Have All the Monks Left Achel?

(Jan 22, 2021) Post updated below.

A short and disturbing item appeared in today’s news:

Limburg has lost its only authentic Trappist beer with Achel. De Kluis loses its prestigious label because no more fathers live there. The beer can no longer be called authentic if Trappist fathers do not supervise the brewing process. As a result, our country has only five authentic Trappist beers and our province has zero.

Achel is one of the six Belgian Trappist breweries, and the most recent, joining the club when it started brewing in the late 1990s. Right on the Dutch border, it was launched with the help of monks at Westmalle, and a few years later, Brother Antoine from Rochefort assisted in refining the recipes and process.

This is a danger for all the monasteries. Catholicism is in steep decline in Europe, a fact I’ve witnessed firsthand in my secondary avocation of cathedral-touring when I’m in Europe visiting breweries. These amazing sacred spaces, many of which took hundreds of years to complete, are visited by only a handful of (typically aged) parishioners. That affects the monasteries as well, vastly reducing the number of young men entering the contemplative life, and most people visiting the grand structures at places like Orval and Westmalle will be shocked to learn they house no more than a handful of monks. Stan Hieronymus wrote about this eight years ago, when only Westvleteren had a healthy complement.

Achel then had sixteen, and the drastic collapse illustrates a second problem: the monks living at the monastery are quite old, with median ages in the sixties. In that article, Stan was debunking a story about how the dwindling number of monks might affect beer production, but acknowledged, “As long as there are monks living at Orval there almost surely will be Orval beer.” Yes, but what happens when there aren’t?

Our correspondent in Brussels, Eoghan Walsh, noted on Twitter that “The last monks left at the end of 2020, meaning Achel fails to fulfill 1 of the criteria for Trappist designation (being brewed under supervision of monks). Westmalle were supervising, but that wasn't enough for the ITA board.” Yet he added, hopefully: “Was talking to someone else about Achel only recently, and this was not on the radar. I share [Joe Stange’s] sanguinuity that it will eventually be sorted out. This report says they can still call themselves Trappist, given they follow the other edicts, but let’s see.”

Trappist Kremlinology isn’t the easiest thing to master, but the main issue the umbrella body wants to address is theft of the Trappist name for crass, commercial endeavors. My guess is that they do not want to undermine struggling monasteries in which the elder monks are leaving through retirement or death. No doubt everyone will want to see monks at Achel again.

It does highlight a much more profound problem. If these monasteries don’t build a bridge to younger monastics, the whole enterprise is in trouble—and that danger isn’t a distant one. The beer could still be made by laity, but one of the reasons these beers achieve their sublime accomplishment is because they are under no commercial pressure to innovate. They just refine, decade after decade, until they end up with beers like Orval and Westmalle Tripel. What happens if the central purpose for making the beers—supporting the monastery—vanishes with the last monk?

It’s all too alarming to contemplate. So instead let’s gaze at the brewhouse at Rochefort, surely one of the most gracious in the entire world. It always makes me happy.

Update, Jan 22, 2021. The Telegraph (UK) has a fuller report.

“Achel is the first of the six monasteries that no longer has a living community. For the past four years there have only been two brothers,” Abbot Nathanaël Koninkx, of the Westmalle Abbey, told the De Tijd newspaper.

He added, “If there are no vocations, the monastic order disappears and so does the name. The beer can continue to exist, but no longer under the Trappist label.”