England to get a Trappist brewery

Trappist monks at the Mount St Bernard Abbey in rural North West Leicestershire (that’s between Birmingham and Nottingham) have been given council approval to convert part of their 19th century Cistercian monastery into a fully operational brewery. England once boasted 54 Cistercian monasteries (called abbeys), but these were dissolved by Henry VIII in the late 1530s.

The Mount St Bernard monastery is the only one today and was the first Catholic abbey to be founded in England (in 1835) after the Reformation.

The development will enable the monastery to produce Trappist beer, the only product of its type within the UK, whilst continuing centuries of monastic brewing tradition. The brewery will replace an uneconomical dairy farm which has ceased operation.

All the profits from the brewery will go to the Trustees of Mount St Bernard, a charity that supports the monastery and the monks’ living expenses, thus ensuring that the monastery can continue to be self-sustaining, in accordance with the religious order’s tenets.

Although Trappist beers are held in high esteem by beer lovers, Trappist breweries are something of a rarity. Currently, there are only eleven active Trappist breweries. Because of their beers’ popularity, four new breweries have opened in the past five years, mostly in non-traditional Trappist brewing regions: one each in Austria, the US and Italy, as well as a second Trappist brewery in the Netherlands. All the other Trappist brewers are located in Belgium.