Belgian abbey restricts beer sales to counter Dutch price hikes

The Belgian Trappist abbey of St. Sixtus has concluded a deal directly with Dutch off-licenses to keep middlemen from selling their popular Westvleteren beer there at exorbitant prices.

The smallest of the Belgian Trappist breweries, which houses about 20 monks, brews 7,500 hectolitres of beer annually to cover its costs. That comes out to about 50 brewing days a year.

“We brew to live. We do not live to brew,” is their motto.

“This usury is  diametrically opposed to the values of the community,” the abbey said. “The brothers want as many people as possible to be able to enjoy their Trappist beers for a normal, fair price.”

Private buyers of their three types of beer – known as Blond, 8 and 12 for their alcohol content – make an appointment online to pick up their wooden crates of 24 bottles on specific dates at the abbey southwest of Bruges. Some have them delivered to their homes in Belgium.

Demand is so high that Dutch traders have been buying crates and repacking them in cardboard boxes of 12 bottles for sale at a higher price to shops, cafés and restaurants. About 10 per cent of the abbey’s output is estimated to end up in the Netherlands.

Hoping to hide this illegal trade, traders even collect empty bottles and return them to the abbey in the original crates.

“We sometimes saw dozens of crates popping up in unsuspecting supermarkets and liquor stores with prices that were a multiple of the normal price,” abbey spokesman Yves Panneels said.

Some traders ask others to buy the beer, repurchase it from them and then sell it on, he told Nederlands Dagblad.

Bottles of the beer, brewed since 1839, carry the exclusive “authentic Trappist product” labels, meaning they are certified as being brewed in abbeys with at least one Trappist monk supervising production.

Due to the decline in vocations, the Achel brewery closed in 2021 when the last monk there left for a retirement home, leaving only five registered Trappist breweries in Belgium.

The deal with independent off-licences calls for bottles, not crates, of Westvleteren to be sold only through them.