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 Read more…
Many of us were excited for the first American Trappist brewery back in 2014 at St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts. I was inspired to write The Beer Option: Brewing a Catholic Culture Yesterday & Today by the long tradition of monastic brewing, which pointed to a whole Catholic history Read more…
Monks created brewing as we know it, with the first large scale breweries in Europe and many advances to brewing techniques and technology. There were thousands of brewing monasteries, but then suddenly they disappeared. The French Revolution and its aftermath, the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire and the Napoleonic Read more…
The Beer Option–the use of beer for evangelization and cultural renewal–continues to unfold. In particular, the footprint of Trappist beers, the flagship line of monastic brews, has grown throughout the world in just the last few years. In addition to the seven classics of the Lowlands (Belgium and the Netherlands), Read more…