A faint waft of malt drifts over the walls of the tranquil Mount St Bernard Abbey in central England as brewmaster monks are hard at work within.
Faced with dwindling revenues from dairy farming, the monks at the Trappist monastery in Leicestershire decided about six years ago to swap milk for beer.
They sold the cows and spent five years setting up a state-of-the-art brewery that can produce about 300,000 bottles a year of “Tynt Meadow” — only the 12th beer in the world to receive the centuries-old Catholic order’s coveted seal of approval.
Photo: AFP
To qualify as an “Authentic Trappist Beer,” it is brewed within the monastery’s walls under the community’s control and responsibility, and the revenue it generates is used for social service.
The dark ale with an alcohol content of 7.4 percent last year became the first British brew to be recognized by the International Trappist Association, the order’s trade standards body, following an exacting three-day audit.
Tynt Meadow is named after the plot of land in Leicestershire on which Catholic monastic life was refounded in England in the mid-19th century, about 300 years after the Protestant king Henry VIII shut down the country’s monasteries and convents.
Photo: AFP
It has found an enthusiastic following in the Netherlands and Belgium, and at home among younger Britons who are fuellng the craft beer boom.
“I think people are increasingly fed up with fake and they want authenticity,” monastery head monk Abbot Erik said. “We endeavor to live our life authentically.”
Behind solid limestone walls, a web of pipes and state-of-the-art machinery, custom-made in Germany, churn out about 6,000 bottles with each weekly brew.
The popularity of craft beers and tradition of monastic brewing made the switch from milk an obvious choice, but it also came with challenges.
“We weren’t actually aware that there was a craft beer revolution going on,” Abbot Erik said.
“We were somewhat anxious about that for a bit. I think the other Trappist breweries were also a bit anxious that too many people would want to join the bandwagon,” he said.
The spotless workspace, a former laundry, and the monks’ dedication attest to exacting standards.
One monk, obliged to miss services on brewing day to monitor the high-tech system, joins his brethren in spirit by praying in the brewery, using an iPad app to ensure he is singing from the same page.
“We have our monastic life to live and we can’t let the brewery interfere with that too much,” Brother Joseph said, adding that they would brew only the quantity needed to maintain the monastery and support charities.
Thanks to the time-honored rhythms of monastic life, the brewery unexpectedly found itself in tune with cutting-edge culture, Abbot Erik said.
“The fact we make our beer in an artisanal way, we let the processes take their time, we use select ingredients and there is an important manual component to the work” all fit in with the craft beer trend, he said.
However, it also holds deeper significance, he added.
“Something that appeals to me is that beer is made up of very simple, very humble ingredients,” he said, outside the 19th-century abbey.
“What makes a beer special is that these ingredients are brought together in a specialized environment and then allowed to mature ... and then release a potential that was inconceivable originally, when you just looked at the malt, the hops, the water and the yeast,” he said. “I think there is there something of a parable of what goes on at a deeper level in a monastic community.”
Beer enthusiasts can enjoy the tipple any time, unlike its creators.
They get a taste only on feast days, Christmas and Easter, Brother Joseph said.
“We wouldn’t be great drinkers ourselves, being monks,” he said.
An Australian university student who has never visited China and has only a modest social media following would seem an unlikely target for the Chinese government. However, when a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman personally denounced Drew Pavlou at a news conference, it was just the next phase in an extraordinary campaign against the 21-year-old that has fueled concerns over China’s targeting of critics overseas. Pavlou first placed himself in the superpower’s sights when in July last year he organized a small sit-in at the University of Queensland, where he studies, to protest against various Chinese government policies. Since then, the Global
‘ASKED TO MOVE OUT’: Indonesian coast guard personnel argued with a Chinese vessel over territorial claims after it entered the country’s exclusive economic zone An Indonesian patrol ship confronted a Chinese coast guard vessel that spent almost three days in waters where Indonesia claims economic rights and that are near the southernmost part of China’s disputed claims to the South China Sea. The Indonesian Maritime Security Agency on Friday night detected Chinese ship 5204 entering Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in what Indonesia calls the North Natuna Sea. The agency sent a patrol ship that closed within 1km of the Chinese coast guard vessel and they communicated to affirm their position and their nation’s claims to the area, Indonesian Maritime Security Agency head Aan Kurnia said. “We
BEFORE WINTER COMES: Snow cuts off roads into Ladakh for four months or more each year, so the crunch is on to get food, tents and high-altitude equipment to Leh From deploying mules to large transport aircraft, the Indian military has activated its entire logistics network to transport supplies to thousands of troops for a harsh winter along a bitterly disputed Himalayan border with China. In the past few months, one of India’s biggest military logistics exercises in years has brought vast quantities of ammunition, equipment, fuel, winter supplies and food into Ladakh, a region bordering Tibet that India administers as a union territory, officials said. The move was triggered by a border standoff with China in the snow deserts of Ladakh that began in May and escalated in June into hand-to-hand
Dark matter, mysterious invisible stuff that makes up most of the mass of galaxies, including the Milky Way, is confounding scientists again, with new observations of distant galaxies conflicting with the current understanding of its nature. Research published this week revealed an unexpected discrepancy between observations of dark matter concentrations in three massive clusters of galaxies encompassing trillions of stars and theoretical computer simulations of how dark matter should be distributed. “Either there is a missing ingredient in the simulations or we have made a fundamental incorrect assumption about the nature of dark matter,” Yale University astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan, a coauthor of
RSS