On October 26th 2013, Pretty Things Beer and Ale Project tweeted that America's first Trappist beer was in the kettle boiling. Every beer news outlet picked it up and soon after the hype was on! The Monks at St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, MA would be bottling the first beer made outside of Europe that would be branded with the authentic Trappist stamp. By mid December national news outlets like CNN and Fox News would publish articles about the beer being brewed in our backyard by devoted monks.
Authentic Trappist beer must follow some simple rules. They must be brewed within the walls of a monastery, by the monks themselves or under their direct supervision. The brewery is not to be used as a profit machine, but as a means to repair and maintain the monastery. And the beer must be of the highest quality.
St. Joseph's Abbey, with help of many local and national brewers, including Dan Paquette of Pretty Things and the Monks of Chimay brewery in Belgium helped set up the equipment and the business model leading to a facility that if running at full capacity would make them the 2nd largest brewery in Massachusetts. As of right now though, they're hoping to sell 4,000 barrels of beer, or in bottles around 1.2 million bottles of beer this year. That's a huge order for a new brewery; even one with a higher power behind them.
On Monday we received our first shipment of this beer and as curiosity gets the best of most of us, I immediately took home a bottle and popped it open. The first smell is heavy banana with a heavy nose. The taste is delightfully sweet, with more banana balanced with a nice toffee sweetness and with minimal bitterness in the finish. For a first batch of commercial beer I think this is an amazingly well done and simple paters. They say that they're planning on brewing only one beer for the first five years but I don't see how that production can keep up without leveling off and the need for a new product makes itself impossible to ignore. We'll see though, we will see.
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