Orval open doors

The Trappist monasteries in Belgium are world famous for their incredible beer... if you have followed my blog for any length of time then you'll know that I'm a Trappist beer enthusiast.  Here are the six Belgian beer brands that are part of the official Trappist Association:

• Achel
• Chimay
• Orval
• Rochefort
• Westmalle
• Westvleteren

To qualify for inclusion into the association, and to obtain the right to display the "Authentic Trappist Product" label, beer and other products must meet the following criteria:

• Products which carry this label are produced within the walls of the monastery or in the vicinity of the monastery,
• The monastic community determines the policies and provides the means of production.  The whole process of production must clearly evidence the indisputable bond of subsidiarity, with the monastery benefiting from the production, and must be in accordance with the business practices proper to a monastic way of life, and
• The profits are primarily intended to provide for the needs of the community or for social services.

As the breweries must be located near or within the monastery, most are not open to the public; Chimay is one such monastery that I have written about.  I regularly go to Westveleteren to pick up beer, but it is closed also, and one may only visit the café instead.  Westmalle and Achel are still on the to-visit list but I suspect they are likely in the same situation... the fact that we were able to get inside Rochefort back in 2010 was really because of the concerts; it's usually closed.

Fortunately I can now cross off the Orval brasserie.  It's open once a year for two days in mid-September, and the tickets go on sale in the spring, and sell out in a matter of a couple of hours.  I managed to grab two for 8:45am on a friday, and got up early to pick up Bryan in enough time to get to the monastery on time.

It was really quite cool, and very different from the tour of the ruins of Orval that Maggie and I have visited in the past... it is all very clean and modern and industrial. It reminds me a little of the tours we have taken of Scotch whisky distilleries in the past; that's not surprising as both involve malted barley and large copper vessels as the starting point.  But watching the steel aging containers, and the bottling lines, I was having flashbacks to Bob and Doug Mackenzie's 1983 film Strange Brew, and was surprised to hear Bryan quoting it also; turns out he's a fan of that film too.

We bought some Orval merchandise and also stocked up on boxes of the beer to replenish our local supplies.  Orval wasn't my favourite Trappist beer at first but it has really grown on me, and recently the supply has become very unreliable in commercial enterprises: often when you see it in the DelHaize or Carrefour it's one case for the whole store, maybe once every couple of months, and it sells out like lightning.  Here's more information on the history of the abbey of Orval and its beer, if you are interested.

We did a little math and calculated that in the event of the zombie apocalypse Orval Monastery would be a good place to go.  Plentiful water source, fortifications, probably lots of game in the woods around it, and enough beer to last a very long time.  Our calculations included an assessment of how long it would take the two of us to drink out the storage room… assuming a rate of 10 bottles each a day, given that each pallet of Orval hold 648 bottles (54 cases of 24) 20 bottles per day comes out to around a pallet per month.  That would mean that the 96 pallets seen in this stack pictured below (16 pallets long by 3 pallets high by 2 pallets deep) would last eight years.

The aging room is estimated to accommodate 90,000 cases of Orval, so that works out to around 1667 pallets, which would mean that it would take us around 138 years to drink a full aging room dry.

Math is important...