"Monks in Spencer launch brewery" by Megan Woolhouse and Gary Dzen | Globe Staff, January 10, 2014
SPENCER — The simple monks of Saint Joseph’s Abbey have quietly set about building one of the biggest breweries in the state and the first Trappist brewery on American soil. Their sleek 36,000-square-foot brewery — modeled after multimillion-dollar facilities in Europe— has already made its first commercial batches of Belgian-style ale, which will go on sale next week….
Brother Isaac Keeley, director of the brewery, standing in his monk’s robes in a state-of-the-art beer laboratory inside the brewery, said: “We needed to generate more income.”
Looks like everyone but banks and the elite are $truggling these days.
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But the secrecy shrouding the enterprise, and the mystique surrounding the monks, should only add to the beers’ cachet when it hits store shelves, beer aficionados said….
The Spencer monks do not drink much beer. As part of a Roman Catholic religious order started in 1825, they pray seven times a day, live without many modern amenities, such as television, and forgo personal possessions.
But they gotta taste it, right?
They don’t hold individual bank accounts, but they still have bills to pay.
Good idea.
The abbey, built in the late 1940s on the site of an old dairy farm, is in need of expensive improvements to its roofs, copper plumbing, and distinctive stone exteriors.
At the same time, the monks’ numbers are shrinking….
There are eight Trappist monasteries with breweries….
Where does someone have to go to get a beer around here?
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I hadn't thought of becoming a monk, but….
I might post any other beer-related articles I come across in my Globes.
Then again, I might not. I don't drink and I'm rather offended by the new$paper promotion of consumption. Don't get me wrong, I am a prohibitionist (didn't try hard enough, if it's good enough for weed then…. forgot where I was going with that, but anyway) but per my principles have come to accept that which the majority agree upon in this case. I just don't like seeing a pre$cription pharmaceutical, boo$e-pu$hing media that hates pot serving it up on the front page. Sorry.
