Trappists Rochefort Have a New Beer—And Brewery
The abbey on my visit eleven years ago.
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The monks at Abbaye Notre-Dame de Saint-Rémy are no newcomers to beer. They’ve been brewing at the abbey we call Rochefort (for the town nearby) for four hundred years. Or close to it, if you squint and ignore that period during the French Revolution when the monasteries were sacked or sold off. The interruption lasted until the end of the 19th century, when monks reoccupied the abbey and immediately began brewing again. Monks made the beer mostly for themselves, but after winning a prestigious award, started offering it to the public before WWI. To compete with increasingly-popular Chimay beer, Rochefort reformulated the recipes starting in the 1950s, establishing their present line—three brown beers they have been brewing ever since.
Many American breweries make sixty beers a year. Rochefort hasn’t offered a new release in sixty-plus years. Until recently. In October 2020, they quietly put out a golden Triple (the French spelling, not the Flemish tripel). It was in the darkness of the lost Covid years, and I missed it, but when Merchant du Vin sent me a bottle, I knew I had to have the full story. It’s a good one.
A New Brewery
Trappist breweries have gotten pretty good at selling their beer, and even Americans can track down bottles of Orval, Westmalle, Chimay, and Rochefort. They aren’t so hot at communications, though. It turns out that Rochefort not only added a new beer, but a new brewery as well—though good luck finding much information about it, or any pictures. The old, purpose-built building housed one on the most beautiful breweries I’ve ever seen. Long and narrow, it resembled a small church, and stained glass windows even suffuse the room in a gently holy light, making the copper equipment gleam softly.
Unfortunately, it was an old brewery, with equipment dating to 1962. Breweries are built to last, but they aren’t permanent. “That’s very long for a brewhouse,” Gumer Santos, Rochefort’s longtime “Brewing Engineer” (brewmaster) wrote me. “The copper was becoming very thin with time.”
Over the course of three years between 2017 and Valentine’s Day 2020, Rochefort planned and built a new, larger brewhouse. Longtime abbey head Father Abbot and the monastery manager wanted to implement the project before they retired, so the time was right. Beyond the age of the brewhouse, Rochefort is also maxed-out on capacity. A new brewery would position the monks for the future and allow them to brew more beer—so it made sense to add a new offering to the line. Monks have time to be deliberate about changes like this, and at Rochefort they kept both breweries online at the same time while Santos transitioned production, making sure the taste of the beer didn’t change with the new equipment.
The old brewhouse.
An old bottle, little changed, in a cellar.
A New Beer
The idea for the new beer emerged from these new circumstances—and a recognition that things have changed since the Cold War. “There were so many people around here asking for a blond beer,” Santos acknowledged. In the middle of the last century, Belgians were a lot more into dark ales than light. Duvel was still a brown beer then, and Westmalle’s best seller (by far) was their Dubbel. Rochefort’s lineup of increasingly stronger brown ales was in tune with the times. Even in Belgium, however, that’s no longer true. With the new capacity, Rochefort could finally catch up with the decades-old ascension of pale beers. (That the abbey could keep production up despite their old-fashioned lineup is a testament to how good the beers are.)
They began by looking through their archives and found a pale beer called Extra brewed until 1920. “It was a really incredible coincidence, because we [launched] our Triple Extra in 2020,” Santos wrote. It’s more an echo than an evocation, though. In fact, Santos led a project to create a new Extra for the 21st century.
They bought a 40-liter pilot brewery and began conducting trials, starting with a beer merely stripped of the dark malts and sugar that color their other beers. In all, Santos brewed over twenty batches before they landed on a version they liked. Throughout the process, a team tasted each beer and honed the recipe. “The tasting panel was composed by Father Abbott and some monks of the community such as Brother Pierre, Vital Streignard (General Manager), François Mathy (Production Manager), [and other] administrators, lab guys, and myself.”
Triple Extra
Rochefort’s beers are bready, raisiny, and creamy, but the yeast character is subdued compared to other Belgian ales. And, even where it seems present—what is that hint of orangey sweetness?—it might owe something to the coriander the monks have always tucked in. It’s far from spicy-tasting, but the coriander is one of those small elements of process and ingredient that create Rochefort’s lush, approachable ales. They took the same approach with the Triple.
Santos was somewhat elusive in describing precisely which spices he included, mentioning “orange peel” at one time, but later adding that they use the “same spices” as their other beers—which, to my knowledge, didn’t contain orange peel. But mystery is quite often another ingredient of Belgian beers. The goal, as he put it, was for “The Triple Extra to be a real sister of her big, brown brothers.” He called the yeast and spice, “the fingerprint of the Rochefort beer.”
“A blond beer has to be a bit more refreshing, original, and have its own character,” he said, “and, at the same time, respect the ‘equilibrium’”—by which I take it he meant balance, though I love the slightly different meaning. Finally, the malt bill includes wheat malt, which explained part of the character I discovered when I tasted the beer.
Trappist ales don’t conform to style, and the tissue connecting them can sometimes be hard to see. Where it’s most obvious is in the incredible refinement these beers have achieved after decades and thousands of batches. They are incredibly ordered and precise, with the elements composed for surpassing harmony. In a list of my top ten best Belgian beers, I’d place at least three Trappists in the list—including Rochefort’s “8.”
For that reason, I expected Triple to be good, but perhaps slightly rougher around the edges than the others. And it was—but just. I ended up hugely impressed with the beer, which does contain those Rochefort fingerprints. A lot of the photos, including the cover photo I found for this post, show a very murky beer. That’s mostly from bad pouring (leave the milky, yeasty lees in the bottle, folks!), but not entirely. It does contain a slight haze, and I suspected the wheat was responsible. It has a yeasty nose, with hints of stone fruit like peach and apricot and fruit blossom—or is that the spice?
It’s an incredibly creamy beer, another gift from the wheat. While I found wonderful baked apple and honey and orange notes, what really knocked me out was the malt. It was toasty, soft, and a touch grainy, and the wires in my brain kept connecting it to the malts I found in my helleses in Bavaria. It’s just 8.1%, which is a bit light for most Belgian tripels, yet here it’s the perfect strength. This strength allows for the malt expression and the creaminess, while making the beer far more drinkable than anything this strong has a right to be.
It wasn’t quite perfect; there was a slightly husky, sharp note, but in a non-Trappist ale I’d have ignored it. I went hunting to see if I could find anything that was out of place, that might be burnished into the same harmony of the other beers over time. I found it, but I had to work.
If you’re going to introduce a new beer after six decades and build a new brewery to brew it, you’re putting a lot on the line. The monks can relax now—this is a beer built for six more decades.