Monks' Brew Showers Blessings on Belgian Town

<editor's note>
From the New York Times, Jan. 15, 2003
</editor's note>

Monks' Brew Showers Blessings on Belgian Town
By JOHN TAGLIABUE

HIMAY, Belgium, Jan. 10 - With his billowing white beard and black and white 
hooded habit, Dom Armand Veilleux, a Canadian-born monk in his mid-60's, more 
resembles a figure from Umberto Eco's novel of monastic mystery, "The Name of 
the Rose," than your average brewery executive. 

Yet just across a snow-dusted garden from the room where he receives visitors, 
a microbrewery throbs, its six huge stainless steel vats fermenting more than 
13,000 gallons of beer a day. 
Only five years ago, the Trappist Abbey of Our Lady of Scourmont, where Dom 
Armand has been abbot for almost five years, turned out 15 percent less. But 
these days, Belgian Trappist beers - heavy brews, often dark and with as much 
as 9 percent alcohol - are surging in popularity, spreading blessings on the 
hilly farmland around Chimay, pop. 10,000, traditionally one of the poorer 
Belgian lands that snuggle against the French border. 

Today the brewery that Scourmont controls, Bières de Chimay, with 72 employees, 
is the area's largest employer. Last year, Chimay generated revenues equivalent 
to $21 million, up from $17 million in 1995. 

A new low-slung headquarters building was inaugurated last year a 20-minute 
drive from the abbey's gray stone buildings; the sales staff was increased to 
seven, from three, and 12 more workers were hired for bottling and brewing.

Recently, limits to production and sales that the abbey imposes were lifted 
slightly to accommodate increasing demand. 
Still, Dom Armand insists with a chuckle, "We're not out to beat Interbrew," 
the big Belgian brewery that competes with the likes of Anheuser-Busch and 
Heineken for global dominance. "Quality has to be first - quality in the 
product, and in the working conditions, in relations among people."

Indeed, five years ago, the abbey's business affairs were separated out under 
the umbrella of two foundations that reinvest the profits in charitable works 
and the development of local business. To maintain control, the board of each 
business consists of three monks and two lay people.

"The brewery pays us rent, and all the profits are redistributed," said Dom 
Armand, a thoroughly modern monk who designed the abbey's Web site. "We own 
the brand name - Bières de Chimay - and they pay us a licensing fee."

Traditionally, Trappists support themselves by farming and light industry. 
They also produced and sold cheese and took in paying visitors at a small 
guesthouse. Over the years, the number of monks dwindled. Now, there are 22, 
including seven from affiliates in Africa. 

At Scourmont, the monks began brewing beer in 1862, a dozen years after the 
abbey was founded. It is only one of six Belgian Trappist monasteries brewing 
beer, including the abbeys of Rochefort, Westmalle, Westvleteren, Orval and 
Achel. But today, at Scourmont at least, none of the monks actually work in 
the brewery. 

Instead, they spend their days in prayer, singing the liturgical office at set 
hours, and working, mainly organizing spiritual retreats for visitors. They 
also still toil on the 1,500 hilly acres that surround the abbey, raising 
cattle and grains (though not their own hops, which come from Germany and 
Washington State). 

But while the monks may aspire to poverty, the product made at their abbey is 
pure luxury. A 750-milliliter bottle of Chimay can sell for $9 in New York, 
positioning it somewhere between beer and wine. "There's a certain cachet, more 
like wine," said Beth Rogers, the general manager of Markt, an upscale West 
Village restaurant that features Belgian Trappist beers. "We pair them with 
foods." 

If Dom Armand is at pains to keep the brewery at arm's length from the monks' 
spiritual life, Philippe Henroz, the brewery's 37-year-old marketing director, 
does not shrink from bathing the product in a monastic glow. 

"I take visitors across the garden and I ask them, `What do you hear? The 
birds? The wind? The rumble of the brewery machinery?' " he said. "It has 
something to do with the environment. Our objective is to show how we are 
different."

After quenching Belgium's thirst, the monks are now looking abroad. While 
Trappist beers account for little more than 1 percent of all Belgian beers, 
the brewery at Chimay is now shipping to France, Italy, Britain and Scandinavia, 
but above all to the United States, which is its second largest export market 
after neighboring France. 

For Mr. Henroz and the brewery's other employees, the conundrum is to balance 
the global thirst for their beer and Dom Armand's abhorrence of empire building.
 
"It's not necessarily to put a limit on production," Mr. Henroz said, sipping 
a blond Chimay red label. "We don't want to risk the quality of the product, 
and the working environment." 
He paused, then added, "But we will never say no to a client."

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