VLETEREN, Belgium — On the face of it, this quaint Belgian town has few attractions — a charming brick parish church; a tall wooden windmill at the town’s main intersection. But it has the world’s best beer.
In the past few years, several Web sites that ask beer
drinkers to rate their favorite brews have accorded that honor to a strong,
dark local brew known as Westvleteren 12. In fact, the enthusiastic American
Web site RateBeer.com
gave the beer the honor two years in a row, dethroning a Swedish dark beer,
Närke Kaggen Stormaktsporter.
Yet the people of Vleteren, population 3,700, have
mixed feelings. The beer has been brewed for a century and a half by the
Trappist monks of a local abbey, St. Sixtus, nestled in farmlands on the edge
of town. Clearly, its newfound fame has given a lift to the local economy,
benefiting restaurants, bed-and-breakfasts, and local shops that cater to
pilgrims and tourists flocking to the abbey for the rich, brown-hued brew.
“It’s very good for us,” said Stephan Mourisse, 46, a
notary who is the town’s part-time mayor. “We don’t need to advertise, our
bed-and-breakfasts are always full, full, full because of the beer.”
A dozen years back, he said, if you wanted Westvleteren
12 you just drove out to St. Sixtus and bought some. Now, he said, in nice
weather the line of cars waiting to buy the beer can stretch for three miles.
The pick-me-up for the local economy could not come at
a better time, with Belgium feeling the recession afflicting all of Europe. Out
in Liège, in the east, a major steel works announced in January that it was
laying off 1,300 people; a month earlier, Ford said it would close a car plant
in nearby Genk, affecting as many as 10,000 jobs.
Yet beer, for the moment, keeps little Vleteren nicely
afloat.
In recent years a second microbrewery has sprung up,
perhaps inspired by the monks. In 2005, several local people who ran an ostrich
farm began producing a dark beer of the strong 12 percent type similar to what
the monks brew. Now, demand for their dark strong ales and stouts, branded as
De Struise — Dutch for the ostrich — is so great that the company is expanding into
a disused school building.
Urbain Coutteau, 51, the fledgling brewery’s brew
master, leads a visitor through a warehouse of used oak casks, some from
Kentucky that once stored bourbon and others from wine-growing regions of
France, that are now used for aging the beer. The monks of St. Sixtus, he says,
are not competitors. “I regard them as holy colleagues, that’s just the word,”
he said. “If I want to visit them, I just go out there; we have a good
relationship, we respect each other.”
Beer, he said, is lifting everyone’s economic boat.
“Lots of pilgrims come,” he said. “They have to eat, sleep, they don’t go back
the same day.” They visit other breweries, like nearby St. Bernardus, he said,
or the war graves that abound in this region, Flanders Fields, where major
battles of World War I were fought.
Yet, if De Struise is growing, what lifts the
desirability of the monks’ Westvleteren 12 is their strict refusal to increase
production beyond the roughly 130,000 gallons they have maintained for more
than 60 years, or to supply stores and pubs in the region for sale. Forget
exports. Only once, last year, did they have a sales drive abroad, even
shipping the beer to the United States, where a six-pack sold for $85. But that
was to finance reconstruction of the abbey buildings, completed late last year,
which were in sore disrepair.
Westvleteren’s popularity has created jobs, albeit a
modest number. Six laymen work in the abbey, including five in the brewery, and
another dozen or so in a restaurant and gift shop near the abbey gate. Yet the
monks, all 21 of them, insist they are first and foremost men of God, not beer
salesmen.
“Many people benefit” from Westvleteren’s success, said
Mark Bode, a layman who has worked for the monks for 10 years, and now functions
as a kind of spokesman. “It gives the village its profile.”
“But that is not the main goal,” he added, sipping tea
in the restaurant, as visitors hauled off six-packs — maximum two to a customer
— at $27 each, clutching them like gold ingots.
“The monks are ambiguous,” he went on. “They are proud
of their product, yet they don’t want to be associated only with beer. At the
moment, they are sticking to that line.”
“One of the biggest things they give to the region is
silence,” he said, alluding to the Trappists’ practice of refraining from
speech whenever possible.
Beers like Westvleteren and De Struise help make
Belgium a beer powerhouse. Anheuser-Busch InBev, the world’s biggest brewer,
has headquarters in Leuven, east of the capital, Brussels. Though many of the
brewer’s 200 brands, like Bud Light or Beck’s, qualify as valuable brands, few
ever enter the best beer ranks on popular Web sites. Still, there is no envy.
“The wide variety, styles and sheer number of Belgian beers puts Belgium on the
map as a country of reference for quality beers,” Natacha Schepkens, a
spokeswoman for the company, wrote in an e-mail. “There is room for all
players.”
Economic benefits aside, the people of Vleteren just
enjoy their beer. “During the day I’ll have a Fanta,” said Hanne Versaevel, 32,
a local police officer and a mother of two young children. “In the evening I’ll
have a Westvleteren, because it’s strong.”
“We’re very proud of it,” she added.
But Marianne Soutaer-Boutten, who runs the Cafe De
Sterre near the town center, dissents from the general jubilation, lamenting
the fact that local restaurants and pubs cannot get the monks to deliver them
the brew. In nearby Bruges, you can find a bottle of Westvleteren for almost
$35, she said, probably beer that is being resold, a problem the monks wrestle
with.
Yet you cannot buy it in Vleteren, aside from at the
monastery.
She denounces the hype surrounding Westvleteren,
arguing that the St. Bernardus ale she sells is every bit as delicious.
“You can buy a T-shirt with Lacoste on it, or a T-shirt
at the supermarket,” she said. “But it’s basically the same T-shirt.”
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