A Trappist Bishop on Trappist Beer

In my last post, I looked at some things that went wrong for Spencer Trappist Brewery in Massachusets. Remarkably, a Catholic bishop in Norway (of the territorial prelature of Trondheim to be precise), Bishop Erik Varden, OSCO, is a Trappist, who was abbot of Mount St. Bernard’s Abbey in England when it launched its own Trappist beer, Tynt Meadow, which I reviewed here.

The Pillar just interviewed Bishop Varden and asked him first to comment on Trappist beer. It’s an amazing reflection, rich both in beer and spirituality:

What makes a good Trappist beer?

Perfect balance: that’s the secret. The ingredients are simple. The processes are simple. But they’ve all got to be calibrated. This notion of equilibrium is essential to the monastic life. You find that as a theme in the Benedictine Rule. You find it in St. Anthony [the Great] and many of the sources.

The production of beer is actually quite a good school, of ensuring balance, getting exactly the right proportions, and letting processes take their time. One of the exciting things about artisanal brewing is that there aren’t any added chemicals. You sit around and wait. And you watch and you clean, and you let things take their time. And so you enable the ingredients, which have got to be the best ingredients, to reveal all their potential.

St. Paul talks about the twinkling of an eye in which everything will be revealed and we shall enter eternity. We shall look at our lives here on earth in a supernatural flash that will illumine everything and make it appear as a single entity. But when we’re engaged in the daily slog of living, it all seems so slow, and we can’t see how things fit together. That’s fundamentally where we need patience, just to let things work. 

We’re a bit like the ingredients in a brewing kettle. We are being made into something the conclusion of which we can’t foresee because it’s in the mind of God. Like the hops and the malt, we are being treated in order that our inner potential be revealed, and enabled to interact with other ingredients to make something which is beautiful and nurturing.

Can that perspective -the wisdom of the brewer – help with Church conflicts?

I think so – to have that ability to look for a broad perspective, to step back, to see the present in the light of eternity, and sometimes just to consent to the fact that here and now I may be going through something which is dark, which I can’t understand, and my chief task is simply to persevere in that darkness for a bit in the hope and in the certain expectation that dawn will rise.

See the entire interview here.