Holy Grail of B eer

Trappist Command:
Thou Shalt Not Buy
Too Much of Our Beer

Monks at St. Sixtus Battle
Resellers of Prized Brew;
Brother Joris Plays Hardball

By JOHN W. MILLER
November 29, 2007; Page A1

WESTVLETEREN, Belgium -- The Trappist monks at St. Sixtus monastery have taken vows against riches, sex and eating red meat. They speak only when necessary. But you can call them on their beer phone.

Cassandra Vinograd

Monks have been brewing Westvleteren beer at this remote spot near the French border since 1839. Their brew, offered in strengths up to 10.2% alcohol by volume, is among the most highly prized in the world. In bars from Brussels to Boston, and online, it sells for more than $15 for an 11-ounce bottle -- 10 times what the monks ask -- if you can get it.

For the 26 monks at St. Sixtus, however, success has brought a spiritual hangover as they fight to keep an insatiable market in tune with their life of contemplation.

The monks are doing their best to resist getting bigger. They don't advertise and don't put labels on their bottles. They haven't increased production since 1946. They sell only from their front gate. You have to make an appointment and there's a limit: two, 24-bottle cases a month. Because scarcity has created a high-priced gray market online, the monks search the net for resellers and try to get them to stop.

"We sell beer to live, and not vice versa," says Brother Joris, the white-robed brewery director. Beer lovers, however, seem to live for Westvleteren.

When Jill Nachtman, an American living in Zurich, wanted a taste recently, she called the hot line everybody calls the beer phone. After an hour of busy signals, she finally got through and booked a time. She drove 16 hours to pick up her beer. "If you factor in gas, hotel -- and the beer -- I spent $20 a bottle," she says.

Until the monks installed a new switchboard and set up a system for appointments two years ago, the local phone network would sometimes crash under the weight of calls for Westvleteren. Cars lined up for miles along the flat one-lane country road that leads to the red brick monastery, as people waited to pick up their beer.

"This beer is addictive, like chocolate," said Luc Lannoo, an unemployed, 36-year-old Belgian from Ghent, about an hour away, as he loaded two cases of Westvleteren into his car at the St. Sixtus gate one morning. "I have to come every month."

Two American Web sites, Rate Beer and Beer Advocate, rank the strongest of Westvleteren's three products, a dark creamy beer known as "the 12," best in the world, ahead of beers including Sweden's Närke Kaggen Stormaktsporter and Minnesota's Surly Darkness. "No question, it is the holy grail of beers," says Remi Johnson, manager of the Publick House, a Boston bar that has Westvleteren on its menu but rarely in stock.

Some beer lovers say the excitement over Westvleteren is hype born of scarcity. "It's a very good beer," says Jef van den Steen, a brewer and author of a book on Trappist monks and their beer published in French and Dutch. "But it reminds me of the movie star you want to sleep with because she's inaccessible, even if your wife looks just as good."

WSJ's John Miller travels through Belgium in a quest for a small-batch brew made by Trappist monks that's considered by some the best beer in the world.

Thanks to the beer phone, there are no more lines of cars outside the monastery now. But production remains just 60,000 cases per year, while demand is as high as ever. Westvleteren has become almost impossible to find, even in the specialist beer bars of Brussels and local joints around the monastery.

"I keep on asking for beer," says Christophe Colpaert, manager of "Café De Sportsfriend," a bar down the road from the monks. "They barely want to talk to me." On a recent day, a recorded message on the beer phone said St. Sixtus wasn't currently making appointments; the monks were fresh out of beer.

Increasing production is not an option, according to the 47-year-old Brother Joris, who says he abandoned a stressful career in Brussels for St. Sixtus 14 years ago. "It would interfere with our job of being a monk," he says.

Belgian monasteries like St. Sixtus started making beer in the aftermath of the French Revolution, which ended in 1799. The revolt's anti-Catholic purge had destroyed churches and abbeys in France and Belgium. The monks needed cash to rebuild, and beer was lucrative.

Trappist is a nickname for the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, who set up their own order in La Trappe, France, in the 1660s because they thought Cistercian monasteries were becoming too lax. The monks at St. Sixtus sleep in a dormitory and stay silent in the cloisters, though they speak if they need to. Today, though, Trappists are increasingly famous for making good beer.

Seven monasteries (six are Belgian, one, La Trappe, is Dutch) are allowed to label their beer as Trappist. In 1996, they set up an alliance to protect their brand. They retain lawyers in Washington and Brussels ready to sue brewers who try use the word Trappist. Every few months, Brother Joris puts on street clothes and takes the train to Brussels to meet with fellow monks to share sales and business data, and plot strategy.

The monks know their beer has become big business. That's fine with the brothers at Scourmont, the monastery in southern Belgium that makes the Chimay brand found in stores and bars in Europe and the U.S. They've endorsed advertising and exports, and have sales exceeding $50 million a year. They say the jobs they create locally make the business worthy. Other monasteries, which brew names familiar to beer lovers such as Orval, Westmalle and Rochefort, also are happy their businesses are growing to meet demand.

Not so at St. Sixtus. Brother Joris and his fellow monks brew only a few days a month, using a recipe they've kept to themselves for around 170 years.

Two monks handle the brewing. After morning prayer, they mix hot water with malt. They add hops and sugar at noon. After boiling, the mix, sufficient to fill roughly 21,000 bottles, is fermented for up to seven days in a sterilized room. From there the beer is pumped to closed tanks in the basement where it rests for between five weeks and three months. Finally, it is bottled and moved along a conveyor belt into waiting cases. Monks at St. Sixtus used to brew by hand, but nothing in the rules of the order discourages technology, so they've plowed profits into productivity-enhancing equipment. St. Sixtus built its current brewhouse in 1989 with expert advice from the company then known as Artois Breweries.

In the 1980s, the monks even debated whether they should continue making something from which people can get drunk. "There is no dishonor in brewing beer for a living. We are monks of the West: moderation is a key word in our asceticism," says Brother Joris in a separate, email interview. "We decided to stick to our traditional skills instead of breeding rabbits."

The result is a brew with a slightly sweet, heavily alcoholic, fruity aftertaste.

One day recently, the wiry, sandy-haired Brother Joris returned to his office in the monastery after evening prayers. He flipped on his computer and went online to hunt for resellers and ask them to desist. "Most of the time, they agree to withdraw their offer," he says. Last year, St. Sixtus filed a complaint with the government against two companies that refused -- BelgianFood.com, a Web site that sells beer, cheese, chocolate and other niche products, and Beermania, a Brussels beer shop that also sells online. Both offer Westvleteren at around $18 a bottle.

"I'm not making a lot of money and I pay my taxes," says BelgianFood.com owner Bruno Dourcy. "You can only buy two cases at once, you know." Mr. Dourcy makes monthly two-hour car trips from his home in eastern Belgium.

"Seek the Kingdom of God first, and all these things will be given to you," counters Brother Joris, quoting from the Bible, adding that it refers only to things you really need. "So if you can't have it, possibly you do not really need it."

Write to John W. Miller at john.miller@dowjones.com

Deadly Obituary

Jörg Immendorff, who died on Monday aged 61, was Germany's best-known and most provocative artist, a close friend of the former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and, in 2003, the central figure in a sex scandal involving prostitutes and cocaine-fuelled orgies at a luxury hotel.

In what became known as the Orgy of the Year, Immendorff was discovered naked having his nipples licked by a retinue of seven young filles de joie, while 11 grams of cocaine lay ready for consumption on a Versace ashtray nearby.

Notwithstanding his exotic private life - he had also been a luminary of Dusseldorf's sadomasochistic scene - Immendorff was regarded by many critics as an original and vigorous artist of great complexity.
advertisement

His early work in the 1960s reflected the political upheavals of the times, but he later emerged as one of the leading figures of the new German Expressionism.

In 2005 Immendorff's work was hung at the Saatchi Gallery in London as part of an exhibition - The Triumph of Painting - that ranked among the top five British shows of that year. Charles Saatchi was a long-standing and enthusiastic collector of Immendorff's paintings.

After coming to prominence as a member of the German art movement Jungen Wilden (the Young Wild Ones), Immendorff became a figure of national acclaim, whose pictures sold for more than £100,000 apiece. His best-known work includes the Café Deutschland series of 16 large paintings in which he addressed the conflict between East and West Germany.

His huge colourful canvases, depicting fictitious settings such as discothèques and cafés, were heavily laden with political iconography and imagery. "In my paintings, symbols associated with National Socialist Germany function as kinds of clichés in so far as they stand for universal evils," he explained in 2003.

"The factors that led to [Hitler's] rise to power and the destruction he subsequently wrought remain permanent dangers. Such images must be painted. To make them taboo would be regressive.

"The smoking swastika indicates that the matter is far from closed, be it in Germany or the malicious terrorism emanating from the Middle East. Evil takes root and flourishes when art and freedom of expression are censored."

Last January Immendorff ran into heavy critical flak for his official retirement portrait of his friend, the outgoing German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, which was completed on the ailing artist's instructions by his students.

The result was an odd icon-like image painted in gold, with a melting black eagle, symbol of the German state, in the foreground. Also in the picture is Immendorff himself, represented as a broken man, a reference to his increasing physical frailty.

"There are statues of Elvis Presley that look like this," sneered one critic. "Siberian oligarchs and Californian rappers have a need - alongside their collection of Rolex watches - to immortalise themselves in this manner."

Schroeder had apparently given the commission to Immendorff as a way of letting the painter atone for his public humiliation in August 2003.

Caught in a £1,100-a-night suite at the Steigenberger Park Hotel, Dusseldorf, with seven naked young call-girls and several lines of cocaine, Immendorff was being hustled away by police while still more prostitutes were arriving.

As well as the drugs found on the scene, a further 10 grams of cocaine were found at Immendorff's atelier nearby.

At his trial the following year, Immendorff admitted cocaine possession, and having organised 27 similar orgies between February 2001 and the date of his arrest. In the light of his confession and his terminal illness, he was put on probation and heavily fined.

Jörg Immendorff was born on June 14 1945 near Lüneberg, the Saxon town twinned with Scunthorpe where Himmler committed suicide. Immendorff studied in Dusseldorf under Joseph Beuys, the influential modern artist whose principal media were animal fat and felt, before being expelled for Maoist activism.

Immendorff rejected traditional painting in 1966 by scrawling the words "Stop Painting" across one of his pictures, and made the natural progression into the art establishment, spending 12 years teaching and later holding guest professorships all over Europe.

He also created stage designs, including some for the Salzburg Festival, exhibited as a sculptor, owned a sex bar near the Reeperbahn in Hamburg's red-light district, and helped to design André Heller's avant-garde amusement park Luna Luna in 1987.

In 1996 Immendorff became a professor at the art academy in Dusseldorf from which he had been dismissed as a student in the 1960s. The following year he was awarded the richest art prize in the world, from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Monterrey, Mexico.

His sculptures include a large bronze of the German film star Hans Albers and a spectacular piece of iron, 25 metres high, in the shape of an oak tree trunk, erected at Riesa, near Dresden, in 1999. Although named "Elbquelle" by Immendorff himself, locals know it as "Rostige Eiche" ("rusty oak").

In 1998 he was diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. When he could no longer paint with his left hand, he switched to the right.

For the last year, unable to hold a paintbrush, he had been confined to a wheelchair and directed his assistants to paint by following his instructions.

Jörg Immendorff married, in 2000, Oda Jaune, a former student more than 30 years his junior; their daughter was born the following year. Both survive him.

Drunk Cop

Decorated officer caught drinking on job, cops say
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
By MICHAELANGELO CONTE
JOURNAL STAFF WRITER

A highly decorated Jersey City police officer was found drinking a beer in his marked patrol car yesterday afternoon and was issued a summons and allowed to go on paid leave, officials said.

Charles Casserly, 53, was found drinking while on duty early yesterday afternoon by Internal Affairs officers who got a tip, said city spokesman Stan H. Eason.

The 28-year veteran of the department was issued a summons for driving with an open alcoholic beverage and taken off duty, Eason said.

Police said they do not think Casserly was drunk at the time he was found with the beer. Officers requested a blood sample and are awaiting the results, Eason said.

Casserly received the Valor Award, the highest honor bestowed by the Police Department, after being shot multiple times while stopping bank robbers in the 1980s, Eason said.

Eason said the South District officer was allowed to go on personal leave pending the outcome of the probe and he will continue to collect his pay. Eason said he was allowed to go on leave due to the nature of the offense, which is not criminal.

Dry Vote

Vote goes awry, town goes dry

DAN WIESSNER
Albany bureau


(May 16, 2007) — ALBANY — People in Potter thought it was a straightforward ballot question: Should we allow restaurants to sell beer?

Then the state got involved. By the time it was over, residents had accidentally banned beer sales anywhere in town. Now they're asking the Legislature's help in reversing an inadvertent prohibition that threatens to close the only grocery store.

Those involved blame the prohibition on the state's arcane alcohol laws.

The Yates County town of 1,800 is south of Canandaigua on the Yates-Ontario County border. In 2005, residents requested a vote to allow the Hitching Rail, the only restaurant in town, to sell beer. But the state Alcoholic Beverage Control Law, essentially unchanged since Prohibition, mandates that a list of five specific questions be put on the ballot — questions that even the state Liquor Authority admits are outdated.

Voters became confused by the questions, according to Potter Supervisor Len Lisenbee, and voted down all the proposals. The beer ban is set to take effect on July 1.

The ban would put the town's only grocery store — Federal Hollow Staples Grocery — out of business, said manager Kati Brown. Potter residents would have to trek 10 miles or so to Canandaigua or Penn Yan for food and beer.

Last week, the state Senate passed a measure that would allow Potter's residents to vote Nov. 15 on repealing the beer ban.

"They've been selling beer in this joint since 1970," said Sen. George Winner, R-Elmira, one of the sponsors of the bill.

The Potter bill still has to pass the Assembly by June 21, the last day of the 2007 session, and then be approved by Gov. Eliot Spitzer.

AA Anti-Church

ROCKVILLE, Md. -- An Alcoholics Anonymous group known as Midtown has been barred from meeting at another church, News4 reported Monday.

Leaders of St. Mark's Presbyterian Church on Old Georgetown Road in Rockville said the group could no longer meet there, News4's Pat Collins said.

Last week, St. Patrick's Episcopal Church in Northwest, D.C., said the group could no longer meet at it's building.

Midtown also left The Church of the Pilgrims in downtown, D.C., about a year ago after church officials launched an investigation amid allegations of misconduct, Collins reported.

Melissa, whose real identity has been concealed because of the nature of the story, said she only stayed in the group for two months because she was disturbed by its sexual activity.

"I would describe Midtown as a cult," Melissa said. "(I was sitting at a table with) three young women, a 15-year-old, 17-year-old and 21-year-old, in their group homes. They were talking about all the men that they had had sex with in the group. It was very unnerving for me, and they were all laughing about it and talking about stories of the men that they had slept with in common."

Pastor Roy Howard of St. Mark Presbyterian Church said, "My concern is that there are too many allegations about this group for me to feel comfortable that they are about helping people recover from alcoholism."

Newsweek magazine recently ran a story about Midtown AA, discussing some of the alleged sexual exploits of some of the members and what some described as a cult-like atmosphere.

Melissa said the group tries to cut members off from old friends and family.

Attempted contact with the Midtown AA group from News4 has received no response.

However, a current Midtown member who was not identified said, "These allegations are based on gossip and untruths ... AA is based on love and service."

Members of other local AA groups described Midtown as a fringe group that does not follow all the traditions of Alcoholic Anonymous.

Dumb Drunk

Man exiting bar with beer bottle sues for tripping



4/11/2007 12:00 PM
By Ann Knef

A man injured by his beer bottle after tripping out of an Alton tavern last year is seeking more than $200,000 for neck, face and chest injuries.

Matthew Shewmake filed suit against Norb's Tavern in Madison County Circuit Court April 4.

He claims that as he was leaving the premises at 2505 State St. on April 8, 2006, he tripped over a toejam at the exit, causing him to fall onto and fracture the beer bottle he was carrying. He was exiting the tavern with a bottle of beer to consume on the parking lot area, the complaint states.

"Plaintiff was pitched forward out the door upon exiting and was unable to catch himself as the outside walkway was a steep ramp without rails which defendant knew or should have known was a dangerous condition for patrons leaving the premises who may stumble and be unable to stop or catch their fall," the complaint states.

Shewmake is represented by Rod Pitts of Wood River.

He claims it was the defendants' duty to exercise ordinary care and caution in an about the management of the premises and to keep the entrances and exits in a reasonably safe condition.

The suit alleges Shewmake has incurred doctor and hospital bills in an attempt to cure him of his injuries. He has been prevented from attending to his usual duties and affairs and has lost large sums of money which he otherwise would have earned, the suit states.

Co-defendants include Roxie D. Halvorsen, Thomas A. Halvorsen and Halvorsen, Inc.

Falling Asleep at a car

Driver who fell asleep at pump jailed for 18 months
By KIM RUSCOE - Fairfax Media and Stuff.co.nz | Thursday, 19 April 2007

A two-year-old who was left in the back seat of a car when her drunk father fell asleep while refuelling the vehicle called out "Bye, Daddy" after he was jailed for 18 months today.

At Waitakere District Court today Shannon Perenara, a 30-year-old Auckland labourer, was sentenced to 18 months in jail and disqualified from driving for three years, effective from today.

He was denied leave to apply for home detention.

The incident happened around 9am on March 24 when officers were called by a concerned Rotorua service station attendant who found Mr Perenara slumped at the petrol pump. Officers had to wait 40 minutes for him to wake up before he could be breath-tested.

The man's daughter was left unrestrained on the back seat while her father lay collapsed at the pump.

Mr Perenara tested more than four times above the legal limit, with 1729mcg of alcohol per litre of breath.

Police said at the time it was one of the highest readings in New Zealand. At Waitakere District Court today, Judge Barry Morris said he had no choice but to sentence Perenara to prison.

Judge Morris said Perenara had 23 prior convictions over nine years for offences including traffic, drugs and assault.

Included in this were six convictions involving drink driving, the first being 10 years ago, and four for driving while disqualified.

Mr Morris said that if Perenara was "stupid and irresponsible enough to endanger his own daughter then what concern does he have for us?"

Perenara showed no emotion while being sentenced but family members including his mother and his partner cried.

Perenara mouthed "I love you" to family members as he left the courtroom.

- With NZPA

Man Jailed After Taunting Police, Daring Them To Catch Him

POSTED: 8:00 am MST March 10, 2007
Email This Story |

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- Toxicology results for drugs haven't been released , but police believe a man who called 911 and taunted police for about three hours Friday was "obviously high on something."

Alexander Craig, 21, was being held on suspicion of vehicular eluding, DUI and resisting arrest after making about 10 calls between 8:30 and 11 p.m. Thursday and leading police on a chase.

"He called 911 and said, 'I'm hammered ... come get me,"' said Sgt. Rob Kelley.

He described his car, dropped clues of where he was and even gave his name.

About 20 officers were involved in the search, but could find Craig.

"He said we need to try harder to find him. He said he couldn't believe he hasn't been caught yet," Kelley said.

After nearly two hours, Craig found them. He pulled up in front of squad cars and drove off, running red lights, driving down the wrong side of the street and jumping medians. He was caught when his car, leaking fluids, broke down and police used a stun gun on him.

Intoxicated drivers usually try to stay under the radar, Kelley said.

"For somebody to call us -- that's a first in 20 years I'm aware of," he said.