Jock Fistick for The New York Times
A bar near St. Sixtus, where monks make Westvleteren 12, rated by some as the world’s best.
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.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 21, 2013
Due to an editing error, a web summary that appeared with an earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the town in Belgium where Westvleteren 12 is brewed. It is Vleteren, not Bleteren.
Vleteren Journal: Cult Beer Westvleteren 12 Gives Belgian Town a Lift
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