing beer in the 19th century, unfortunately without recording their recipe. .
“We definitely had a big discussion about the moral aspects of brewing beer,” Delargy said, adding that the monks “are not ignorant of the difficulties that alcohol can cause.”
But they concluded that, in good conscience, they could brew a beer whose full-bodied style might discourage most drinkers from overindulging. Even sothe beer’s alcohol content, at 7.4 percent, is higher than most mass-produced brands.
Tynt Meadow is not well known in Britain, and around 65 per cent of the 966 hectoliters produced last year was exported, much of it to Belgium and the Netherlands.
One of the volunteers, Steven Horsley, 67, a Trappist beer enthusiast, is not religious and said the blessing took him by surprise at first. But now he finds him attractive.
“I think it gives something special,” he said.
One recent day, an ill-fitting machine replacement part broke several bottles.
Although the process was blessed, an hour of work was lost, with the total of 4 thousand bottles for the day well below normal. However, that won’t change the routine at Mount Saint Bernard Abbey.
“If we hadn’t been blessed, it could always have been worse,” said Peter Grady, the brewery manager.
By: STEPHEN CASTLE
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6934780, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-10-12 21:10:07
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